Guard It With Your Life
By Summer Saadah
Columnist

It was around this time last year, under the balmy blue sky of a Florida winter, that the official groundbreaking for Ave Maria took place. It’s just 5,000 acres of sunny soil–11,000 homes, a 100-foot high cathedral, a Roman Catholic university, a market, a pharmacy, a school and $400 million later and it’ll be finished. And what an accomplishment. It’ll be the first town that is a gated community! It’ll be the first gated community that is a town! It’ll be hard to tell the difference.

Town, community, neighborhood. It’s all geography. Shut out the fact that while legalities determine a town and real estate developers a neighborhood, it is ideology that forms a
community. Close your eyes to the notion that to some extent neighborhoods have always been
gated—but the gate was in the form of socio-economics not wrought iron. After all, if a
person can’t afford the price range of the houses in a neighborhood, then, for all intents
and purposes, they are on the other side of the gate. Guard against the idea that it is philosophy that draws the unseen boundaries and it’s clear that exclusionary methods haven’t gotten worse—just more overt.

Those in favor of “gated communities” would argue that despite all these ideas, when it comes down to it, it is just the bad that is being excluded from their “communities.” In fact, in some cases, it’s only a tiny gate and piddly little guardhouse being used to keep out all that Bad. Where’s the harm in that? Especially against a Goliath like crime. They would ask what’s wrong with wanting to determine how one’s neighborhood should appear and who should appear in it?

Nothing.
Especially if you keep in mind that, like the price tags in “gated communities,” this nostalgic yearning doesn’t come cheap.

Nothing.
If you’re willing to pony up diversity for a down payment and sacrifice the spice of life as a mortgage payment.

Nothing.
If you are so naïve as to think that it is just the erection of a gate that poses a problem with the “gated communities.”

It isn’t the gate. It is the intent. And this is where it gets ugly.

Now technically, Ave Maria, Fla. is a town. There are probably lots of legal hoops that former Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan had to jump through to get people to mistake his
gated community for a town, so this definition should be clear. Especially since there are no gates to tell us otherwise.

It could be said that this town is just a much needed evolution of the ideology that fueled the formation of the first gated communities a couple of decades ago: the achievement of an
idyllic existence with low crime rates, neighbors who knew one another and clean sidewalks
that led little Janie to school. To give Mr. Monaghan some credit, a community whose focus
is around the church certainly has the potential to lend more spirituality to humanity than say, a community whose focus is golf.

But what is the actual intention of the founder? What is the intention of building a community whose ideological and physical focus is the church? In his own words, it seems his intention is like that of any other gated community developer: focus on keeping bad out. “I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don’t want to be on the sidelines,” he stated.

Should that really be the sole intention for building a community? Fear? Battles? Crime? It’s almost as uninspiring a foundation for a community as golf. Perhaps the idea of community should not be translated by gates, guardhouses or clean sidewalks. Perhaps instead of focusing on protecting our backyards, we could focus more on protecting our potential to make the world around us a bit better–a bit friendlier even– by living such nostalgic ideals as talking to those around us. Finding common, interactive goals to better our backyards.

Instead of more gated communities, we should have more intentional communities such as Carrboro’s co-operatively run Weaver Community Housing association. According to their Web
site, their goal is to create affordable communities that “will remain livable for future
generations, [where] social and environmental sustainability must be essential principles
for all current and future endeavors.” Solar heating, permaculture, and the idea of a
cooperative spirit give a conscience to this intentional community.

The Blue Heron Farm in Pittsboro is another example of what can be achieved when the idea of
community isn’t relegated to what can be found within a gate. Their Web site’s vision statement, a quote by spiritual psychologist M. Scott Peck says it all: True community is
not simply an aggregate of people…but a people which have made a commitment to communicate more authentically, more intimately, more vulnerably. The farm focuses on cohesion through communal interaction with an emphasis on sound ecological practices. What isn’t included in any of their statements on their website is a battle between good and evil, golf courses, or fear.

These are authentic communities. And they don’t need gates.