Since April, a new neighborhood called Silverthorne has been under construction along Deerpath Road, a sizable patch of land in North Aurora. The layout of this project seems to match the same style as many of its neighboring communities: winding streets, cul-de-sacs and only one or two entrances leading in and out. If you look at maps of cities across the United States, you can see this type of infrastructure everywhere. These are often referred to as gated communities. While they do not always have literal gates, they effectively function as if they do. With minimal entrances and exits, it becomes difficult for people who do not live there to enter, creating a physical separation from the surrounding community. Studies have shown that communities like this can have negative social, economic and psychological effects, yet despite these concerns, developments built around this idea continue to appear across the country. Why are they still being built?
For generations, Americans have been sold the idea of the American Dream: a stable career, a happy family and a large home in a quiet neighborhood. Developments like Silverthorne are often marketed as exactly that. They promise privacy, safety and a place away from the noise of the city. To many families, living in one of these neighborhoods is a symbol of success. However, communities designed around separation can also come with unintended consequences.
A 2024 study comparing gated communities in the Middle East found that gated developments increased social separation, with residents inside and outside the communities interacting less frequently. The researchers concluded that “isolation and lack of interaction” negatively affected social well-being, while people living outside these developments reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, chronic disease and other negative health outcomes. By limiting interaction between different groups of people, gated communities may reinforce social divisions that already exist within a region.
Despite their downsides, the appeal of these developments is not difficult to understand. People want easy access to the opportunities cities provide, such as jobs, restaurants, schools, healthcare and entertainment, but at the same time many also want distance from the unpredictability or danger that comes with living alongside thousands of strangers. Gated communities offer a compromise, with more privacy, quieter neighborhoods and lower crime rates. Residents remain close enough to benefit from the city while maintaining a level of separation from it.
That separation, however, can extend beyond neighborhood design. When higher-income families cluster into these exclusive developments, the economic benefits they generate are often pulled away from the communities that provide them. Researchers have long noted that when economic divides become tied to where people live, they can reinforce broader patterns of inequality across metropolitan areas.
In many American cities, those economic patterns overlap with long-standing racial ones. Decades of housing policy, lending practices and real estate discrimination have influenced where different groups have been able to buy homes and build wealth. As a result, neighborhoods that are divided by income are often divided by race as well, even when that is not the stated intention of these modern developments.
One way researchers measure this division is through the dissimilarity index, which represents the percentage of one group that would need to move to a different neighborhood for two groups to be evenly distributed throughout a metropolitan area. From 53 unique cities recorded in a 2019 study, Illinois rates at an average of 0.511 (or 51%) in the dissimilarity index between Black and white people. This places Illinois within the moderate range of racial segregation. For many Illinois residents, these numbers reflect what they see in everyday life.
“In the South, Blacks stayed in certain areas and so did whites. That’s the same here now in Springfield,” Springfield resident Silas Johnson said in a 2019 Governing article. Statistics appear to support this, with both the Springfield and Champaign-Urbana metro areas reportedly being more segregated than that of Charlottesville, Va., even though they all have similar populations and percentages of Black residents.
The consequences of these patterns are not limited to the present day. Researchers suggest that residential segregation can continue to influence families long after neighborhoods have been established.
“Neighborhood environments, along with all of the advantages and disadvantages that go with them, tend to be passed on from parents to children,” researcher Patrick Sharkey said in a 2023 Health Affairs article. “[Black households] have remained tied to places where poverty has become increasingly concentrated, where opportunities for economic advancement have declined.”
If viewed on its own, a single neighborhood’s development like Silverthorne may seem insignificant. However, when its pattern is repeated dozens or even hundreds of times across a region, it gradually reshapes who lives where. Neighborhoods become less connected to one another, and existing economic divisions can become more pronounced over time. As real estate continues to develop and grow, the question no longer is just, “Why are they still being built?” but what kind of communities they are helping create.
