a name . . . I could be me. Then the next minute I turn into Satan" (Knight, 1993, p. 9).
The response of populations feeling threatened by society's unpredictability has been to seek protection and privacy. A perceived increase in suburban crime in Los Angeles, particularly in the wake of the so-called Rodney King verdict riot in 1992, led to widespread applications for gated communities in both upper-class and middle-class areas of the city area (NPR, 1995, p. 246). However, as Kerber suggests (1997, p. 843), gated communities are part of a larger scheme of "social developments that undermine the building of social trust," which include a whole range of mechanisms that may or may not protect but that undoubtedly foster class divisions, such as elite-class flight from public schools, "slum clearance projects, which bulldoze close-knit neighborhoods; or gated communities and private athletic clubs, which pull the upper classes out of contact with middle classes."
An underlying argument in favor of gated communities, which are by and large found in u
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