Gated communities entrench social segregation in suburban communities which are already racially similar.

Do gated communities contribute to increased segregation in urban areas? While the answer almost seems self-evident, there is very little empirical data available to actually measure their effect in metropolitan areas. In new research Renaud Le Goix and Elena Vesselinov investigate the relationship between urban segregation patterns and the location of gated communities in US southwestern metropolitan areas. Through an analysis of the “social distance” between neighborhoods, they find that gated communities contribute to social – but not racial – segregation, but that this effect fell between 2000 and 2010.