[Editorial]  ‘Gated Pods’ a Bad Idea

June 1, 2011

Sadly, Councilman Quentin Whitwell's ideas are going downhill since he pushed for a food-truck ordinance. Last week, we explained why he is wrong about the potentially Chamber-dominated sales-tax commission; this week we are dismayed to see him pushing an ordinance to allow (presumably well-to-do) neighborhoods to vote on and erect gates to their communities.

In one breath, he says it's about "traffic-calming," but the neighborhood he says he's doing it to please (Avery Gardens) has only one entrance; it's not like they have people speeding through to get to work. In the next breath, he acknowledges that the gates are for "safety" reasons—which leads to the uncomfortable notion that they are really about profiling and slowing down certain people who might drive through the areas. More likely, they are better making people feel safer because they don't see "the other" tooling around their streets.

Sadly, this is not far removed from Madison County sheriff candidate Mark Sandridge's promise to keep Madisonians away from all us heathens south of County Line Road.

To boot, Whitwell wants taxpayers to keep paying to maintain the infrastructure behind the gates, and it's fine with him if a quarter of the residents don't want the ugly thing, or to be associated with the message it sends.

The truth is that gated communities are not healthy for communities, as new urbanist Andres Duany and co-authors point out in no uncertain terms in their 2000 book "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream." They show how "gated pods" tend to contain people who are against taxes (except when used to pay for their needs): "The rest of the world is expected to take care of itself."

They write that the worst part about "gated pods" is when they lock in homogenous groups of similar income levels and ethnicity. Then, many kids (thankfully not all) who grow up in these insular backgrounds seek out the same thing: "Unfortunately, the segregationist pattern is self-perpetuating."

And worse: "A child growing up in such a homogenous environment is less likely to develop a sense of empathy for people from other walks of life and is ill prepared to live in a diverse society. The other becomes alien to the child's existence, witnessed only through the sensationalizing eye of the television."

In addition, they write, the poor in turn have little understanding of the middle class and their problems, or how they can become a part of such an alien world. In our ridiculously segregated city with such a blood-thirsty media, this explains why crime and fear of "the other" is so out of proportion with reality, when people are at far greater risk of being physically harmed or killed while driving home to their "gated pods."

Still, if people want to gate their pods, it's their business. But Whitwell shouldn't try to stick city government in a pod where it doesn't belong.

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