Leisureville (30 page)

Partway through breakfast, Boob clinks his glass and stands up. “A toast,” he declares, then raises a triangle of crispy buttered rye bread and promptly eats it.

“What an idiot!” Ruth shouts in delight.

“We all have a lot more in common than it seems.”

—Fortune cookie

B
EHIND ALL THE GATED AGE-RESTRICTED LEISURE, ERSATZ ARCHITEC
tural nostalgia, and nightly hanky-panky, what I saw in The Villages is a concerted effort by a segment of older Americans to find community—something that in today's turbulent world can be hard to chance upon, particularly for the elderly. Many Villagers simply don't care if they live in an autocratic fantasyland founded on a policy of segregation; they just want a place to call home, a geritopia where they can be comfortable among their peers.

Most of the Villagers I met were blissful—thankful that such a place existed and that they had been lucky enough to find it. Retirement can be a stressful stage of life. There's no script to follow for the decades between giving up work and reaching advanced old age. Private developers such as Webb and Morse are filling that void for some people, peddling a glamorized vision of serene, financially predicable leisure living in segregated resort-like communities. It's a powerful vision that has proved to be very appealing to a sizable segment of aging Americans.

Much of life's unpleasantness is erased in such a community. You don't have to worry about boom boxes interrupting your sleep, or about tripping over a tricycle as you walk down your driveway, or about skyrocketing local property taxes. Nor do you have to worry
about potentially volatile encounters with people who are significantly different from yourself. Real life is filled with friction; these communities attempt to remove the source of some of that friction—mainly children, troublesome neighbors, and the underclass.

And residents don't have to grow old alone and afraid—a cheerless fate by any measure. Some of our cities and towns provide senior citizens with enough targeted services and built-in social networks, as well as conveniences accessible to pedestrians and by public transportation, but many don't. Nor do many communities provide seniors with a critical sense of personal safety.

And the alternative to an artificial “downtown” is often worse: what's a retiree supposed to do in the car-dependent suburbs, where so many Americans now live, often with no family nearby? Twenty years ago the average American drove 12,000 miles a year. Today that number is 21,000 miles. Not only is suburban sprawl antithetical to aging in place; it's not a lot of fun to grow old in.

By contrast, for many seniors The Villages is fun because it's a community specifically designed for them. When you drive up to The Villages' security checkpoints, you are leaving behind a culture that worships—and caters to—youth. Certain ground rules are different in The Villages. The music is gentler; it's “lights out” earlier, and social interaction is overall less belligerent and competitive. Residents can pass mostly worry-free days comfortably playing tennis and golf, and not have to fight for a court or tee time with a fast-paced younger crowd. And they never have to be lonely again, because it's so easy to find friends with similar interests.

The relative dearth of younger people and real-life concerns frees up these seniors. To younger folks, they may be old fogies, but to each other they're just peers. An older man with thinning hair, paunchy midsection, and bad knees can buy a woman a drink and not get heckled. A gray-haired woman succumbing to gravity's pull can dance the night away, swim at the pool, and be a cheerleader with pom-poms without feeling self-conscious or foolish. Best yet,
women feel safe enough to drive downtown in a golf cart at night to meet friends for drinks and live music at the town square, and then drive home alone in the dark.

What better place to park one's parents than a leisureville? It's safe; everything—even the hospital—is acessible by golf cart; and there are educational and recreational activities galore. For older family members, it can be a vacation from depression and loneliness. And for younger generations, it's a ticket away from worry. That's a beautiful thing.

But as history has shown us, utopian movements are much like balloons—they either burst or slowly deflate. People tend to rebel against rigid programming, even if that programming is centered on their own leisure. The developers I met at the housing conference in Phoenix expect such rebellion when enough boomers come of age and reject the Sun City model. And yet these developers are supremely confident that small tweaks to this “senior playpen” paradigm are all that it will take to entice another generation to buy their product.

But it's not just a matter of smaller and more intimate communities placed closer to urban areas. It's something more basic: something's rotten at the core of these leisurevilles. While it's not for me to say seniors shouldn't enjoy themselves, the reality behind age segregation is another matter. No clever euphemism can hide the fact that these communities are based on a selfish and fraudulent premise—the exclusion of children and families. And no amount of volunteerism and continuing education courses—however admirable or enriching—can compensate for the high societal price of this exclusionary lifestyle.

To be sure, our elders have special needs, which are all too often sadly ignored by our youth-centered society. Age restrictions can be appropriate (if not redundant) for institutions designed to address these needs, such as specialty care facilities or vitally needed low-income senior housing.

But housing for senior citizens is one thing; “adult” housing is another. Just what “special needs” do today's wealthy middle-aged boomers have? Not only do they represent the least marginalized generation in human history; they're not even old. Developers are merely exploiting a legal loophole.

If The Villages is any indication, the so-called special needs include, among other things, alcohol-saturated faux downtowns and an opportunity to play golf on a different course every day of the month. People in the prime of life—they are called “active adults” for a reason—don't need nursing stations and communal cafeterias so much as tennis courts, lap pools, and espresso bars. So why are we providing these “seniors” with a legally codified right to keep the rest of society at bay?

