You see, Enoch was a seer. He looked in the Urim and Thummim and learned how the Latter-day Saints protected their property values.

Then he copied us, implementing immigration restrictions, zoning, planned unit developments, restrictive covenants, and gated communities!

hthalljr’gmail’com

OK, I’ll admit that my post was a little more polemical than it should have been in this respect.

• #10: Wow, I had no idea some local governments were pulling this. I suppose it could theoretically be OK to do this if it were universal, and if the voters in the city/area had actually voted for it in a referendum or something. But I suspect this isn’t the case. Likely its only applied to new developments, and has been done as a way for the politicians to avoid the hard questions that sometimes arise in local government. Throw the bums out who did this!!
• #18:
  

  Gated communities and alarm systems are similar in that their primary effect is they make the home seem less attractive to criminals than other potential victims.

  Perhaps. It could also be that these are signals to thieves that something of value is on the other side of the gates or just past the alarms.

  My own view of these security concerns is that they are mostly about property. As I understand it, very little violence is perpetrated against strangers, and even the much feared home invasion is usually about theft, not violence. So much more can be accomplished by simply minimizing how ostentatious the home, cars, and property is than by alarm systems and security guards.

  I’ve lived here in New York City, in wonderful, but not particularly upscale neighborhood, for more than 20 years now. I’ve never been robbed, nor has our home ever been broken in to. The worst we’ve experienced is vandalism against and theft of our car (for a joy ride, the car wasn’t worth stealing). We simply don’t have much worth stealing, and yet we don’t lack for almost anything that we really need or for much that we want.

  It’s like the old saying: I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!

  Hmmm. Have you considered the morality of that saying?

  I don’t think I have a lot of objection to increasing personal security, or even to gated communities increasing their security. BUT, I do think it would be better for that money to be spent on the security of the town or city as a whole instead of on a single neighborhood. If you were to spread that spending across an entire city at the same percentage of income, the overall increase in security for everyone would far exceed the increase in the single neighborhood. There are economies of scale for security spending.

• #23:
  

  people in large cities love living in buildings with doormen

  Really? I think a lot depends on the doorman and on the building and neighbors. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about doormen, and horror stories from doormen on how they were treated by the residents of their buildings.

  and one of the primary reasons is security (keep the missionaries and riff-raff out).

  Well, when I lived in a building with a doorman, that was NOT the issue at all. In my experience, doormen have a very marginal effect on security. When they are loved, it is for the conveniences — someone to accept packages for you, help with opening the door, etc. I do think that some people feel more secure with doormen, but I don’t think they really make much difference. After all, most of them have no security training whatsoever.

  What is more troubling about your statement, Geoff B, is the fact that you are equating “keeping the missionaries and riff-raff out” with security. I’m afraid that is one of my chief objections — the fact that those in gated communities equate security with keeping out the innocuous.

• #29:
  

  but I also have fewer worries about what other folks are doing.

  Wow. I don’t think I could put it better.
  You do know that the Mormon Creed is “Mind your own business”?

• #47:
  

  The fascination some people have with “inclusion” and “openness” ends up being fascist before long, as one group imposes their will on everyone else, so that we can all be one big collective joined under the beloved leader.

  I see, so in order to avoid this, we need to join gated communities, where the will of our fascist neighbors are imposed on us, right?

  I don’t have a problem with having local neighborhood agreements, when the neighbors truly and freely enter into the agreement, without inducements and complications. In the case of HOAs and gated communities, that freedom isn’t there. Neighbors are forced into the HOA because they want to buy the house. That doesn’t seem free to me.

Now that’s quite helpful, because when you wrote in the original post that you were “not suggesting that anyone that lives in a ‘gated community’ is necessarily evil,” I was left to wonder what kind of evidence would be sufficient to rebut the presumption of evil that must attach to anyone that lives in some sort of restrictive housing association. But now with your concrete example, I can conclude that only people that choose to live in an association when they have many other choices, or those that live in an association that isn’t close to their school, are evil.

