Column: Fences in Los Angeles have gotten taller, gone horizontal, redefining neighborhood life

My cynical oversimplification of the story of Los Angeles goes like this: lots of people saw how beautiful Southern California was and wanted not just to live there but to possess it.

I think that’s why fences are such a facet of the residential landscape in Los Angeles. Not only do we have gated communities here, but we have gated communities within other gated communities, and even entire gated municipalities. It’s hard to find a good view of Los Angeles without a fence somewhere in it.

I wonder if this is what the landowner in Robert Frost‘s poem “Mending Wall” meant when he said good fences make good neighbors.

Fences appear in almost every neighborhood and in communities of all income levels. As I’ve moved around Los Angeles, I’ve noticed a few different styles.

East Hollywood‘s iron fences were their own kind of art form, unique, twisting designs decorated with acorns, crowns or fleurs de lis. On the Westside, walls of ivy or trimmed hedges towered over the sidewalk. When I moved to Alhambra, there were low barriers of cement and cinder block, dividing properties horizontally but leaving the lawn open to the street. In West Adams, unadorned barriers of iron bars and chain link formed an uneven wall along the sidewalk.

East Hollywood was also where I noticed the first signs of an aesthetic shift in fences: a wooden or wood-like fence of horizontal planks, sometimes called gentrification fences. That term reflects the resentments caused by rapid neighborhood redevelopment, and you often see graffiti crews target these fences. But these fences are so ubiquitous now they exist even outside that context.

Garik Babayan, chief executive of Torrance Fence Co., describes the new trend as a shift from vertical to horizontal styles.

There’s been a quiet boom in the fence construction industry since the pandemic, Babayan said. New homeowners are less worried about violent crime and more concerned with porch pirates, pets and privacy in their outdoor recreational spaces, he said. Lots of property owners decided to upgrade their outdoor spaces during the pandemic, a time when everyone was focused on security and privacy. Millennials and younger homeowners usually prefer the horizontal wood fences because they look more modern. They’re often accompanied by cameras.

It’s tough to track exactly how many fences are being built — each city has different practices when it comes to permitting fences, walls or hedges, and many kinds of fences don’t need permits.

But according to Babayan, in the last six years, he’s started his own company and the waiting period for fence installation has ballooned from just two weeks to more than three months. He now has 40 employees and five different crews.

One big change between the old fences and the new is that you can’t really have a conversation through the new ones, which block any view of the residence and the yard and are often fronted with security cameras.

“In the past that open feeling was great, but people are more cautious now,” said Babayan.

Sue Freeman, 70, of Venice, has a chain-link fence to keep her dog from roaming. But it’s low enough so she can talk to her neighbors, and it’s getting to know them that makes her feel safe. She has a Ring camera, but she can’t figure out how to get it to talk, and she’d rather get to know the mail carrier — Luis, and before him, Susan.

She has a hard time imagining life without a fence. She still has a bullet hole in her house from a gang decades ago, and the fence sets the border of her yard and garden. But she’s watched fences get taller over the past 40 years with mixed feelings. The neighborhood has far more Airbnb operators and renters than ever before.

“Everyone who has a house has a snapshot of that place and time, and they want to keep it frozen in that time,” Freeman said. “But I didn’t get to keep my snapshot, and nobody ever really does.”

Fences have been a persistent source of friction in rapidly changing neighborhoods across Los Angeles. Old neighbors see the new fences and wonder why the new neighbors seem less interested in chatting.

It’s not just the fences that cause that friction — it’s also the contrasting lifestyles that the fences might indicate. It’s easy to assume that a person with a gentrification fence is less likely to engage with community events, learn the names of your kids or let you borrow a cup of salt or a pinch of baking powder.

These changes in fences indicate not just new aesthetic preferences, but also new attitudes about what it means to be a part of a neighborhood. Is it still a neighborhood, in the traditional sense, if it’s just a group of people who have nothing to do with each other except owning homes close together?

Marques Vestal, an assistant urban planning professor at UCLA, describes this change as a shift towards inward home ownership.

“People are moving into neighborhoods without the expectation that they will get along with the people there. They buy a piece of land and fortify,” Vestal said.

Fences have always reflected different eras of thinking about neighborhoods, and different fears, Vestal said. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the war on drugs raged, fences became ubiquitous amid an overheated public conversation about crime and gangs. According to Times archives, Los Angeles Police Department raids often used violence, even employing a six-ton tank with a steel battering ram, pro-police graffiti and deliberate property destruction.

Authorities also deployed fences to close off alleys and secure multifamily buildings where drug trade occurred, Vestal said. For Black and Latino homeowners, whose neighborhoods were the site of that war, fences offered security from crime but also served as a response to the destructive policing that often accompanied it.

“It was part security theater, and part status symbol,” Vestal said.

In “City of Quartz,” historian Mike Davis identified fences as part of an effort to police social boundaries with hostile architecture. Builders in the 1970s and ’80s took cues from prisons, military forts and overseas embassies, a collective paranoid tendency Davis summarized as the fortress city.

It’s never been clear whether fences actually stop crime. Fences make a property harder to access, but rarely do they make it impossible. They protect a property but also mark it as a potentially profitable target for petty crime.

I think it’s useful to look at fences as a measure of how secure people would like to feel. And those feelings are often a function of how dangerous they think the world is, what media they consume and how they were raised.

I use the word feelings because I think ultimately safety is an emotional reality, not necessarily a factual one. Statistics show violent crime is down in every American city, but if Nextdoor posting is any indication, homeowners are more scared than ever of violent and property crime. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the safest, wealthiest neighborhoods have the tallest, most imposing fences.

A fence might make us feel safer. So might a border wall.

Perhaps the war on drugs made us feel safer four decades ago. Maybe the current crackdown on public homelessness makes us feel more secure right now.

It’s important to recognize these as feelings because we have a choice in how to respond. We can build the walls higher, or we can imagine a place that doesn’t need them. A city of fences, or a city of neighborhoods.