SUN CITY, SUN CITY WEST, AND THE NEWER SUN CITY GRAND ALL border a major thoroughfare called Grand Avenue, which connects the distant town of Wickenburg on one end with downtown Phoenix on the other. The Sun Cities sit just outside Phoenix, in an area called the West Valley.
Although Phoenix now dwarfs the little community of Wickenburg, this was not always the case. In 1863, a lone German miner, Henry Wickenburg, discovered gold in the far western valley. Several years later and some fifty miles to the southeast, another adventurer decided to revive a prehistoric canal system and cultivate produce for the rapidly growing population of Wickenburg. He transported the food using a wagon trail that connected the two settlements. At the time, it was called Vulture Road.
It is said that during the restoration of the ancient irrigation system, an Englishman looked at the parched ruins of the Hohokum tribe and said, “A city will rise phoenixlike, new and more beautiful, from these ashes of the past.” He was right about Phoenix, but as far as Del Webb was concerned, the Englishman might as well have been talking about Sun City.
By the time Sun City came onto the scene in the early 1960s, the surrounding area with its bountiful aquifer was mainly used for growing long-fiber cotton named after the Pima tribe. But when the price of cotton plummeted after World War II, landowners began courting developers, like Webb, who bought up thousands of acres. Webb cut swooping curves into the starkly angular fields, and steered the West Valley’s flagging economy from cotton balls to golf balls.
Although Sun City’s first residents complained of cricket infestations, tumbleweed, and valley fever (a lung infection caused by windblown spores), the community’s early years were nevertheless brimming with promise. Webb developed the community in phases, but the homes sold so briskly that it was as if the construction never stopped. Every year or two residents saw the completion of yet another recreation center, golf course, or shopping area, in addition to hundreds and hundreds of homes. It was an optimistic era fueled by Webb’s seemingly continuous investment.
Sun City’s very first recreation center, called the Oakmont, has undergone some minor renovations over the years, but for the most part it looks much as it did when it opened in 1960. It’s decidedly small by today’s standards. There’s one large room that can be used for small theatrical presentations, dances, and other gatherings. Down the hall is a workout room with equipment that looks about twenty years old. On the day I visit, a few men in trousers and collared shirts walk on treadmills or slowly pedal stationary bicycles, as “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones fills the room.
In the other direction is a room for the jewelry club, which costs just four dollars a year to join. One door down is the pottery club. I find several women giggling as they trade gossip and paint molded ceramic kittens, puppies, and other tchotchkes. One woman light-heartedly pokes fun at my book project: “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I left my cane at home!” The others all share in the laugh.
Outside there is a nine-hole golf course, and a swimming pool with seniors tanning on lounge chairs. There is no kiddie pool, nor is there a playground; Sun City does not have a dedicated area for children to play. A sign on the pool lists the hours during which children ages four to sixteen may use the pool: eleven AM to one PM.
Next door to the Oakmont are Sun City’s first five model ranch homes, each measuring a mere 860 square feet, which 100,000 people visited that first weekend in 1960. The recreation center, golf course, and nearby shopping center were built before these homes were completed, to counter the image of other, less scrupulous developers who promise future amenities, but don’t deliver. This clustered configuration—neighborhood, recreation, retail—is the basic pattern one still finds in many of today’s larger age-segregated and planned communities.
One of the five homes—the first to be sold—has been converted into a museum housing the Sun City historical society. With its wavy gingerbread touches, Formica countertops, vinyl flooring, and pink tiled bathroom, the home is a perfect period piece. The director of the society is an intellectually active but physically frail woman, Jane Freeman. Curious about The Villages’ future, I decided to take a peek into Sun City’s past by visiting with her and spending some time in Arizona’s West Valley—the birthplace of age segregation.
Freeman moved to Sun City from New York in 1970 with her husband, now deceased. “I raised my children and I didn’t want to raise anyone else’s,” Jane tells me. “A lot of grandparents become dumping grounds for kids. So I came here. My brother used to ask me why I don’t move back to be with the family. I’d ask him why he doesn’t move out to Sun City.”
