By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY

NEW ORLEANS — To find refuge from the bawdy French Quarter and the faded elegance of downtown, the wealthy here live in gated suburban communities with names that whisper exclusivity: English Turn, Barkley Estates and Oakland Plantation.

Six-foot brick walls and iron fences encircle these enclaves of luxury homes. Electronic gates and 24-hour security guards keep outsiders away. The streets are spotless, the landscaping lush.

A mile away, Gina Rojas, a waitress and single mom, also enjoys a gated lifestyle. But she lives in a one-bedroom apartment that rents for $492 a month. An iron fence surrounds her Harper's Ferry development. She needs a coded card to get past the electronic gates that guard all three entrances.

In cities and suburbs from New York to Los Angeles, wealthy homeowners no longer are the only ones retreating behind gates. The desire to lock out the outside world cuts across all income groups, according to the first Census Bureau survey to measure how many Americans live in walled or gated communities.

"We think of affluent people and mini-mansions in exclusive enclaves, but we don't think about the multifamily, higher density, lower-income residents also being in that type of development," says Tom Sanchez, an associate professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. He analyzed the data for the university's Metropolitan Institute.

Many sociologists bemoan the growing popularity of gated communities. They say they're exclusionary, elitist and anti-social. Most of that criticism targets the wealthy. But the new data suggest that a desire for such separation exists among all economic classes.

The popularity of gated communities is on the rise nationwide, according to developers and housing experts. In a nation still confronting post-9/11 jitters, living behind walls and knowing your neighbors create a safety zone for many. Security is also a top concern for baby boomers as they head toward retirement.

"It's spreading to the middle class," says Ed Blakely, co-author of Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States and the dean of the Milano Graduate School at New School University in New York. About 40% of new homes in California are behind walls, he says. Most subdivisions approved by Palm Beach County, Fla., in the past five years are gated.

The analysis of the Census Bureau's 2001 American Housing Survey, a sampling of 62,000 households that is representative of the nation's 119 million households, shows that:

* More than 7 million households — about 6% of the national total — are in developments behind walls and fences. About 4 million of that total are in communities where access is controlled by gates, entry codes, key cards or security guards.

* Homeowners in gated communities live in upscale and mostly white developments. But renters, who are more ethnically diverse and less affluent, are nearly 21/2 times as likely as homeowners to live behind gates or walls.

* Whether they own or rent, Hispanics are more likely to live in such communities than whites or blacks. That may be partly because there is a large Hispanic population in the West and Southwest, areas with the largest concentration of gated communities.

* Affluent African-American homeowners are less likely to live in gated communities than whites and Hispanics, even in metro areas such as Atlanta and Washington, D.C., which have a large black middle class. Experts theorize that after centuries of exclusion, blacks may be reluctant to embrace such a lifestyle or to live in predominantly white developments.

"The symbolism is too powerful," says Blakely, who is black. "When a black lives behind the gate and another black comes to visit, the first thing the person says is: 'What's going on, man?' "

* Gated developments are more prevalent in Sun Belt metro areas such as Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles than in older urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast. But they're becoming popular in places like New Orleans, Long Island, N.Y., Chicago, Atlanta and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Safety first

Why people cherish life behind gates or walls usually starts with safety.

"I moved here from Charlotte, N.C.," says Marcia Newton, 63, a flight attendant for the New Orleans Hornets basketball team, which switched cities earlier this year. "When I came to New Orleans, I thought, 'Oh, my God, all the crime.' "

Newton, a divorcee, settled in a gated apartment complex called The Lakes of Chateau Estates, where monthly rents range from $775 to $1,225. The electronic gates make her feel more secure when she returns from out-of-town games, often at 2 or 3 a.m. "It feels clean and safe."

Newton's fellow tenants include young professionals, newcomers to the area who are trying to buy homes and many who work at the nearby airport. Some are empty nesters who have sold homes to be in a secure and maintenance-free environment.

Gated access is "a safety issue not so much from criminal elements," says Henry Shane, president of an architectural firm in New Orleans that has developed 25 gated apartment complexes, including some for moderate-income renters. "It limits the amount of people who can come in."

That's what drew waitress Gina Rojas to one of Shane's developments. Harper's Ferry is not fancy. But the iron gates at all the entrances give it a tidy look and discourage outsiders from parking in spaces reserved for tenants or littering the grounds.

Rojas says the development provides a safe environment for her 2-year-old daughter, Caroline. "It's nice, quiet, private," she says. "You pretty much know everyone who comes in and out. There's less traffic."

But walls and gates don't always stop crime. In Atlanta, burglars targeted gated communities in 1995. They stole $1 million in jewelry, cash and silver from at least 90 homes before getting caught.

Many so-called gated communities have walls but no gates. Their streets are open to anyone, and many guardhouses serve more as decoration than roadblocks because the community won't pay for a full-time guard.

Some researchers suggest other reasons for the appeal of gated developments to a broad spectrum. Anthropologist Setha Low calls it "the search for niceness."

She spent eight years interviewing residents of six gated communities, ranging from a working class community in Queens to a wealthy development in San Antonio. Her book, Behind the Gates: Security and the New American Dream, is due next spring.

She found a common desire among residents to provide a safe environment for children and to live among people who share their values. "What they're looking for is not so terribly different than other suburban residents," says Low, professor at the City University of New York. "It's a sense of community, which is like American pie. It has a lot to do with nostalgia, the '50s suburbs, the image of the small town."

For property owners, it also has a lot to do with protecting the value of homes, the biggest investment for most Americans. "They're trying to lock in economic security against deterioration of property values," Blakely says.

The word 'gated' "means different things to different people," says Lynda Nugent Smith, a New Orleans real estate agent. "Some people think of gated as exclusive. Some think of it as security. But most think of privacy."

"It works for everyone, not just for the rich," Shane says. His company even put up gates around older developments to provide the old-neighborhood feeling that many people crave. "Your children can actually play in the street like they used to in the olden days."

In more affluent communities, the goals are the same but on a grander scale. At Barkley Estates in Harvey, a New Orleans suburb, custom homes range from $300,000 to $600,000. A guard screens visitors at the gate. Rules prohibit overnight street parking. No boats, campers or RVs are allowed in driveways. Houses must be painted only certain colors. What one homeowner called "mauve" was too purple for the neighbors.

Restrictive to some, these rules are what Ricky Dantin likes about his community. "Knowing that it's going to stay nice," says Dantin, 44, general manager for a road contracting company.

Plenty of critics

Many demographers and sociologists who criticize the gated lifestyles of the wealthy find just as much fault in the phenomenon's spread to lower-income groups.

"We are so focused on looking at how rich people wall out poor people that we missed the fact that some poor people have also built walls between themselves," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, who analyzed the data on gated communities with Sanchez.

The health of neighborhoods depends on contact between people of all incomes and races, he says. When lower-income people wall themselves from people who are poorer, Lang says, there is less chance that the surrounding area will improve. "You create enclaves of stability in seas of decay," he says. "That's worrisome."

In one of Washington, D.C.'s neighborhoods hardest hit by poverty and crime, a townhouse development recently went up. It's gated. Neal Payton, a principal with the architectural and planning firm that designed the Walter E. Washington Estates in Anacostia, isn't particularly proud of that.

"Gated communities are anathema to civic life," he says. "What they do is isolate individual neighborhoods from each other and from the public realm. But the perception was that the marketplace wouldn't support a new housing development unless it had the security of gates."

-- Anonymous, December 16, 2002