A 51-year-old grandmother in Santa Ana, Calif., received a citation from her condominium association for allegedly violating one of the association’s rules.
The charged offense?
“Kissing and doing bad things” while parked one night in the circular driveway.
She acknowledged kissing a friend good night, but retained an attorney and threatened legal action.
“Somebody, or a group, has decided to invade my privacy,” an Associated Press story quoted her. “And it just doesn’t feel right to say, `Let them get away with it.’ “
Near Philadelphia, a homeowner paid a landscape architect to design and build a black fabric fence in his back yard to prevent his infant son from falling down a 400-foot slope at the rear edge of his lot.
His homeowner association took him to court for violating a rule against fences.
The owner fought back and won, saying, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “By God, when you have a 400-foot cliff, you need a fence.”
These stories and many more like them are not just isolated neighborhood conflicts. They are examples of life at the cutting edge of a new civic culture.
They represent business as usual in walled, private, urban and suburban enclaves called “common-interest housing developments,” or CIDs.
For some, CID living means having to fight to defend a semblance of privacy and personal freedom, while the few residents who enforce the rules enjoy a degree of personal power over their neighbors that the Constitution denies to public officials.
Over the last 30 years, this alternative to city living has risen to prominence in most rapidly growing areas.
Since the early 1960s, large-scale “community builders” have constructed 150,000 CIDs, designed for hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
The concept is profitable because it allows builders to squeeze more people onto less land and makes housing a mass-produced commodity.
Buyers and public officials are more likely to accept small individual lots, narrow streets and higher density if the development contains open spaces and other facilities owned in common and maintained by a homeowner association.
Today, these developments house an estimated 30 million people, or almost one-eighth of the U.S. population.
In many parts of the country, including much of the Sun Belt, almost all new housing units are some form of CID.
The rapid spread of this housing is the largest and most dramatic privatization of local government functions in American history.
CID residents pay monthly assessments to a homeowner association that governs the area and provides exclusive services.
Within their gates and walls, CID dwellers are protected by private security guards. They drive on streets that are privately lit, cleaned and maintained. Their swimming pools, gyms, parks and golf courses are private.
City officials who grant building permits are tempted by this private infrastructure because it adds taxpayers at minimal public cost.
However, with little notice or debate, the CID has begun to undermine basic assumptions of urban culture and establish a competing regime.
Millions of affluent homeowners are encouraged to secede from urban America, with its endless flux and ferment, its spontaneity and diversity and its unpredictable rewards and hazards.
They are beckoned to a privatized, artificial, utopian environment I call “Privatopia,” where master-planning, homogeneous populations and private governments offer the affluent a chance to escape from urban reality.
But those who opt for the good life in Privatopia pay for their amenities in more ways than their monthly assessments. The price of a ticket to this fantasyland includes a substantial loss of freedom and privacy.
The residents live under the rule of their corporate boards of directors, an elected group of neighbors enforcing a set of restrictions created by the developer to ensure that the master plan never will be altered.
These private governments operate outside the constitutional limits that bind local authorities.
Moreover, courts often accept the legal fiction that CID restrictions are private, voluntary arrangements among individuals. In truth, they are non-negotiable boilerplate, drafted by the developer’s lawyers and imposed on all residents.
In Rancho Bernardo, a large California development, a restriction stated that “no truck, camper, trailer, boat or any kind or other form of recreational vehicle shall be parked” on the project.
One of the residents bought a new pickup truck with a camper shell to use for personal transportation. The association took him to court to prevent him from parking it under his own carport and to recover $2,060 in fines it assessed against him for the “violation.”
After losing in court, the management company appealed, only to see the appellate court side with the resident and hold the company’s action unreasonable.
Yet this sort of action does not seem unreasonable to many CID residents, particularly those who serve on boards of directors.
They believe the restrictions are good for property values and feel that losing some of your own freedom is a small price to pay for protection from the potential misdeeds of neighbors.
Here are examples of CID activities, all reported in the press:
– Some community associations have banned display of the American flag and political signs, prohibited distribution of newspapers and barred political gatherings in the common areas.
In Ashland, Mass., a Vietnam veteran was told he could not fly the American flag on Flag Day. The board backed down only after he called the press and the story appeared on the front page of a local newspaper.
– In Monroe, N.J., a homeowners association took a married couple to court because the wife, at age 45, was three years younger than the association’s age-48 minimum for residency.
The association won in the trial court. The judge ordered the 60-year-old husband to sell, rent the unit or live without his wife.
– In Fairbanks Ranch, an affluent CID in Southern California behind six locked gates, 45 private streets are patrolled by private security officers who enforce a private speed limit.
First-time speeders get a warning. The second offense brings a hearing before the board and a reprimand. A third offense means a $500 fine; car and driver are banned from the private streets for a month.
– In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., condominium managers ordered a couple to stop entering and leaving their unit through their back door, claiming they were wearing an unsightly path in the lawn by taking a short cut to the parking lot.
The couple retained an attorney, who filed a lawsuit seeking a court’s permission for the couple to use their own back door.
For those who live outside CIDS, in America’s beleaguered cities, the rapid spread of walled-in projects threatens to transform urban culture in deeply disturbing ways.
This “secession of the successful,” as U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls it, deprives urban America of a vast amount of human and economic resources.
It promotes a two-class society of haves and have-nots, the former enjoying a private set of what formerly were public services and the latter struggling to survive in cities faced with increasing responsibilities and shriveling revenues.
Urban theorist Mike Davis, in “City of Quartz,” paints the picture of a privatized Los Angeles, architecturally redesigned to physically separate the two classes and protect the rich from the rest.
It is time to ask whether corporate builders should be allowed to continue spreading walled-off housing across the country, guided only by the calculus of private profit.
We should have an open, public discussion of the consequences-before the metropolis becomes a necropolis.