Like many Sun Citians, Jane takes Webb’s retirement revolution very seriously. She sees it as her duty to chronicle and preserve this significant piece of America’s history. “People say that because we weren’t born here and didn’t go to school here, we don’t have roots here,” she says. “They say we don’t have any history, that our history is back home. But we do have a history here.”
To prove her point, Jane hands me a tattered red paperback. It’s a surviving copy of Sun City’s first narrative history, which she wrote decades ago in celebration of the community’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The dedication reads: “To Delbert Eugene Webb, a man of genius, who, together with men of competence, courage, and foresight, explored and conquered untried frontiers that opened new vistas for thousands of retired Americans. And to those Sun City Pioneers who dared to leave old ties to establish new homes, new friends, and a whole new life of active retirement.”
In many ways, the early settlers in Sun City were pioneers: they left behind all they knew for an untested and uncertain but hopeful future. Webb may have created a city out of dirt, but it was these pioneers who created a community from scratch.
Although he personally had little to do with the day-to-day planning and development of the retirement community, a reverence for Del Webb, the man, permeates Sun City. There is an eight-foot bronze statue of him in the exterior courtyard of one of the main recreation centers. He is shown with one arm extended toward the future; his other arm holds blueprints.
The interior of the residence housing the historical society is filled with photographs from an optimistic and somewhat glamorous era (we’re talking about a retirement community after all, not Camelot). The photos show residents dressed to the nines and posing in front of their new homes; listening to Rosemary Clooney and Lawrence Welk perform at the outdoor Sun Bowl; and gazing admiringly at a visiting Bob Hope on a golf course wearing a tam-o’-shanter and sharing a joke with Del Webb.
What the photos don’t show is the mounting enmity and relentless quarreling between residents of the growing community, which often stemmed from Sun City’s ambiguous governing structure. To seek clarification and redress, residents often found themselves organizing angry petition drives and filing incessant lawsuits to tackle such mundane matters of governance as garbage collection, regulations regarding dog walking, and restrictions on guests.
Webb was winging it when he built Sun City, and governance was something of an afterthought. His original vision didn’t adequately address how residents would establish rules and resolve conflicts. He was more interested in providing amenities and selling homes. Webb made this clear when he called the second recreation center “Town Hall.” As he stated in an early company memo: “We will build houses but we will not become involved with the population in any way, shape, or manner.” But such a policy proved untenable as early attempts at self-governance continually devolved into acrimony. The company was forced to step back in and remain involved for a lengthy transition process, which has since become a proud company hallmark.
Webb soon set up a homeowners association and a nonprofit corporation to run the recreation centers in perpetuity. Neither of these organizations proved to be particularly popular, but the alternative—incorporation—was repeatedly dismissed by Sun Citians as too costly and unnecessary, even though the Webb Company recommended it. Sun City remains governed by these quasi-governmental entities with limited powers, as well as numerous very vocal special interest groups.
Age segregation became an issue early on. Webb’s company attracted a handyman to the community, but to Webb’s chagrin, residents evicted him because he had young children. Residents also tried to kick out the community’s only doctor, an older man with a young son, but once they realized how difficult it was to recruit another doctor to the isolated desert community, they soon relented.
But what concerned residents most was the inescapable feeling that as the development reached completion, their progenitor and protector was slowly abandoning the community altogether. And they were right: Webb had made his money and he was now detaching himself and his company from Sun City. First to go were the shopping centers; then the restaurants, the office buildings, and the professional plazas; and finally any vacant land—all sold to other developers for a quick infusion of cash. The company’s attention had already drifted to a dusty tract of land a few miles down the road named Lizard Acres, future home of Sun City West.
Sun Citians had to threaten and cajole Webb’s company to build a final promised recreation center. The center was eventually built, but it has the cramped appearance of something designed on the cheap. A final shopping plaza was never built, because Webb couldn’t attract any tenants. In Sun City West, plans for a centrally located shopping center were scrapped for similar reasons, and replaced with additional housing. Residents had little say in the matter.
