People who live in gated communities and complain about traffic congestion remind me of people who say they hate sprawl and also hate density.
Guess what. The best remedy for traffic congestion is to have lots of streets, most of them relatively narrow and slow-speed, connecting to lots of other, similar streets. Traffic engineer and N.C. State grad Walter Kulash, in an interview with me years ago, compared an efficiently functioning street network to an electric company’s power grid: “a dense, highly connected network of low capacity.”
What prompted this reverie was the news that the city of Asheville just banned building any more gated communities. Here’s the story. The city figured out that letting some neighborhoods wall themselves off makes it even harder to build a street network of connecting streets.
Charlotte, despite its much bragged upon “connectivity” policy, not only hasn’t banned gated neighborhoods, there hasn’t even been a proposal for the City Council to vote on.
I have two theories why Charlotte isn’t talking about such a ban.
–First, developers wouldn’t like it. Gated communities are popular with some affluent buyers, who assume they’re safer. Guess it depends on which crimes you’re worried about. I might worry about disproportionately high rates of insider trading or hedge fund fraud in gated communities. (But seriously, I recall seeing a study a few years back done in Atlanta, that compared crime rates in a gated community with those in a comparable, but non-gated community. The gated community had more burglaries.)
–Second, even when planners and politicians are willing to displease developers — which believe it or not does happen upon occasion — they still operate with a mindset dating to maybe the 1960s or 1970s, in which central Charlotte truly was threatened by vast growth flowing to the suburbs. In this mindset, the city shouldn’t do anything that would discourage development here.
Even though the city is experiencing growth so rapid and extreme that infrastructure can’t keep up with it, and even though demand for close-in housing is so great that prices are being bid up to an unhealthy level and in-town houses are being scraped away so in-town mansions can be built — despite all that the planners and politicians are still afraid they might scare off growth.
Silly, isn’t it?