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6. Mini-Citadels and Geroncrats

When I first began to study gated communities in Southern California in the mid-1980s, it was a trend largely confined to very wealthy neighborhoods or new developments on the distant metropolitan frontier (e.g., the areas Burgess described as the "restricted residential district" or the "commuter zone"). Since the Spring 1992 rebellion, however, dozens of ordinary residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles have demanded the right to gate themselves off from the rest of the city. As one newspaper put it, "The 1980s had their boom in mini-malls; the 1990s may bring a bull market in mini-citadels."

Although crime and safety are the ostensible issues, increased equity may be the deeper motive. Son.e realtors have estimated that "gatedness" can raise home values by as much as 40% over ten years. As communities -- including black middle-class areas like Windsor Village and Baldwin Hills Estates -- race to reap this windfall, Burgess's "Residential Zone IV" begins to look like a fortified honeycomb, with each residential neighborhood now encased in its own walled cell. In most cases the local homeowners' associations also contract "armed response" private policing from one of the several multi-national security firms that specialize in residential security. Obviously this only further widens the "security differential" between the inner city and the suburbs.

"Empty-nest" households are especially passionate advocates of restricted-access neighborhoods, and there is an important sense in which Los Angeles is not merely being polarized between rich and poor, but more specifically between the young poor and the old rich. Furthermore, the 1990 Census showed that metropolitan Los Angeles has the greatest discrepancy in the nation between household size and home size. On the Westside and Hollywood Hills, where "mansionization" has been in vogue, older, smaller Anglo households occupy ever bigger homes, while in the rest of the city large Latino families are being crammed into diminishing floor-space.

California as a whole is an incipient gerontocracy. and any post-Blade-Runner dystopia must take account of the explosive fusion of class, ethnic and generational contradictions. Three of the state's leading demographers have recently given us a preview of what the near-future may hold. In their "worst-case scenario," civil war breaks out in the year ~030 after the ruling class of aged, Anglo Baby-boomers, living in "security-patrolled villages" and confiscating the majority of tax revenues to support their geriatric services, imposes an Iron Heel on a huge under-class of young Latinos who live in "unlit, unpaved barrios."

Strikes broke out in assembly plants, security walls were set afire and toppled, the sale of guns, and their price, soared in the elderly areas. The younger Latinos painted the elderly as parasites, who had enjoyed all the benefits of society when those benefits were free and now blithely continued to tax the workers to maintain their style of living. The elderly painted the younger Latinos as foreigners who were soaking up benefits that should go to the elderly, as non-Americans who were threatening to dilute American culture, as crime-ridden, disease-ridden, and lawless. Each side prepared for a last assault on the other.
At the end of summer 1992, the California legislature took a giant step toward the realization of this scenario when it savagely cut the budget for schools and social services. The Democrats capitulated to the intransigence of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who repeatedly emphasized that the underlying issue "is not the current recession, it is demographics." Wilson, of course, was calculating that aging Anglo voters (still an electoral majority) were not willing to support the traditional high standards of California public education now that the schools were full of Latino and Asian children. The budget vote, thus, effectively ratified two, unequal tiers of citizenship and entitlement.

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