Clearly, our federal government shouldn't be in the business of endorsing discrimination against young families. The Fair Housing Act was originally intended to protect Americans from bigotry, not promote it. It's been well over two hundred years since we shamefully designated blacks as three-fifths human. Are young children—and their parents —any less than whole? Do we really want to promote communities where birth certificates are scrutinized at points of entry? Congress needs to reexamine this legislation and either eliminate age discrimination altogether or, at the very least, periodically raise the qualifying age as time and science progress. But given the strength of the retirement housing lobby, a swift legislative remedy is unlikely. I suspect that deteriorating market conditions for such housing, rather than a concern for the civil rights of families with children, will drive change.

Simply raising the qualifying age still leaves me feeling uneasy. Age-targeted housing in “naturally occurring retirement communities” seems like a far fairer compromise. Cities and small towns are a natural fit for seniors who can no longer drive. They also encourage a mingling of ages. Promoting age-targeted housing and facilities—as well as a sense of safety—in these locations strikes me as a
worthy pursuit. Such a setup worked for my grandmother; why shouldn't it work for me?

But until we establish a coherent vision for addressing the needs of our senior citizens, private developers-cum-social engineers will continue to exploit this lack of cultural consensus. As one industry consultant heartily assured me, the lid to Pandora's box is already wide open.

“Age-restricted housing is out of the embryo stage and it's here to stay,” he said. “It's the housing sector's sweet spot.” He then proudly shared with me his new term for age segregation: “Age-preferred. It just sounds nicer.”

Half a century after Ben Schleifer realized his modest vision for Youngtown, retirement has become more than a life stage—it's become big business. But do we really want to encourage private developers concerned solely with their bottom line to toy with something as critical as our nation's social fabric?

The Villages and age-segregated communities like it represent the coming together of a number of cultural trends emerging from the muddle of modern America life: geographic and financial withdrawal, “enhanced reality,” and the endless pursuit of leisure. Taken individually, each trend is niggling but points to a mounting desire for escapism. When the trends are lumped together, the result is worrisome.

A society that embraces secession and escapism is clearly not a society addressing its problems and planning for a better future. Nor is it a society concerned with sustainability. Sun City and its guiding philosophy are about as disposable as its aging housing stock and the strip malls that surround it. Children represent the future, and a community without them is as doomed as the celibate Shakers.

The Villages is probably not far behind—perhaps a few decades. The architecture may present a historical facade, but nothing
there is built to last—not even age segregation, which may be abandoned one day out of desperation, in a last-ditch attempt to add vitality and population long after the Morse family has disbanded its advertising and sales departments and left the scene with its fortune. The Villages' form of government guarantees that amenities fees will be collected, but it doesn't guarantee that there will be people to collect them from. I suspect it won't be such an attractive destination once the homes start to deteriorate and the vast majority of residents are shuffling by on walkers. At some point even Mr. Midnight will have to admit defeat as nature takes its course.

The people living in age-segregated housing are still a small minority of Americans, but that's unlikely to remain the case. In 2004, ground was broken for 100 age-segregated developments; ten years earlier, that figure was fifteen. There is no firm number for how many of these communities exist, but industry experts estimate that there are more than 1,500, of various sizes, either completed or under construction.

What will happen when there are thousands of these segregated communities across America, housing millions of aging secessionists? What happens to the rest of us—those left behind who don't qualify in terms of age or finances? For that matter, what happens to American society in general, and our municipalities in particular, when a critical mass of mature Americans form self-contained private cities and disengage from the general population? Experience shows that these privately owned quasi-governmental entities often resent paying local taxes for schools as well as for municipal services that they prefer to perform for themselves. And they are potent voting blocs that can swing elections addressing these issues.

Our national mythology extols the concept of the melting pot. We are supposed to work together and strive to assimilate into a commonality called citizenship. Our national motto, displayed on the back of the dollar bill, is E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. But as
an increasing number of Americans secede into niche communities, we risk further loosening the ties that bind our nation together.

The lesson of Sun City couldn't be any clearer: segregation reduces social contact and leads to a willful forgetting of commonalities, which can further deteriorate into generational resentment. Many Sun Citians have lost sight of the fact that they live within a larger age-integrated community that also has special needs, such as schools.

For me, Sun City's de-annexation from the local school district was the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Two decades later, Villagers living in the Lake County portion of their gated community voted down an additional halfpenny sales tax that would have helped fund local schools. The measure failed countywide by a two-to-one margin, but Villagers defeated it by nearly four to one. Three years later, a similar measure easily passed countywide, but Villagers still voted against it in alarming numbers.

Two of the biggest special-interest groups vying for funds in Florida state government are retirees and young families. Evidently, the seniors are more than holding their own: Florida law stipulates that retirement communities are exempt from paying new-housing impact fees designed to help fund school districts. Because this burden is spread across fewer taxpayers, families with children must now pay higher impact fees to make up the difference.

Seniors emphatically insist that they needn't contribute, because their housing has no direct impact on school systems. But as we have seen, these senior communities need employees, and those employees have children who need schooling. Besides, whatever happened to the idea—perhaps naive—that we're all in this together, that we have an obligation to the generations that come after us? What if everybody drops out after getting his or her own needs met? When do things start to fall apart?

Retirees move for a variety of reasons including weather, family, and finances. Many seek a lower cost of living—a prudent consideration
for those on fixed incomes and limited resources, particularly in an age of seemingly skyrocketing municipal expenses. More often than not, local taxes are a factor; in effect, these seniors go “tax shopping.”

Many are picking communities on the basis of how little they can get away with when it comes to paying into local coffers. These retirees are abandoning the communities that once paid for and nurtured them and their families; few have much interest in investing in their new community and its children. Otherwise, they wouldn't be shopping around for lower taxes.