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Sorry, This Is A Wooden-Tools-Only Zone....

Here's a collection of some of the quirkiest rules and prohibitions from gated communities around the country:

-- spouses below a certain age are not allowed to stay overnight

-- pets above a certain weight were forbidden

-- children are not allowed to live there

-- a grandmother was fined for kissing a friend goodbye at her front door

-- a family was prohibited from using their back door because they had to pass an unsightly path

-- children were forbidden to play with metal tools, because only wooden ones were allowed

-- residents were fined for displaying election signs (overruled by the Supreme Court).”

The no-children rule seems reasonable for retirement communities, but I'm not sure what the ban on obese pets or kissing grandmothers is all about. These examples all come from this paper by sociologist Peer Smets on the rise of gated communities in the United States (he's not fond of the trend), which comes via Kaid Benfield.

(Flickr photo credit: purly_qs)