Such are the vagaries of the marketplace when one developer owns an entire community: pieces of it can be sold off and projects abandoned at will. As with any developer, Webb’s fortunes ebbed and flowed with fluctuations in interest rates and the natural cycles of construction booms and busts. Sometimes a community project simply lost its financial attractiveness, and cutting bait was considered a prudent business decision. Early incursions into Florida and California fared badly and were soon deemed nonperforming assets. They were sold off, leaving residents stuck with the highest bidder. To hedge risk and save on costs, projects were designed smaller and smaller.
As any honest developer will tell you, the building of these “communities” is a business and nothing more. Pursuit of profit is what guides decisions. Nearly three decades after Webb’s death in 1974, Pulte Homes, Inc., one of the nation’s largest home builders, bought Webb’s debt-laden company. Corporations are even less sentimental than individual developers. Their purpose is to make money for shareholders, and if a development is not sufficiently profitable, or in line with expectations, it is usually in their best interests to sell and move on.
Five decades after its founding, Sun City is fraying around the edges. No longer a darling of the press, it feels anachronistic and dated. It’s nearly forgotten as a cultural icon, except perhaps as the butt of an old joke. Many younger Americans have never even heard of the place. Like the once luxuriously green medians that have been left to yellow as a cost-saving measure, optimism has been replaced with financial retrenchment. Most of Sun City’s residents are on fixed incomes, and because of that, they don’t like to spend any more money than they have to. In communities with a traditional mixture of ages, these sorts of financial concerns are brought up in town meetings and elections—and then often ignored by younger voters who are usually more eager (and able) to reinvest in their community’s schools and municipal infrastructure.
But Sun City is anything but a mixed community. According to recent census data, the median age in Sun City is seventy-five. Sun City is also about 98.5 percent white, and 0.5 percent black. What happens when you create a community consisting almost completely of senior citizens living on fixed incomes? A number of things, and few of them pleasant.
In order for a community to survive, let alone flourish, it must continually reinvest in its future, with current generations investing in future generations just as past generations invested in them—a generational giveback of sorts. My wife is German, and every time we travel to Germany, I am always impressed by how the Germans build public structures to last for generations. They don’t skimp on materials; nearly everything is built with stone or a correspondingly high-quality and long-lasting material. Why build something that will stand for hundreds of years, well beyond our lifetime? A society that builds with stone clearly cares about its future generations.
By comparison, my town is repaving many of its sidewalks for the first time in decades. Because of mediocre building materials and a lack of craftsmanship, these sidewalks probably won’t last fifty years before they rapidly deteriorate. Today’s taxpayers are saving money by using cheaper materials and less craftsmanship, but tomorrow’s taxpayers will eventually have to foot the bill.
Sun City is a place where seniors choose to live out their final years. They don’t want to plan for ten or twenty years down the road. They might not be around then, and whose future would they be investing in, anyway—the next round of retirees?
For the most part, people who retire to age-segregated communities have already jettisoned their obligations to the community they left behind—the one that invested in their future many years earlier. The residents of Sun City have also made it abundantly clear that they don’t much care about the new communities in their midst, either.
When it first opened, Sun City happened to be within the boundaries of the Peoria school district. This inconvenient fact let to the area’s first generational war. Over the course of twelve years beginning in 1962, the residents of Sun City defeated seventeen school bond measures. School programs were cut and children were forced to attend school in staggered sessions. At its wit’s end, Peoria finally acceded to (some say embraced) Sun City’s demands, and de-annexed the retirement community from the school district. After another prolonged battle, Sun City West was also de-annexed from its school district. With these communities no longer a part of any school district, the average retiree’s tax rate is less than half of what surrounding families pay.
Some Sun Citians are ashamed of this history and the long shadow it cast on their community, but others point out that residents still contribute just like everyone else in the form of state taxes, which help fund school districts throughout Arizona. In reality, they don’t have any choice.
