verging_on_random

Gated communities

February 6, 2007 on 11:39 am | In Uncategorized |

There’s a curious article here about gated communities. The author’s against them.

He raises two main objections:

1. They’re environmentally unfriendly;
2. They create divisions within the community between rich and poor.

Maybe he’s got a point, but he doesn’t make it very well. He overlooks some pertinent alternative views and partially discredits his argument with some very dodgy ‘evidence’.

King argues that in the past,

… we didn’t exclude people from a “community” on the basis on how much money they had; that money inferred a new set of rights on an elite, like a South American country.

No disrespect to King (who to the best of my knowledge I have never met or read before) but that’s crap. 19th century Australia inherited the British class system and it was reflected in where people lived well into the 20th. The only way you got to live in Burns Rd Wahroonga or a thousand other exclusive places was to have money and lots of it. They didn’t need gates - the dogs would take care of any poverty-stricken trespassers. Poor people lived in suburbs like Camperdown  - a rich dude wouldn’t have lived there for a bet. Those cramped airless semi-detached boxes weren’t called ‘workingmen’s cottages’ for nothing, even if they do sell now for a million bucks apiece.

The rich/poor divide was even more obvious in country towns. Go to a place like Cessnock and you can still see where the workers lived, and then go see the owners’ grand residences out of town.

One of the biggest changes that has occurred in Australia over the last 50 years is that the majority of the population have comparatively huge (on a global scale) incomes. One result is that lots of people can afford a house in almost any suburb that you care to name (there are, of course, still small enclaves reserved for the super-wealthy, such as harbourside properties in Sydney). I suspect most people would regard this as a Good Thing. I used to, until I reflected on its implications for Australians’ relationships with the rest of the world, but that’s not relevant here. Let’s just say it’s a Good Thing for internal social cohesion.
Malcolm King shows how much he’s fudging his argument with this bit:

Let me introduce you to “Kenny” who has lived in the area for 40 years and paid his taxes and rates. He’s a bit rough around the edges but he’s a member of Rotary and always helps at the sausage sizzle for the Nippers lifesaving carnival. He likes fishing and a beer.

Unfortunately Mr and Mrs Kenny are not welcome at the gated community. The reason is - and I never thought I’d write this in the year 2007 - “they just ain’t our kind of people”. Ergo the gated community.

For one thing, it’s obviously fiction to write that these people ‘are not welcome at the gated community’, because it’s a long way from being built yet. I happen to live just up the road from Wooyung and the ‘locals’ comprise about 10 people (literally). The place is a big open empty space with a primitive caravan park near the beach. The nearest a ‘Nippers lifesaving carnival’ would ever have come to Wooyung is Kingscliff, about 40 km north, or Byron Bay, 25 km in the opposite direction.

I’m sure there’s a lot of valid objections that could be raised by people opposed to gated communities and coastal over-development, but ill-conceived arguments relying on fabricated ‘evidence’ don’t help their cause. On the contrary, they just give ammunition to the pro-development lobby in their efforts to discredit the ‘loonie Greenies’.