I've never been much of a fan of gated subdivisions. With apologies to all those who choose to lived in fenced subdivisions, I just think there's something snobby about them. I understand all the various reasons for living in them—safety, better upkeep, friendlier neighbors, yada yada yada—but Five Man Electrical Band said it best for me:

I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face, man you're some kinda sinner

"Signs," by Five Man Electrical Band, 1970, peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart

The #1 reason that people tell me they live in gated subdivisions is safety. Interestingly, half of the time when I visit a gated subdivision, the security guard is not present, the shack is closed, or the gates are left open during the day. Well, if I were going to rob a place, it's going to be during the day when everyone is working and no one is home.

I'm going to presume that the gated subdivision I visited recently wasn't concerned about safety. Figure 1 shows the gate. Notice the large gap at the bottom of the gate, a cool 9 inches as shown in Figure 2.

  Figure 1. Subdivision gate showing bottom gap

  Figure 2. Nine-inch gap at bottom of gate

The house was a vacant foreclosure, and notwithstanding the instructions in the MLS listing, the gate code did not work. Someone, I won't say who, simply crawled under the gate, walked over to the exit gate, broke the beam to open the gate, and we went "in through the out door" (Led Zeppelin, 1979).

On our way out, we had a discussion over which would be easier, crawling under the gate, or climbing over the fence shown in Figure 3.

   Figure 3. Subdivision fence.

The fence was six feet high, three feet of iron fencing on top of a planter wall that was also three feet high. One simply stepped up on the planter wall, stepped over the fence to the other side and down to the ground. With apologies to GEICO, "So easy a cave man could do it."

Which would you do? Crawl under the gate or over the fence? LOL