A community that does not reinvest in itself is in real danger of petrifying into a geriatric ghetto, or—worse yet—a necropolis. Further complicating matters for communities like Sun City is that they are monocultures, the societal equivalent of an economy dependent on a single cash crop, such as coffee, bananas, or rice. The problem with such economies is that they have no diversification. If demand for the commodity suddenly drops, the local economy can crater. Real economies—those not owned by a single corporation as in a banana republic—demand diversity. And so do communities. What happens if demand for Sun City’s single crop—decades-old leisure housing for retirees—falls precipitously? Similarly, what happens in twenty or thirty years when the baby boomers begin to die off in significant numbers and there is a glut of age-segregated communities?
A meandering drive around Sun City gives one the feeling that such a fate has already arrived. Many of homes are petite and dated by today’s standards. Today’s retirees want more: an expansive kitchen, Jacuzzi tubs, home office with broadband access, and all the latest appliances. By contrast, when the first homes in Sun City were built, air-conditioning was optional.
And that’s just the homes. Sun City’s recreational centers—its historical selling point—are badly in need of updating. Whereas yesterday’s retirees were content with a small dipping pool, a few bowling lanes, and a few shuffleboard courts, today’s prospective residents are looking for lap pools, yoga rooms, full-service spas, and professional kitchens for cooking classes. Even a rock-climbing wall is not out of the question.
Local businesses have already had a taste of the future, as evidenced by the slowly withering strip malls at Sun City’s commercial core. From the look of it, the top tier of today’s aggressive retailers has already concluded that this city’s sun is setting. Not only do I see a number of vacant businesses and discount retailers in the community’s badly aging retail core; it’s what I don’t see that is more troubling—businesses designed with baby boomers in mind, such as upscale coffee shops, organic groceries, and trendy restaurants. Investors are clearly more interested in chasing younger, more free-spending consumers housed in leapfrogging subdivisions just beyond Sun City’s periphery.
To get a better idea of how Sun City is addressing these critical issues, I meet with Doug Kelsey, president of the Sun City Home Owners Association (HOA). Located in a small building beside a strip mall, the HOA has a staff of seven, four of whom are part-time.
Kelsey, who describes himself as the closest thing Sun City has to a mayor, greets me enthusiastically and invites me into his office. He was born in the Midwest, is the father of three grown children, and has six grandchildren. He wears a cardigan and white slacks; has a mustache; and has a thinning head of hair carefully combed flat. Framed copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights hang on the wall.
“Used to be we were the big dog out here,” he tells me. “We could get our way on a lot of issues. But the towns have grown around us and they’ve surpassed us in sheer numbers. They’ve taken away our clout.”
Adding to Sun City’s woes, Kelsey tells me, is the community’s declining volunteerism. Sun City calls itself the “city of volunteers,” and since its inception, the community has relied heavily on its residents to perform many basic municipal functions. When I imagine a city of volunteers, I picture large numbers of citizens performing charitable work, perhaps for the needy. In Sun City, the motto has a slightly different meaning.
Although a good number of residents volunteer in local schools and hospitals, the majority volunteer inside their own community because the free labor saves residents tax dollars. The Sheriff’s Posse, a neighborhood watch of sorts; and the much-celebrated PRIDES, who landscape medians and keep other public areas tidy, in effect serve as a police and public works department.
“Volunteerism is the backbone of our community,” Kelsey says. “Without volunteers we have a big problem—and volunteerism is dropping. Boomers aren’t as interested in it. They’d rather write a check.”
Also keeping taxes artificially low is Sun City’s dependence on Maricopa County for just about everything it needs—social services, planning and zoning, health inspections, and more. Some might argue that county government is not designed to handle the everyday issues of a de facto municipality with tens of thousands of residents. As Maricopa County continues to grow at a staggering rate (it is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country), Sun City must compete for the county’s attention. But Kelsey scoffs at talk of incorporation, calling it “just another layer of bureaucracy.” He tells me that this lack of bureaucracy helps keep Sun City “vibrant.”
Although Kelsey compares the HOA to a city council, it is by its very nature a reactive organization with very limited powers (let alone voluntary membership), and thus seemingly ill suited to charting the community’s future. When I ask him what sort of long-range plans the HOA has for Sun City, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “If something breaks, we fix it.”
