Part 1 of 2 parts
02/01 By DEBORAH HASTINGS Associated Press Writer
   SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (AP) -- Roger Basham doesn't understand all
the fuss. After all, it has been at least three months since a car
was impaled on the anti-terrorist device that guards his Hidden
Valley housing tract.
   "I'm sure you have a lock on your front door," he says. "And I'm
sure you wouldn't like people opening your door and walking through
your house just because it's a quicker way to get home."
   Basham no doubt is right. But Hidden Valley's answer to
interloping motorists is one of the most extreme measures taken by a
growing number of fearful communities in this country.
   Faced with dangerous crime and unwanted traffic, American
neighborhoods from California to Georgia are hiding behind walls,
gates and barbed wire in a last-ditch effort to protect homes and
families.
   In the nation's second largest city, the Los Angeles Department
of Public Works is struggling with a deluge of applications from
local neighborhoods that want to barricade public streets.
   Resurrecting medieval strategies for protecting hearth and home
also has revived an age-old debate: Should the haves be allowed to
wall themselves off from the have-nots?
   The answer depends on which side of the wall you call home.
   Those outside the walls call such structures elitist and divisive
to communities. Those inside say not true, and that defending
themselves is their God-given right.
   The rise of fortified communities in Los Angeles, New York,
Detroit, Chicago and other cities is even the subject of an upcoming
book titled "The New American Ghetto," by photographer and author
Camilo Jose Vergara.
   In the case of Hidden Valley, the private, residential
development 35 miles north of downtown Los Angeles became the
world's first to purchase a $50,000 hydraulic bollard.
   Primarily used to protect embassies, airport runways and U.S.
nuclear facilities, the device shoots two three-foot-long steel
cylinders positioned below ground up into the cars of motorists who
defy it.
   About 28 vehicles have been damaged since the bollard was
installed last April. Its use sparked a local controversy and
threatened lawsuits. Yet residents continue to defend the device,
saying there are ample warning signs and that they are mandated by
the county to keep traffic off their private road.
   In real estate-obsessed Southern California, gating subdivisions
has become a way of life for developers. Not only does providing
such measures promise greater safety, they also provide a great
selling point -- increased property values.
   For the last two decades, the Leisure World retirement
communities in Seal Beach and Laguna Hills have offered cinder-block
walls topped by barbed wire and round-the-clock guards to its
residents.
   The Laguna Hills site, with 21,000 residents, is virtually its