Some social trends have been around for a while, sitting quietly alongside more noticeable shifts in how we live. But these trends can suddenly come to the fore via a statistic that makes us realize they were not sitting so quietly.
The one that struck me recently was the finding by consultants iPropertyManagement, based on U.S. Census Bureau figures, that 32.9 million homeowners in the country live in “secured communities.” Considering that the average number of people in this type of household is about three, this adds up to nearly 100 million Americans having some type of physical or security service barrier separating them from their wider residential area.
In parallel, there is an increasing recourse by wealthy individuals and affluent communities to privately contract formerly “public” services. A stark example is the enlisting of private firefighting companies by some rich individuals to protect their homes during the recent Los Angeles fires.
Why are these two things happening? The answer is rather depressing.
The Doom Loop of Failing States and the New Feudalism
In so many major cities, there is now rapidly declining confidence in public authorities’ ability to provide adequate taxpayer-funded services in areas like security, firefighting, waste collection, education, and healthcare. Consequently, people — or at least those with the means to do so — are increasingly retreating to private enclaves where those services are provided through commercial operators and contractors, all coordinated through a central non-governmental authority.
The key driving factor of this trend is concern over safety: an understandable reaction to the all-too-real problems of theft, robbery, drug trafficking, vandalism, sexual assault, and gang violence plaguing major cities and even many towns. But a contributing motivation is the desire for exclusivity and greater community cohesion. This has been on the rise in reaction to the increasing phenomenon of homeless encampments and the heavy influx of migrants into major urban areas.
The growing impotence of public governing bodies has given rise to a new societal landscape, one in which money is the ultimate arbiter of happiness and security.
The result is a societal drift towards one aspect of what some observers, including historian Victor Davis Hanson, have called “The New Feudalism.” Gated communities offer, in a way, that sense of protection and peer social connection once typical of medieval walled cities presided over by a local nobleman guaranteeing peace and stability in exchange for fealty and a share of his subjects’ harvests. Today’s equivalent of that nobleman is a combination of real estate companies, property management companies, and the all-powerful Homeowners’ Associations.
Similarly, major corporations are assuming a greater role in organizing and even running the communities in which their operations, their employees, and those employees’ families are concentrated. In so doing, they’re in reality constituting self-contained corporate duchies redolent of medieval city-states.
Examples include Google with its proposed (and now approved) 7,000-home North Bayshore and 2,000-home Middlefield Park developments in Mountain View, California, and Facebook owner Meta’s now-approved plans for its 1,700-home Willow Village project near its Menlo Park headquarters, also in California. In Florida, entertainment giants Disney and Universal plan to build 1,400 housing units and 1,000 apartments, respectively, near their Orlando theme parks. All of these developments will be, to all effects, corporate mini-cities, complete with hotels, shops, restaurants, parks, and leisure facilities.
Jondu11
Jesus Christ is King
