The PPIC website is down...
...but thanks to Fred Pilot I have a copy of their California CID study and it is quite an interesting piece of work. It deseves serious consideration, but I'm on a publication deadline so I can't spend a couple of hours with it. Still, after a quick scan, I don't see how Weintraub could arrive at the interpretation of the study he presented in his article. I wonder if he lives in a gated community and doesn't want to feel guilty about it. :-)

I'd say the study pretty much supports the general trends Reich, Barton and Silverman, myself, and others anticipated years ago. Maybe it isn't as dramatic as Reich's "secession of the successful," but that was said for dramatic effect anyway, in a magazine. And the trends are blurred if you consider all CIDs as part of the same sector, because of low-end condos being lumped in with high-end developments--there are now CIDs at all parts of the price range.

And in any event, if you are trying to see whether the rich are seceding into Privatopia, the issue is not "what percentage of CID-dwellers are rich?" The issue is, "What percentage of the rich live in CIDs?" And if the answer is, "most of them," or "many of them, and the percentage is increasing," then the fact that there are trickle-down CIDs for the less affluent is beside the point (except that it bodes ill for the future financial health of such CIDs). This study doesn't go at the question this way. It asks questions about CID housing as a single sector and compares it with traditional housing as a sector. This is great, and I'm all for doing it, but it doesn't resolve the question of whether the successful are seceding. For that, you need to study the successful.

Also, it is clear that using voting as the measure of civic participation, as the PPIC study does, is a major mistake that leads to an erroneous theoretical conclusion. People often vote out of the most selfish, anti-community, motivations imaginable (in fact, most models of voting assume self-interested voters). Voter turnout is correlated with wealth, education, and age, not a desire to participate in community life. So yes, the residents of CIDs are voting, but no, that doesn't mean they are active participants in the life of the community outside their gates and walls. You need to know things that are harder to measure. It is easy to get voter turnout. It is hard to see how people are really living.

This sort of thing is common in social science. Remember the joke about the cop who approaches the drunk standing under a streetlight and asks him what he's doing? Drunk says, "Looking for my keys." Cop says, "Where did you lose them?" Drunk says, "Across the street." Cop says, "So why are you looking for them over here?" Drunk say, "Because the light is better over here."