WEST CHESTER TWP. — Guardhouses and wrought iron gates will soon be in place at Wetherington, an upscale development that is joining a growing national trend to gated communities.

Guardhouse and gates are under construction at Wetherington. (Michael Snyder photos) | ZOOM |

        Soon, the approximately 1,000 Wetherington residents will enter and exit their golf-and-country-club neighborhood with special key cards that will open the gates just for them.

        That means as many as 11,000 motorists will be turned away from a favorite daily shortcut through one of Greater Cincinnati's more affluent developments.

        Some neighbors and local workers grumble that the upper crust is bent on keeping out the common folk. Some land use and development experts decry the proliferation of gated communities nationally as divisive and even anti-democratic.

        But residents of the Wetherington community say they simply have tired of an endless stream of vehicles using their neighborhood as a shortcut between Tylersville and Cincinnati—Dayton roads.

        “To be honest, some (people) have painted us as a posh, affluent community — (a show of) the class system — and have come out against us, while what we really want to do is simply curtail traffic. That is our main concern. It is too easy to cut through ... and there are too many cars going through,” says Kevin Plank, a lawyer and president of the Wetherington Homeowners' Association.

        It also is a safety issue for children and other pedestrians, he says. “We are not trying to hurt others.”

        The cut-through is attractive because it provides access to and from a bustling Tylersville Road commercial strip on either side of Interstate 75. The shortcut bypasses frequent bottlenecks at and near Cincinnati-Dayton and Tylersville roads.

        To stop the flow, gates are being erected at Wetherington entrances — Wetherington Boulevard off Tylersville Road and Eagle's Wing Drive off Cincinnati-Dayton Road.

Tylersville Road is at top; Wetherington Drive runs left to right; Legendary Drive is at bottom. | ZOOM |

        The move will create what Butler County officials believe is the first single-family residential community to be gated in Greater Cincinnati.While there are a few gated condominium developments and many gated private estates in Southwest Ohio, Wetherington will become the area's largest gated community with 384 homes and condominiums.

        West Chester Township Administrator David Gully says the Wetherington streets used in the shortcut carry more traffic than sections of nearby Tylersville Road. He does not object to the gates.

        The gate at Wetherington Boulevard will be open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. The gate at Eagle's Wing Drive will remain closed and will only open for residents who will be issued cards that will open the gate when inserted into a card reader. The Wetherington Boulevard gate will be closed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and can be opened by residents with cards. Emergency vehicles will have special devices for access.

WETHERINGTON FACTS

• Size: 305 homes, 79 condominiums   • Unit sizes: condominiums, 2,200 to 3,500 square feet; homes, 3,000 to 10,000 square feet   • Cost of homes: $350,000 to $1.2 million   • Population: Est. 1,000   • Developer: Great Expectations; Homerama site, 1992   • Amenities: Golf, pool, tennis, clubhouse, 3.5 mile hike/bike trail which extends outside the residential community. The pool, tennis and golf course are owned by the country club. Seventy percent of homeowners belong to the club. Club memberships are open to outsiders.     Sources: Wetherington Homeownersą Association; Enquirer research

        Mr. Plank emphasizes that the community will remain open to all pedestrians including the many outsiders who frequently use the 3.5-mile hike and bike trail that extends through and outside the residential enclave. Children from outside the community still will be able to walk or ride bikes to friends' houses.

        “There will be no fences or walls (surrounding the development). We don't plan to put any guards in the guardhouses ... not even for special events,” Mr. Plank says.

        Judge Stephen Powell, who sits on the Ohio 12th District Court of Appeals in Middletown, lives in a Wetherington condominium.

        The judge says he has seen at least two occasions when youngsters came close to being struck by cars using the shortcut.

        “One of the close calls I saw was a mom with a stroller with a baby in it who had a toddler behind her in a red wagon. She had towels and pool stuff ... and was walking across the crosswalk to the pool.” The driver of the car that nearly struck the woman and her children "kept honking at her to get out of the way,'” says the judge, who is among prominent Wetherington residents who also include U.S. Rep. John Boehner, R-West Chester, and developer Carlos Todd, former county GOP chairman.

