Tear down this wall.

• Author: Greenblatt, Alan
• Position: Book Review

BEHIND THE GATES: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America by Setha Low Routledge, $26.00

THERE'S CERTAINLY A CASE TO be made against gated communities. Through physical exclusion, people who live within them make it more difficult for themselves to know, and therefore care about, fellow citizens who are socially, economically, or racially different.

This is the case that Setha Low, a cultural anthropologist at the City University of New York, attempts to make in Behind the Gates. She paints a picture of gated communities as separatist enclaves, with residents relying on gates and guards to wall them off from the contemporary world of crime and kidnapping. Low is largely convincing on these points, but what she fails to do is make it clear that the people who choose to live in gated communities are really any different from people who live in other affluent suburban developments.

Low conducted dozens of interviews for this book with residents of gated communities in and around San Antonio, Queens, and Nassau County, N.Y. Much of her book is given over to airing their concerns. Again and again, we hear from people who, although not necessarily touched by crime themselves, live in near-constant fear of it. They have bought into the marketing slogans of developers who promise "lemonade stands, not crime ... on every corned."

The idea of living in physically protected environments that can stave off undesirable elements has long held appeal. In the 19th century, the rich began to sequester themselves in neighborhoods from Gramercy Park in New York to the Central West End in St. Louis. But it was only with the advent of retirement developments, such as Leisure World, in the 1960s that the middle class chose to wall itself in. By 2001, 6 percent of U.S. households--more than 7 million--were located behind gates, with another 4 million located along streets where access is controlled by keys, security codes, or guards. Today, one-third of all new developments in Southern California come equipped with gates, and the numbers, Low writes, are similar around Phoenix, the Washington suburbs, and parts of Florida.

Gated communities "preselect a ready-made community of socially and economically similar people," Low writes. But as her interviews reveal, in time that self-selection feeds upon itself and fear of outsiders grows. Low quotes a San Antonio woman identified as "Felicia" (identities are masked throughout) as saying "if...