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Gilded Gates

Lisa Selin Davis

November 1, 2005

However you feel about gated communities, most real estate agents agree that homes inside them are good investments. “The property values tend to hold a little bit better in those communities,” says Anthony Marguleas, owner of A.M. Realty in Pacific Palisades, Calif. “It’s a better value from an investment point of view.” Brentwood Circle in Los Angeles, a community of 67 luxury homes, added gates around the neighborhood a few years ago, and “the minute they put a gate there, it brought up the value about 10 percent,” says Marguleas.

Still, the double taxation and added expense of life behind the gates are discouraging some Americans from seeking out the gated life. The American Housing Survey—which only added the “secured communities” category in 2001—showed a slight dip in the number of Americans living in gated communities last year: from 7 million in 2001  to 6.6 million in 2003. Gollis of the Concord Group predicts that, eventually, gated communities will once again return solely to the realm of the very affluent. “Homebuyers might like them, but they aren’t paying enough to offset the high cost to developers,” he says.

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Scene from Monterra, a gated, environmentally conscious development near Monterey, Calif. Old coastal oak trees pepper the landscape. (Click image to enlarge.)

Many new luxury developments are opting not to erect the gates at all; perhaps because we are faced with security issues—pat downs at the airports and orange alerts—buyers are looking for subtle alternatives. That might come in the form of the “vertical neighborhood,” in which entire master-planned communities are funneled into a high-rise building, where the concierge and single point of entry work like a refined version of the gate, as in Yoo’s Icon building in Miami. Or it may mean replacing the wall with a line of trees, so boundaries are clear, but that feeling of segregation is alleviated.

While most Americans are still searching for a sense of security and neighborhood, many are finding that those intangibles come more from developing relationships with those who live beside you than from a gate. “A gate doesn’t make the community,” says McIlwain. “The community makes the community.”