The unexpected faces of gated community residents inside the United States
Date
2010
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Gated communities (GCs) are a growing phenomenon around the world and in the United States. Data collected by the American Housing Survey (AHS) has shown that the total number of housing units inside GCs rose from seven million in 2001 to over ten million in 2007; raising the total to slightly over eight percent. Despite increasing evidence to the contrary, GCs nevertheless are persistently viewed as being homogeneous enclaves of the wealthy. Towards gaining greater insight into the diversity and of GCs and possible differences between inside and out, this thesis uses the data collected in the most recent AHS (2007) to further elucidate the issue.
A canonical discriminant function analysis (DFA) is performed to determine if a different set of push and pull factors act on the residents of GCs relative to the residents of other communities in the United States. A series of two sample difference of proportions Z-tests are used to examine the relationship between immigrants and GCs while a two sample difference of means t-test is used to determine if a gated „transnational elite‟ exists inside the United States.
Differences between the residents of GCs and non-gated communities along the dimensions considered in the DFA are not found to be meaningful, suggesting that those living inside of GCs are looking for the same community aspects as those living elsewhere. However, the immigrant population is almost twice as large inside of GCs as elsewhere in the United States, suggesting that immigrants are driving the growth of GCs, in part, by creating demand. The proportion of the gated foreign born is found to be more than twice that of native born Americans, with immigrants originating in countries with histories of GCs having the highest rates of gating once inside the United States. This suggests that although immigration itself seems to encourage gating once inside the host country, the culture of origin is also an important determining factor. Although the income of foreign born homeowners is found to be greater inside of GCs than elsewhere, the differences are insignificant, suggesting that no “transnational elite” exists inside of the United States.