The story of Los Angeles can be cynically simplified as follows: A lot of people saw the beauty of Southern California and decided they wanted not just to live there, but to own it.
That’s why I think fences are such an essential part of the residential landscape in Los Angeles. Not only do we have gated communities here, but we have gated communities within other gated communities, entire municipalities are gated communities. You’re going to have a really hard time finding a great view in Los Angeles without a fence somewhere.
Is this what the landlord meant in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Walls” when he said, “Good fences make good neighbors”?
Fences can be found in nearly every neighborhood and community of every income level, and as I walked around Los Angeles, I noticed several different styles.
Iron fences in East Hollywood were a unique art form, twisting designs decorated with acorns, crowns and fleur-de-lis. On the Westside, walls of ivy and clipped hedges towered above the sidewalks. When I moved to Alhambra, low cement and cinder block fences separated properties horizontally, but the lawns opened up to the street. In West Adams, unadorned fences of iron bars and chain link formed an uneven wall along the sidewalk.
East Hollywood is also where we first saw signs of a changing fence aesthetic: horizontally planked wooden or wood-like fences sometimes called gentrification fences. The term reflects the resentment generated by rapid neighborhood redevelopment, and we often see graffiti crews targeting these fences. But because they’re now so ubiquitous, they also exist outside of that context.
Garrick Babayan, CEO of Torrance Fence, describes this new trend as a shift from vertical to horizontal styles.
Babayan said the fence construction industry has seen a quiet boom since the pandemic. New homeowners are more concerned about porch pirates, pets and privacy in their outdoor recreational spaces than violent crime. Many property owners decided to upgrade their outdoor spaces during the pandemic, when everyone was focused on security and privacy. Millennials and younger homeowners tend to prefer horizontal wooden fences, which look more modern. Fences often come equipped with cameras.
It’s difficult to keep track of exactly how many fences are being built: cities have different practices when it comes to permitting fences, walls and hedges, and many types of fences don’t require permits.
But over the past six years, Babayan said, wait times for fence installation have ballooned from just two weeks to more than three months since he started his own company and now has 40 employees and five work teams.
The main difference between an old fence and a new one is that a new fence blocks the view into the home and yard, often has a security camera installed in front, and makes it impossible to have a conversation through the fence.
“Before, there was a good open atmosphere, but now people are more cautious,” Babayan said.
Sue Freeman, 70, of Venice, has a chain-link fence to keep her dogs from roaming around, but it’s low enough that she can talk to her neighbors and get to know them, which makes her feel safe. She has a Ring camera but doesn’t know how to get it to talk, so she wants to get to know her mailman, Lewis, and the man before him, Susan.
It’s hard for her to imagine life without the fence — the house still bears bullet holes from gang shots decades ago, and the fence marks the boundary between yards and gardens — but she has watched with mixed feelings as it has gotten taller over the past 40 years, as the neighborhood becomes home to more Airbnb operators and renters than ever before.
“Anyone who has a home has a snapshot of that place and time, and they want to preserve it as it was in that time,” Freeman says, “but I couldn’t preserve that snapshot, and nobody really can.”
Fences have always been a source of friction in Los Angeles’ rapidly changing neighborhoods: Old neighbors see the new fence and wonder why the new ones seem less interested in conversation.
It’s not just the fences that cause this friction, but the contrasting lifestyles they suggest: It’s easy to assume that people who worry about gentrification are less likely to attend community events, remember children’s names, or lend each other a pinch of salt or baking powder.
These changes in fences represent not just new aesthetic tastes, but also new ways of thinking about what it means to be part of a neighborhood: Is it a neighborhood in the traditional sense if it’s a group of people who own houses nearby but have no relationship to each other?
Marques Vestal, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, describes this shift as “a shift inward toward homeownership.”
“People move into an area with no expectation that they’re going to get along with the people who live there. They buy land and fortify it,” Vestal said.
Fences have always reflected different eras’ attitudes about the neighborhood and different fears, Vestal said. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the drug war raged and public debate about crime and gangs heated up, fences became ubiquitous. LAPD raids were often violent, featuring six-ton tanks equipped with steel battering rams, pro-police graffiti and even deliberate vandalism, according to Times archives.
Vestal said authorities also blocked off alleys where drug deals took place and erected fences to protect apartment complexes. For black and Latino homeowners in the war zone, the fences offered safety from crime but also served as an antidote to the disruptive policing that accompanied them.
“It was partly a security play and partly a status symbol,” Vestal said.
Historian Mike Davis, in his book City of Quartz, points out that the fence was part of an effort to police society’s borders with hostile architecture: builders in the 1970s and 1980s took inspiration from prisons, military forts, and foreign embassies, which Davis sums up as fortress cities.
It has never been clear whether fences actually deter crime: They make it difficult, but rarely impossible, to access a property; they protect the property, but at the same time, they mark it as a target for potential petty criminals.
I think it’s useful to look at fences as a measure of how safe people want to feel, and how those feelings are often determined by how dangerous they think the world is, what media they consume, and how they were raised.
I use the word “feeling” because, ultimately, I believe safety is an emotional reality, not necessarily a fact. Statistics show that violent crime is down in every city in America, but if Nextdoor posts are any indication, homeowners fear violent and property crime more than ever. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the safest and most affluent neighborhoods have the tallest, most intimidating fences.
A fence might make us feel safer, and so does a border wall.
Maybe we felt safer 40 years ago because of the war on drugs. Maybe we feel safer now because of increased policing of the homeless.
It’s important to recognize these as emotions because we have a choice in how we respond. We can build high walls, or we can imagine a place where we don’t need walls: a city surrounded by fences, or a city made up of neighborhoods.