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  #141  
Old Posted May 2, 2014, 6:18 PM
geotag277 geotag277 is offline
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Originally Posted by freeweed View Post
But no one's arguing against gated homes. A gated community is buying something on a whole different level. Like implementing a private road system (which is essentially what is done in larger examples). In terms of it being a luxury item - well yes. But many socially abhorrent things have been classified as luxury items in the past, it doesn't justify their existence simply because they can be purchased.
A gated community isn't harming anyone, any more than a restricted access condo-only green space in the middle of Downtown harms any one. You can say that the land scale puts it in a different league, but it's simply a difference of degrees. The residents and developers of the property spent the money to improve and create that green space, that otherwise would never be visited by anyone and designated as private property anyway. I find the argument that remote suburban areas need to maintain access to everyone to maintain the greater good very weak - much more people would benefit at a much larger scale having more green spaces publicly accessible Downtown - even if those green spaces are orders of magnitude smaller.

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Absolutely. Thereby defeating the purpose of gating it to begin with. It solves no problems, and only adds to the hassle for the 0.1% of people who might want to explore or have some other need/desire to use it.
It doesn't defeat the purpose of the gate, any more than additional requirements for maintenance "defeat the purpose" of owning a nice pair of leather shoes. Some things don't need a purpose beyond the satisfaction that comes from owning it - it's a common theme among luxury items in general.

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You're confusing practicality with ideology. No one gives a shit if they can't drive by 233 Oak Valley Lane on a daily basis. That isn't the point. The point is that without any gates, anyone is free to traverse any road or public space, anywhere in a city. Once you put gates in place, it begins to restrict freedom of movement. Say there are two roads to go from point A to point B. If they're both publicly accessible, and one is blocked off (accident, weather, you name it) - then the other can be used. By me, by emergency vehicles, by whomever wants to. But if one is gated, then it removes that as an option. For no material benefit of anyone, as you've already admitted (beyond as a symbol of status). And I've never seen a road in my life that couldn't be used in some capacity like this given the right circumstances, other than dead-end cul-de-sacs.

Remember when you were in Kindergarten, and there was a huge pile of toys shared amongst 20 kids? And there'd always be a kid or 2 who wanted to hog multiple toys? Even if he couldn't play with them all at the same time, and even if the other kids had *some* toys to play with, he got pleasure from denying the use of the excess toys to others. Most of us, at 5 years old, recognized that as selfish and non-productive to a group. Even if we had our own toys to play with at any given time.
It seems you are simply admitting you are arguing an ideological point and not a practical one. It's fair, but I would say that as a society we come together from different ideological backgrounds and a cornerstone of that is being free to pursue a lifestyle that we are all comfortable with, and that means different things to different people.

Your analogy with kids toys doesn't quite work. It's more like if you are a kid playing with your toys in your own playground in the way you want, that you want to also decide how the kids at the school on the other side of town play with their toys and that they should be playing with their toys in the same way that you do. If anything the person trying to dictate how everyone should play with their toys is the selfish one imposing their own ideology on the entire school system, even those schools across town that have nothing to do with your own playground. If anything that ideological war is the unproductive thing.

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Just imagine the minds I'd blow if I shared my belief on inheritance taxation.
That's interesting, but I suspect we may fundamentally agree here more than we disagree. Personally I find absurd generational wealth one of the most egregious social imbalances in modern society. Where we probably disagree is that I don't believe that upon death a person's wealth should default to the administration by a government entity, but I'm not sure what the solution is - I suspect a levelling of the playing field in terms of opportunity across income classes would be a good place to start.
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  #142  
Old Posted May 2, 2014, 9:43 PM
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Originally Posted by geotag277 View Post
A gated community isn't harming anyone
Not by itself, no. But the attitudes that lead to it are. Fear, desire to be isolated from society, segregation based on class lines... those are what people have a problem with. No one gives a shit if someone is a kook who wants to live like a hermit. Hell, I live in the suburbs precisely because I can't handle the noise and hassles involved with shared wall accommodations. What people have an issue with is the end result of the attitudes of people who want to take their wealth and wall off the rest of the world as a result.