        Nationwide, gated communities are on the rise.

        Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder in their book — Fortress America — Gated Communities in the United States — estimate there were more than 20,000 gated communities in the United States in 1997, up from about 2,500 in the early 1970s. After beginning mainly in the Sun Belt with retirement communities and enclaves for the very wealthy, the trend is spreading across the nation. They estimated that more than 8 million Americans lived in gated communities by 1997.

        While the reasons for gating and walling off a development — traffic, crime, lifestyle and prestige — may be valid, the exclusionary nature goes against “the very fabric of a free and democratic society by taking control of once public space and privatizing it,” says Dr. Blakely, former dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California. His book was published by the Brookings Institution and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

        The book says gates “also divide neighborhood from neighborhood, encourage privatization and send signals of exclusion ... The gating trend ignores the very elements of communities that make them places that will endure.”

        While Dr. Blakely is generally critical of gated communities with walls and fences, he says the steps taken by Wetherington sound reasonable.

        “It is still pedestrian-friendly, and I laud that,” he says.

        The Wetherington gates “are really necessary to keep the neighborhood intact and it is a defensible space strategy far superior to walls and fences, because it is creating a pedestrian-friendly and neighborhood-friendly environment. Walls are a very distancing environment.”

        A major local criticism of Wetherington's decision is that the gates will serve only to move the traffic problem west into the Cobbler's Creek development, where the largely middle- to upper-middle class residents cannot afford to gate. Gating requires the community to maintain its streets, as Wetherington homeowners will. Public residential streets in West Chester are maintained by the township.

        Mr. Plank says Wetherington homeowners will pay $43 a month for street maintainance. They are sharing in the one-time $300,000 cost of gate installation.

        Gary Renner, president of the Cobbler's Creek Homeowners' Association, objects.

        “I do not think we should be putting up boundaries between our neighborhoods. We are all West Chesterites and putting up those boundaries is not good for our community as a whole. We shop at the same stores, go to the same churches and do everything else as a community except now being able to drive through one neighborhood's streets.

        “Their reason is for traffic. I understand that,” Mr. Renner says. “But, now we are going to have an issue of traffic safety passed on to our streets, to our families and to our neighborhood. They will be gated and protected, and we can't afford to do that.”

        Dr. Blakely says Mr. Renner makes a valid point and it should be the job of West Chester Township government “to work with all surrounding communities to divert traffic off residential streets to the major arteries designed to carry it.”

        Redesigning streets with roundabouts or islands in the center of intersections, making street pavement zig zag, adding speed humps or pinch points are options, he says.

        Mr. Gully says the township is willing to work with Cobbler's Creek if a significant amount of traffic diverts to those streets. “We would start with speed enforcement,” he says.

        But, Mr. Gully says, improvements to the intersections of Tylersville and Cincinnati-Dayton roads, widening Cincinnati-Dayton Road from Tylersville Road to I-75, the success of the Michael A. Fox Highway (Ohio 129) in taking traffic off of other east/west arteries should all help to move traffic to the main roads and away from Cobbler's Creek. A narrow street design there requires several turns to make a cut through, with no traffic signal at either end.

        People who use the Wetherington shortcut had different opinions about the gates.

        “It will not be a good thing,” says Donna Doty, 42, of Middletown, who works in a store near Wetherington. “It's going to add at least 10 minutes in travel time because you don't have as much traffic (going through Wetherington). So long as people do the speed limit, ... I do not see why they should cut it off. Why are they going to inconvenience the business patrons here who made it possible for them to buy those big houses back there?”

        Kelle Fecher, 35, of Liberty Township said: “It's going to be an inconvenience, but I understand why (Wetherington) wants it done. They want it to be more private and to stay that way. People fly through there, and they shouldn't. It will affect Cobbler's Creek,” she said.

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