Neighborhood Lockdown

With an order to demolish the warehouse, it should have been easy for Litke to move ahead with his plans, except the demolition did not go smoothly. One neighbor whose house was damaged during the bulldozing of the warehouse sued Litke and won a $5,000 award. Gundlach says the back of his garage was dented in, and in the winter, water from the leveled site, black and iridescent, spewed into his building. The contractor hired to do the demolition sued Litke for reportedly failing to pay her. Litke filed a cross-complaint, blaming her for damaging the neighboring properties. Both were settled.

Now, with Litke planning to finally build on the property -- and a gated community to boot -- the neighbors are pissed off, not just with Litke, but also with each other. Some of the property owners have split from nearby renters. Apparently one bad apple has tainted the neighborhood barrel, spamming the Internet community of neighbors. As a result, no one is allowed to speak for the neighborhood without a vote deciding what should be said.

From all this divisiveness, a gated community has been conceived. Given the city's tremendous need for housing, the project has a good chance of getting built. The Planning Department is now in its final phase of checking the property for environmental hazards, with the project expected to go before the Planning Commission sometime after the new year. The development will be almost all market-rate rental housing, with a few units set aside, as required by the city, for low-income tenants.

Only a few such secured communities exist in San Francisco. One is the opulent Presidio Terrace, where Sen. Dianne Feinstein owns a house. But that circular hamlet has no security beyond a sign declaring it private property. The suites at Walton and Golden Gate plazas, situated above offices and retail stores around Walton Square, are secured from the public. And a few nonprofit, subsidized housing complexes have gates to limit pedestrian traffic and loitering.

Perhaps not surprisingly, San Francisco has built very few gated developments compared to other cities and suburbs across the nation. As of 1997, 20,000 gated communities, comprising an estimated 3 million units, had sprung up across the country, according to Fortress America by Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, and not just in suburban strongholds like Orange County or the San Fernando Valley; New York City and Chicago have many secured neighborhoods as well.

Regardless of location, the gated community reflects the suburban movement toward homogeneity and exclusion, the book says. "They are the outgrowth of decades of suburban design and public land-use policy. Gates are firmly within the suburban tradition: they enhance and harden the suburbanness of the suburbs, and they attempt to suburbanize the city."

Ado Schulzeff, a renter who lives across the street from Litke's planned development, says he doesn't mind the fact that the project will lock out the public. He says he thinks of it like an apartment complex where he wouldn't be allowed entrance to swim in the pool. "This is America," he says. "Private property rules."

But while Schulzeff accepts that the neighborhood is bound to grow and evolve around him, he says he regrets the loss of the little things he's become accustomed to; there will be even less parking in the neighborhood, and less light in the shadow of the new buildings, some as high as four stories. "I'll miss the little intangible things, the quality-of-life issues," he says.

Russ Charpentier, whose house was damaged in the demolition, says he doesn't believe that every plot of open space in the city should be developed. "This is the beginning of what they call urban infill," he says. "Fill up every vacant space, every back yard. I left Manhattan to get away from the sardine principle. We have to face the fact that not everyone who wants to live here can live here."

But it is precisely this attitude that has contributed to San Francisco becoming its own kind of gated community, says Jim Chappell, director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association and a Dolores Park neighbor. Chappell say he disapproves of the locked-up settlements on principle, but this one, he says, because of the unique shape of the property with its interior shielded from the street, would benefit from extra protection. Chappell says the neighbors are being just as provincial in this case as anyone from the suburbs. He tells a story from one of the neighborhood meetings concerning the proposed development. Michael Stanton, the architect, came to the meeting to show his plans, introducing himself and his daughter as members of the neighborhood, living on 22nd and Church streets, just a few blocks away. Chappell says the neighbors took issue with the architect's claim of membership.

"To them, 22nd Street was not the same neighborhood, and they made that loud and clear," he says. "It was very sad."