Minding Fences

When it comes to putting up a frontyard fence in Santa Ana, homeowners need remember only one thing: Keep it under 4 feet tall, and pretty much anything goes.

Fences can be wrought iron and foreboding, silvery and shaped like sunbursts, or white with glistening gold tips. They can have heavy locks or simple latches or elaborate electronic openers. They can be wooden, metal, mesh or concrete. In short, they can be almost anything.

And they are.

“It’s out of control,” said Tim Rush, who lives in the city’s historic Washington Square neighborhood. “Everywhere you look, you can see the march of the ugly fences. . . . I’m not talking about cute little picket fences. These are wrought-iron monstrosities.”

The issue has popped up at City Council meetings for years, with neighbors complaining about other neighbors and council members struggling to balance what many residents view as a basic property rights issue. But now that a citywide field study has shown that half of Santa Ana’s 13,500 fences are illegal--despite the city’s liberal guidelines--because they are taller than the 48-inch limit, city officials say the matter has finally gone too far.

“It’s time we dealt with this once and for all,” said Councilwoman Lisa Bist, who was among the first group of residents five years ago to question whether the city’s ordinance on gates and fences needed updating. “Pretty soon we’re going to have this mishmash of metal and wood, and every neighborhood will look like a war zone.”

At a time when developers are designing fewer of the gated communities that once defined suburban life, hoping instead to unseal neighborhoods and build unity, residents in Santa Ana and other urban areas are signaling an unmistakable desire to stay disconnected by walling themselves in anyway.

Installing private driveways or courtyard entrances accessible only by key is a trend that probably caught on in the 1980s, when rising crime put a premium on defensive architecture in Southern California, said architect and urban planner David Hertz.

Many people already had burglar bars on their homes then, he said. By constructing a gate or fence, they just moved the bars out.

“People still want security, but they want more elbow room too,” Hertz said. “So the trend now is to capture and internalize our frontyards. That sense of enclosure has become really important to people.”

But critics contend the practice will destroy a community’s identity, and many planners have started to look more closely at the number of fortressed residences in their cities. This month in Santa Ana, for example, officials plan to approve a temporary moratorium on the construction of frontyard fences and gates while they review the city’s ordinance and decide whether to add a permit requirement. They hope to stop the runaway fortification of houses--and residents’ use of wooden warehouse pallets, chicken wire, scrap metal and even curtains as fencing material.

“The best security you can have in a neighborhood is a front porch,” Rush said, adding that gated entries threaten to rip apart established neighborhoods that once enjoyed connectedness. “When we wall ourselves in and don’t interact with our neighbors . . . it doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Some argue, however, that fences and gates deliver security; others counter that a street lined with barricaded homes fosters insecurity and a perception that the neighborhood is not safe.

“Crime is lower than ever, and the city is really turning around,” said Carmen Ochoa, who lives in the Wilshire Square neighborhood. “But you’d never know it driving down our street. It looks like we’re ready for battle or something.”

Dave Lopez, a volunteer code enforcement officer for the city, has a different take on the controversy. To him, the issue of residential gates and fences is a matter of personal preference, property rights and, he said, the city’s misguided priorities. The lifelong Santa Ana resident would rather see his understaffed department dealing with other, more pressing issues, such as erasing graffiti and shutting down unsanitary garage-front “marketplaces.”

“I think it’s a waste of time,” Lopez said of the recent citywide fence study, to which he was assigned for one week. “There are so many more important things we should be doing than trying to decide whose fence is pretty and whose isn’t.”

Still others say building a fence--and making the frontyard into a living area--is a trend that makes sense.

“The frontyard has traditionally been viewed as nothing more than the public side of your home, or a presentation to your neighbors of just how nice your lawn is,” Hertz said. “So why not make better use of it? The joy of living in an older neighborhood is the fact that you can do whatever you want to with it. It’s called being allowed to have character.”