KEY POINTS:
Another bungalow has just been wrenched off the section it has squatted on for 80-odd years.
The diggers have moved in and scraped away ancient fruit trees and rumpty sheds ready for a great grey slab of concrete and glass.
Around this new house, which will probably win
acclaim in architectural circles but look disturbingly like a grandiose 1970s public toilet, a wall will inevitably be built. An impenetrable wall, with push-button entry and driveway gates that trundle open by remote control.
The message will be unambiguous: stay out.
This prediction can be made with some certainty because for the last couple of years such walls have been regularly going up near here.
And it seems the more expensive the real estate, the more barricades you'll find, like ugly punctuation marks among the lines of scruffy hedges and low fences neighbours have talked over for generations.
What I can't fathom is just what the siege-mentality homeowners are trying to wall out. Presumably they've moved into a neighbourhood because they like it. Why then build a fortress to separate them from it?
I haven't noticed marauding gangs in Auckland's western bays - Herne Bay, Westmere, Pt Chev - although the taggers are having a sublime time with so many fresh canvases to choose from.
"No thanks" usually sends salespeople away and God-peddlers can easily be dispatched with, "Sorry. I'm Catholic/Hindu/Muslim/Methodist/Satan worshipper."
Plunket collectors are never a problem. They are suitably grateful for a few dollars and appear to have babies, not rocket-launchers in their pushchairs.
Burglars? Well once in, they're going to have a field day behind those walls. And any household with a Pentagon-grade security gate is going to have an alarm system anyway.
A psychiatrist I know says fortress walls - and gated communities - are more about the fear inside a person than a real threat from outside.
The "it" he calls it, and once someone adopts a siege mentality it's not long before the breeze-block fortifications go up over the road, down the road and around the corner.
However, the psychiatrist has a cunning plan. Lock 'em all in, he reckons. Think 'night forays with large padlocks'.
This, will, he says, make society a better place because those unwilling to participate - who are, in effect, promoting a breakdown of the community - can be isolated and quietly forgotten.
In our road, all that separates homes from the mean streets of Auckland's central suburbs are rose bushes, trees, not-too-tall wooden fences and, in the case of our house, a waist-high chain-link fence with a broken gate.
Our secret weapon in the war against whatever is out to get us? It's just us. The neighbours know each other and, in the main, we look out for each other.
Structurally suspect wire fences divide our property from next door on either side. And the families across the road have an uninterrupted view into our front yard from their decks, where they sit sipping coffee, or wine in the evenings.
If you happen to walk by, or be out front gardening, it's an excellent chance to say gidday, or discuss the rugby league results.
No need for walls; no one here is frightened or intent on surgical disconnection from the people they live among.
It may be that ours is a remarkable neighbourhood - I've never lived anywhere quite like it - but people here have a willingness to make it that way. Some have worked hard to make it that way.
Every December, two couples who live up the road organise a street party to herald the switching on of Christmas lights. The barbecues are fired up, kids scoot around and about 9pm we all go on a street walk for an electric assault on our senses.
You can't help but talk to the new people who've moved into number 14 or the mother you've seen in the playground looking for lost sneakers or coaching netball when, together, you're faced with a giant, blow-up snowdome.
Our walking school bus has also built a sense of community. I know parents and kids from other streets I'd probably never have met if we'd all dropped off our kids or picked them up in nuclear family isolation.
In his August Canvas article about gated communities, Alan Perrott made the point that when he was growing up fences were for keeping kids, footballs and dogs in. Now, of course, they're used to keep people out, and this societal shift is chilling.
It's exemplified by the householder with his walls, push-button entry and automatic gates that swish open to occasionally release small children on mini-motorbikes, like pint-sized invaders dispatched from a fortified castle.
The only other time I've seen the gates open is to let in and out an SUV with a sneering grille.
Stands to reason, really. Fortress at home; fortress on the road. If they're out to get you in your house, they're sure as hell out to get you in your car.
It's not the way I want to live; and given that these neighbourhoods are not crime-infested no-go zones, it shouldn't be the way others want to live either. But that's free choice for you.
Whenever I look at the peeling paint on my 1920s bungalow and dream of a low-maintenance house, I remind myself of my Fort Knox-free patch and dismiss the idea of moving.
And that will change only if the "it" brigade moves in.
* Fiona Barber is a Herald subeditor.
