Private Property Definition

[Quiet]

What if the entire neighborhood is private/gated, but the individual lots within are not? That is, would your your front yard, if not gated but contained behind a gated community, be considered a "public area"? In some private communities I've even seen homes that have backyards that are not entirely fenced in private communities, what happens then?

I believe CA case laws [People v Overturf (1976)] addressed that within the open areas of a gated community that anyone within the community can access or grant access to is still considered a public space.
^The events of that case took place in the parking lot of a gated apartment complex/community and the Courts upheld that it was a public space.

[RickD427]

Always a can of worms. For example, my former house in Concord was within 1000 feet of my children's school; the 'private property' exemption clearly covered my guns inside my house, but to legally take my guns to my car in my driveway, they needed to be cased.

As to a shopping center, the lawsuit Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980) should be illustrative - public access was affirmed.

But that's just the way to guess; as always, the exact facts of the situation control, and without the full set of facts and arguments, we cannot know for sure.

Librarian,

There is a lot of caution called for with regard to the Pruneyard v Robins case. I had to deal with it quite a bit during my working days writing agency policy, and later as a consultant to a law firm handling public access issues.

Pruneyard created broad access rights to privately owned property. But the key reason that the Pruneyard case created such broad access was rooted in the architectural design of the Pruneyard shopping center. The Pruneyard center had the traditional storefront businesses, but also had incorporated open public areas that the court found were the functional equivalents of the "Town Square." The "Town Square" functions of Pruneyard were largely responsible for the court treating it as a public area.

We would often have to dispatch deputies to shopping centers where there were unwanted solicitors, and most of the solicitors would throw down the Pruneyard case as supporting their right to solicit. If the location shared the "Town Hall" features of Pruneyard, then they were on pretty solid ground. But very few shopping centers in L.A. County were so designed, and no "Strip Malls" that I ever saw were so designed.

Please see the cases of Trader Joe's v Progressive Campaigns and Golden Gateway Center v G.G. Tenant's Association for examples of where the courts ruled in the opposite fashion for properties that lacked the "Town Square" architecture of Pruneyard.

[Jimi Jah]

You don't really own property in the USA. You lease it, through property taxes.