Atlas Shrugged isn't exactly a study in being nice to each other. And it's essentially the logical endgame of what gated communities stand for.

The entire issue is born out of ideology. No one (here anyway) is arguing that these things should be illegal. We find the reasoning behind them abhorrent, is all.


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That's interesting, but I suspect we may fundamentally agree here more than we disagree. Personally I find absurd generational wealth one of the most egregious social imbalances in modern society. Where we probably disagree is that I don't believe that upon death a person's wealth should default to the administration by a government entity, but I'm not sure what the solution is - I suspect a levelling of the playing field in terms of opportunity across income classes would be a good place to start.
Then we probably agree more than anything. I don't think the government owns your estate lock, stock and barrel - but I think handing down tremendous wealth to the next generation benefits absolutely no one (and has all sorts of deleterious effects on society, like a desire to live in a gated community and not with the commoners).

We probably disagree a lot more on things like multi-tier healthcare, where I suspect you'd have the same opinion as with gated communities - that it doesn't hurt anyone else if a rich person uses their wealth to obtain better healthcare. Which when it's one guy is absolutely correct.
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  #143  
Old Posted May 2, 2014, 10:42 PM
blueandgoldguy blueandgoldguy is offline
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Originally Posted by esquire View Post
It is really crazy how common these things are in the southwestern states. There are some parts of places like Phoenix and Palm Springs where you can drive for miles and never see anything but the walls of these gated communities. It is bizarre and somewhat surreal, and the walls obviously destroy any sort of neighbourhood feeling that might otherwise exist.

There are none of these communities in or around Winnipeg that I'm aware of, which surprises me on a couple of fronts:

1) many wealthy Winnipeggers would be well acquainted with them from owning winter homes in various desert locales, and

2) for its many charms and virtues, Winnipeg is still a racially and socially divided city where, let's face it, people flock to the south end to get away from poor Aboriginal people. You would think some developer would have exploited that fear and paranoia by building a community with a big wall around it... but it hasn't happened yet. There are many small enclaves of wealth, but none that I can think of are behind walls and gates.
Esquire I think the southwest corner of new Tuxedo (nearest the corner of Shaftesbury and Wilkes) is a gated community albeit a rather small one mostly consisting of condos.
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  #144  
Old Posted May 2, 2014, 10:57 PM
Mikemike Mikemike is offline
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These places essentially create another level of government that intentionally excludes while pretending not to be government. These places can be on such a large scale that that's exactly what they are. They have their own rules and regulations, and boards/councils, security forces. Everything that a government has, except open doors. And because of the way the "laws" are structured as "contracts" that can be avoided (they can't, not without moving elsewhere) they often usurp the role of the local government by "contractually" overriding bylaws, and can be harder to change than actual laws enacted by genuine governments.
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  #145  
Old Posted May 3, 2014, 12:45 AM
geotag277 geotag277 is offline
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Originally Posted by freeweed View Post
Not by itself, no. But the attitudes that lead to it are. Fear, desire to be isolated from society, segregation based on class lines... those are what people have a problem with. No one gives a shit if someone is a kook who wants to live like a hermit. Hell, I live in the suburbs precisely because I can't handle the noise and hassles involved with shared wall accommodations. What people have an issue with is the end result of the attitudes of people who want to take their wealth and wall off the rest of the world as a result.

Atlas Shrugged isn't exactly a study in being nice to each other. And it's essentially the logical endgame of what gated communities stand for.

The entire issue is born out of ideology. No one (here anyway) is arguing that these things should be illegal. We find the reasoning behind them abhorrent, is all.
Again, this is a pretty extreme picture you are trying to paint of the psyche of a person who buys a property in a gated community. You sound like you want to be judge, jury, and executioner to convict people for a thought crime based on reasons you invent for the motivations of why people buy the things they buy.

