If you live in a gated community, Rich Benjamin doesn't think much of you. A fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank, Benjamin spent two years living in various gated communities for research on his new book, "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America." Here's what he found:
No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for "safety." Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls. A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.
Residents' palpable satisfaction with their communities' virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given "threat" create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.
Except for the firearms, what Benjamin describes sounds a lot like the way your humble columnist lives--in a community of about 300 homes with 24-hour-a-day security that prevents outsiders from entering without permission. It is located in New York City and is usually referred to not as a gated community but as a doorman apartment building.
We don't know where or how Benjamin usually lives, but we'll bet a lot of the editors who worked on his Times op-ed--not to mention his New York-based publisher, Hyperion--also live in doorman apartment buildings. And we'll bet a Benjamin that they're parochial enough that it never occurred to them to question their own assumption that they're better than people who live in gated communities in Middle America.
