Advantages of Gated Communities - Essay Example

The main aim of this essay is it analyzes the possible positive and negative impacts of gated communities.

Advantages of gated communities

Gated communities have a lot of benefits in the communities. First and foremost, gated communities are not prone to crime1. This is because living in enclosed compounds reduces the chances of suffering insecurity. Since the compounds have enclosed surrounding, the parents also have a feeling that their children have a safe playing environment. Security is also a result of exclusionary Zoning. This is a scenario that occurs when certain types of people or groups are excluded from a given community. The same is being practiced in Pennsylvania, and it fosters security in the community in the sense that people likely to cause chaos are excluded from the community. Secondly, a gated community also fosters affordability. This is because gated communities have houses of a variety of qualities. This shows that houses are available for people of various classes. The main advantage of buying a house in a gated community is that it is cheaper than buying land on an individual plot.

1. Atkinson, Rowland, and Sarah Blandy. Gated communities. London: Routledge, 2006.

Also, Common services are shared among residents in a gated community and this makes them to be more economical. Services such as street lights, solar panels, boreholes, and the community center are shared between people living in the same community. This forms a fundamental part of the economic structure of the community since it saves a lot of money that could be spent to pay for the same services in individual plots.

Disadvantages of Gated Communities

The supporters of gated communities have the idea that the reduction of people passing through makes strangers recognizable with ease. The truth is that not all strangers are harmful to the community1. Therefore, this view is unrealistic because only a very small percentage of strangers are potential criminals. Secondly, security in gated communities is more of an illusion than reality. In the United States, the crime rate in gated communities in suburban areas is the same as the crime rate in non-gated communities.
Another disadvantage of gated communities is that it renders individuals to be homeless in instances where they have to be vacated due to isolation from industries and institutions. The municipalities use legal frameworks in their favor to vacate many people from their original homelands. This causes disunity in various communities since they are sometimes set wide apart.
Gated communities are a major promoter of racism. This is because the main aim of their creation is to segregate people of different classes and races. This is a dysfunctional phenomenon in society since communities should interact freely to build the country’s economy.
Therefore, it is important for individuals to reconsider their priorities on the basis of the SWOT analysis before considering living in such communities. Perhaps people should be more creative to create forms of housing that are more functional than gated communities. Read More