Monday, November 27, 2017

Brookhaven reverses vote to prohibit gated community - Reporter Newspapers

Brookhaven reverses vote to prohibit gated community - Reporter Newspapers

But they are going to develop a policy on this: "[T] he city will work toward creating a broad policy to consider whether the city should allow future gated communities as it works to create connectivity and promote walkability."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Having lived in a gated community, all I can say is Never Again. The gates do not make a neighborhood safer. Car break-ins, ATV joy rides on vacant lots, vandalism all occured, despite the gates. We had to pay extra to get the County Police to do regular patrols after that. The 24-7 guards at the gates know all your personal business - when you come and go, who visits you, etc. The gates reguarly break down and need repair. Or the sensors do not work, and then you have to go through the visitor lane. At certain times of the day, you have bottlenecks in and out of the community. There are only two or three entry points, even in large communities with thousands of homes. It makes it difficult for emergency response (fire, ambulance, police) to reach your home quickly. Homeowners have to pay for their own road maintenance, something that costs a fortune to do right. Many HOAs fail to budget for regular road resurfacing. In northern climates, snow and ice removal alone is a huge expense. The security services at my former gated HOA were one third of my quarterly assessments. And that was before they added surveillance cameras at the gates.

Ironically, the density that is supposed to be beneficial to the environment and walkability creates the opposite effect. It creates the need for lengthy highways to go around all of these gated planned communities, so that people can get to the supermarket, Walmart and Target, restaurants, doctors’ offices, etc. Gates cut off access and creates an “outsiders vs. insiders” mentality. The handful of main “through” streets in the gated community become a hazard, with chronic speeders and people not obeying the stop signs. At the same time, anyone walking or running or biking in the neighborhood cannot avoid crossing these streets, because every other street is a dead end cul-de-sac or loop that gets boring very quickly. Add golf carts to the mix, and you have yet another hazard.

Oh, and the golf cart trails were off limits to non-golf members, and were not for biking or walking.

Back in the day when neighborhoods were built on a grid or wheel system, it was easy to walk or drive around the neighborhood. If one street or sidewalk was blocked temporarily, you just went around the block to the next street. Problem solved. As kids growing up in such a neighborhood, we walked or biked everywhere - the school bus stop, the playground, the pool, the 7-Eleven, McDonalds, the indoor mall, the movie theater, etc. Parents did not have to drive us around. Most every street was a side street with through access. Traffic and parking were rarely a problem because there was sufficient driveway space and/or road width, AND people owned fewer cars back then.

Now neighborhoods are commonly built with insufficient parking space and narrow roads, as if this sort of planning would somehow force the public to abandon their vehicles. Sidewals are almost non-existent, so small children have nowhere to learn to ride a bike or use riding toys. Then some residents complain about children playing in the street or parking areas. The communal pocket “parks” are rarely used, because they are not easily accessible for the majority of residents. Plus, people walk their dogs there and do not pick up after them. There’s often no shade, and the HOA frowns upon any damage to the ornamental flower beds. The kids cannot play in their own yards, because, quite often the yards are tiny or nonexistent.

These issues were all intentionally created, and now millions of Americans (and people around the world) are dealing with the problems.