“What if volunteerism continues to decline?” I ask. “Then what?”
“Damned if I know,” Kelsey responds.
According to Kelsey, the HOA’s most important task is protecting residents from neighbors who violate neighborhood deed restrictions, such as by keeping messy yards and using nonconforming paint colors. The organization’s four part-time employees spend their time investigating these complaints, the biggest of which is the discovery of underage children. And it is here that Kelsey chooses to focus much of his energy.
“It happens all the time,” Kelsey says of contraband children. “And it’s a public relations nightmare no matter how we handle it. Why? Because to a lot of people it just feels intrinsically wrong on a gut level to exclude children. But Sun City is not supposed to be a stopover place for kids in hard times. That’s a violation of the rules. Everyone who moves here has read the rules and signed them. If their circumstances change—well, I’m sorry, but it’s time to move on. Sun City is about lifestyle—and children are not included.”
“Why live without kids?” I ask.
“Why not?” Kelsey responds. “Kids can be rude and noisy. What’s so wrong with being in your sixties, having raised your kids, worked hard, and now wanting to live without children? It’s a lifestyle choice. So what if we live in a bubble? It’s our right. We pay our taxes. We vote.” He points to the Bill of Rights on the wall. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says you have to have kids living next to you. I live like this because I can.
“Look, I understand diversity. But I don’t want it shoved down my throat. Why can’t someone be allowed to be comfortable when being comfortable to them means living in, say, an all-white community? Don’t get me wrong; I’m a people person. I have friends of all persuasions. But I don’t want to live in a community with children. I love my grandkids. I just don’t want to be forced to live with them. People should be free to pick who they want for neighbors. Things weren’t so great in this country when we were all forced to live together. And if there’s something wrong with the way we live, then how come they’re building Sun Cities all over the country?
“You know, people say we’re selfish. Well, let me tell you something. Down the street there’s a medical research facility. They have one of the largest brain tissue banks in the world. One day they’ll discover a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Where do you think they get all that brain tissue? Sun City residents donated it. That’s right—we volunteer our bodies and our brains. If you die, they can have your brain out within two hours. Ask those people what they think of us.”
Over lunch, I meet a woman from Sun City Grand whose husband teaches in a neighboring school district. She says the children are wild, disrespectful, and impossible to discipline.
I ask her if she thinks the area’s age segregation has anything to do with it. Surely the children sense Sun City’s antipathy toward them. Could it be that, by their actions, Sun Citians are exacerbating the generational divide, encouraging exactly the sort of behavior they fear?
“I don’t know,” she tells me bluntly. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I can tell you that things were different at my husband’s last job. He taught on an Indian reservation. It was a traditional community, with elders. If a child misbehaved, my husband only needed to report the child to his elders and the trouble stopped.
“Come to think of it, my grandmother lived with me when I was growing up and she taught me a lot. But things were different back then. Everything revolved around family. People are so scattered now. Even cousins are like a foreign concept. The kids here don’t really have elders, and their parents usually work long hours.”
After lunch, I drive to the two-story doughnut-shape Lakeview Recreation Center, Sun City’s most iconic and kitschy building, for an interview with another quasi-governmental group, the Recreation Centers of Sun City, Inc. (RCSC), whose elected board of residents governs Sun City’s many amenities.
After completing the community, Webb handed these amenities to Sun City residents by creating this nonprofit organization, thereby freeing himself from a giant burden: 340,000 square feet of indoor recreation space, 122 holes of golf, and thirty miles of paved golf cart paths that all required maintenance. In the process, Webb created a laudable and fair-minded method for turning over recreational facilities and responsibilities to his residents.
Inside the RCSC offices, Norm Dickson, a retired schoolteacher who serves on the board, greets me. Although he is in his seventies, this athletic midwesterner represents the new progressive face of Sun City—people who are working hard to ensure that the community has a future.