• Comments #6 and #29 only addressed the problem that missionaries face. For the record, this isn’t just about missionary’s troubles.
• Some of the comments (esp. 18 & 20) seemed to focus on security as if that is the primary concern. I’m not convinced that this is true. Security may be the initial reason that many people join HOAs or buy into gated communities, but if that was their reason for existing, why do the agreements go into so many areas that don’t have anything to do with security? [I'm not convinced that most people join HOAs or buy into gated communities is because they have security concerns. Rather, I suspect that in many cases it is part of the package that comes along with the house. The purchaser wasn't looking for an HOA, it was something that came with the house they found and liked.]
• I found the comments about aesthetics particularly interesting (see #1, 7, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37). I tend to agree with the idea that its really none of your business if your neighbor has 5 cars up on blocks in his yard, but I have less of a problem with a restriction on that kind problem than I have on other problems I’ve seen in some HOAs, such as restrictions on what colors houses can be painted, the presence of lawn ornaments, whether or not you can park on the street in the neighborhood, etc.

  I’m especially concerned with those things that represent cultural differences in aesthetics, like color or lawn ornaments. Cars on blocks are one thing. Objecting to pink flamingos or a lavender house is another.

Now let me address some comments specifically:

• #2:
  

  “Any thoughts on an alternative system to mediate the complex of property and contract rights involved?”

  Not really. I agree with many of the comments who say there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the HOA structure, just how it is often implemented. I guess I would support city and other ordinances to limit what restrictions HOAs can impose on property owners. Either that, or courts need to be empowered with some kind of theory about what kind of restrictions are reasonable.

  #2 also wrote:
  

  “The good news regarding religious land use: statutes like RLUIPA help level the playing field.”

  I agree, except that it doesn’t help those who are proselyting, like missionaries.

• #5:
  

  “We’re all hypocrites. We hate it when there are people more exclusive than us, but we have no problem excluding ourselves from people we consider beneath us…”

  Amen.

• #9:
  

  Setting up a local government, where individuals have a bigger voice than at the city or state level, is very moral.

  True, except that local governments are especially likely to overstep moral boundaries and impose the will of the majority on those that disagree. In addition, many of those that are governed by these HOAs didn’t necessarily enter into the agreement without inducement. They wanted the house, not necessarily the HOA.

• Several of you (comments 7, 19, 23, 25, 28, 40 and possibly others) suggested that there was little or no difference between a gated community and a doorman apartment building, and at least Rusty (19) seemed to think that he had caught me being hypocritical in this respect. Sorry, Rusty, not this time. I don’t live in a doorman building.

  I actually do think that gated communities and doorman buildings are very similar. The principal difference is simply that because the physical area owned is part of the same building, instead of part of the same land, there is a lot more reason to control what happens in each apartment because of the effects it could have on other apartments in the building.

  However, the problem I tried to highlight in the post is very complete here in New York City–you really don’t have a choice about joining an HOA when you purchase an apartment here. All apartments in the city are either Condos or Co-ops, and every single one has an HOA associated with it. They are intrusive into areas where they don’t belong to various degrees, just like HOAs in other parts of the country.

  For the record, I did live in a doorman building here in New York City, when my wife and I first moved here–it was student housing, and we didn’t have much choice. My wife needed to be close to the school, and we took the apartment assigned. While having a doorman was certainly convenient, and we liked many of the doormen personally, in retrospect I don’t think the doorman was very necessary. I don’t think that the doorman did much for security at all, other than make residents feel safe.

  As for Kaimi’s clever dialogue (27), I think in many more affordable New York apartments, the dialogue would go more like this:

  Tina: Last Thanksgiving you buzzed up a thief.
  Elaine: I didn’t know who he was! I was expecting a Fedex package.
  Tina: Then don’t buzz anyone in without checking.
  Elaine: But its 5 floors down to see who it is. I can’t walk up and down the stairs with the baby just to see who it is. You know that the intercom with the buzzer doesn’t work. And I really needed that package that day! If I hadn’t buzzed in the Fedex guy, I would have had to go to midtown to pickup the package!

  FWIW, It seems like the intercoms don’t work in half of the buildings, and at least 10% of buildings don’t have elevators.