The problem is the same exact logic works for nearly any thing. The logical conclusion of purchasing almost any luxury item could be "the person wants to segregate themselves along class lines to be isolated from society" - from simple things like buying a car (they want to segregate themselves from public transportation and wall off the rest of the world!) to even taking a damned vacation (want to segregate themselves from the working class, the logical conclusion of which is World War Z!). Do people who buy leather shoes want to signal to the rest of society that they are not a member of the "commoners" and so leather shoes should be considered abhorrent?

Do some people buy cars and take vacations and buy shoes and think that way? Of course, but really it's not anyone's place to judge the motivations or even potential thoughts of other people. At the end of the day, these are luxury items, and people are choosing to spend their money on something that they enjoy, for whatever reason and the reason itself is for no one to judge.

You can ascribe any kind of abhorrent and nefarious twist to the behaviour of other people for virtually anything they do, the end result of which is you are simply convicting people for thought crimes you suspect them of thinking.

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Then we probably agree more than anything. I don't think the government owns your estate lock, stock and barrel - but I think handing down tremendous wealth to the next generation benefits absolutely no one (and has all sorts of deleterious effects on society, like a desire to live in a gated community and not with the commoners).

We probably disagree a lot more on things like multi-tier healthcare, where I suspect you'd have the same opinion as with gated communities - that it doesn't hurt anyone else if a rich person uses their wealth to obtain better healthcare. Which when it's one guy is absolutely correct.
Health care is just a complicated subject. It might surprise you but in ideal terms we probably have a similar outlook for health care, practically speaking is another matter and in the real world of compromises and complexity, a multi tier system could have it's place.
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  #146  
Old Posted May 3, 2014, 1:11 AM
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esquire esquire is offline
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Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy View Post
Esquire I think the southwest corner of new Tuxedo (nearest the corner of Shaftesbury and Wilkes) is a gated community albeit a rather small one mostly consisting of condos.
I wasn't thinking of small condo developments like that one, or the ones on Wellington Crescent... I was thinking more the southwest desert style where you basically have a neighbourhood behind a wall.
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  #147  
Old Posted Aug 7, 2015, 4:52 PM
omark omark is offline
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Wink I doubt any negative comment comes from experience.

I lived my whole life in a gated community.

The whole point of gated communities is not the security, but the services that come from being part of a community with a dedicated staff for the various things you might need as a home-owner such as an electrician,gardener,security guard etc .

The amenities that are also available to you are guaranteed to be of a specific quality that is way higher than public facilities, and you are probably going to be able to use them in peace and privacy as opposed to public places where there is a definitely higher chance of the place being crowded ( ie a public pool ) not to mention that the amenities available to you in a gated community will be attended by members of the community that your friends with or at least acquainted with .

Knowing your kids playing outside are safe as they are surrounded by people you know and a community you are a part of , knowing that traffic wont be speeding over little Johny because they can't access these roads in the first place ,knowing that if the plumbing/electricity goes wrong someone will be round in 15min to take care of it, that is the peace of mind and convenience you buy into when your part of a gated community .
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  #148  
Old Posted Aug 8, 2015, 1:53 AM
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Bcasey25raptor Bcasey25raptor is offline
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I'd like to see them banned in Canada, period.

Kelowna had WAY too many gated communities when I lived there. Too many people gated off from reality.
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  #149  
Old Posted Aug 8, 2015, 3:23 AM
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MolsonExport MolsonExport is offline
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I had the unpleasant experience of living in one such community (near Kelowna, you betcha!) for a period. Fucking hated it, and everything that it stood for. Crotchety old farts that think all the young 'uns are lazy bums, and that generally dislike anyone of a different colour or creed. A closed club chock full of Assholes, basically.
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  #150  
Old Posted Aug 8, 2015, 5:16 AM
matthew6 matthew6 is offline
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I admittedly know very little about gated communities in Canada. Never really thought about them and I don't think I've actually ever seen one in person.

Just a quick question. Do any of these communities exclude non members from passing through?
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  #151  
Old Posted Aug 8, 2015, 2:54 PM
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yes, unless they are guests, with the appropriate vouching by the inviters.
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"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."-President Lyndon B. Johnson Donald Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man, and a stupid man's idea of a smart man. Am I an Asseau?
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