The generational warfare that plagued Sun City’s dealings with its youthful neighbors has turned inward, with older Sun Citians now at odds with younger Sun Citians. Aside from retirement, the two groups don’t have much in common. And as the average life expectancy increases, the RCSC is finding the generation gap all the more difficult to bridge.
“We’re basically a big country club and our job at the RCSC is to make everyone happy at the lowest fee possible,” Norm tells me. “But that’s like changing a wheel on a moving car. We have residents here in their mid-fifties and others that are over 100. There are folks who have lived here for thirty years and others who arrived yesterday. The older folks don’t want their fees raised, because they hardly use the facilities anymore. But the new younger retirees want all the bells and whistles, and they’re willing to pay for it.”
Norm and his fellow board members are in the process of overhauling the community’s recreation centers, in the hope that updated facilities will encourage the gentrification of Sun City. To pay for these projects, the RCSC charges new residents a onetime impact fee of a few thousand dollars when they purchase a home. Even though the snazzy renovations don’t cost veteran residents a penny, the several-thousand-strong Sun City Taxpayers Association has filed several lawsuits against the RCSC and has circulated a petition to recall the board’s president.
“Believe it or not, a lot of the older folks are upset because these projects increase the value of their properties,” Norm says. “They aren’t looking to sell their homes and, frankly, they don’t care much about their heirs, either. What they care about is protesting anything that might lead to an increase in their taxes.”
Because residents of Sun City don’t pay municipal or school district taxes, the tax rate is actually quite low. Norm tells me that he was paying $5,000 a year in property taxes in Michigan before moving to Sun City a decade ago. He now pays about $750. “When I got my first tax bill,” he says, “it was so low that I thought it was a monthly payment.”
Given Sun City’s aging demographics, the turnover of houses is relatively high. The consistent turnover is evidence that newer residents are still buying into the community. Norm intends to keep it that way, because the alternative is unthinkable.
“Communities either grow, stagnate, or decay. In order to remain a viable community, we must attract newcomers. When a community can’t fill vacant houses, neighborhoods begin to deteriorate and things start to spiral downward until there are too few people to afford maintaining what’s left.
“We need to be proactive. If we don’t fix up our community, we won’t attract new people and we won’t fill vacancies—not with fifty-year-old facilities. There are simply too many competing communities out there. We need to give people a reason to continue choosing us. But convincing older residents of this hasn’t been easy.”
The results of these internecine battles—stagnation and decay—are already visible. Some of Sun City’s apartment houses and condo complexes are run by miniature homeowner associations that don’t have the money—or are unwilling to spend the money—to perform cosmetic repairs, let alone major renovations. “What happens when these units can no longer attract new occupants, and the association fees are spread across fewer and fewer residents?” Norm asks. “Then what?”
I ask Norm if these generational wars will ever end. “I don’t know,” he says with a sigh. “As far as I’m concerned we have a moral obligation to contribute to the future of those who come after us. But some of our older residents forget that they were once young.”
After half a century of age segregation, Sun City’s future remains anything but certain. One wonders if it will someday simply cease to exist, the unforgiving desert reclaiming it like the ancient Hohokum settlements before it.
By comparison, a decade of desegregation has breathed new life into Youngtown. Once the poor cousin across the street, the tiny municipality is seemingly filled with optimism and opportunity.
Mark Fooks, Youngtown’s first and only town manager, promotes this hopeful image. The town has a total landmass of just one and a half square miles, so its worst drawback is its postage-stamp size. Municipalities in rapidly sprawling areas tend to compete with one another much as businesses do: the yardstick of growth measures success. For Youngtown to remain competitive, it will have to grow. Otherwise its revenue sources will be forever limited—a situation that in municipal (and business) terms, has a smell of death about it.
How will landlocked Youngtown grow? Youngtown is heavily dependent on its “sales team” to bring home the bacon. Aside from managing Youngtown’s day-to-day affairs, Fooks’s job includes attracting businesses to the town so he can continue to portray Youngtown as a “player” in the local municipal scene. He hopes to transform the resulting cachet into a mandate for annexing the aging behemoth next door. “The only real problem is what to call the new town,” Fooks says, with evident satisfaction. “Do we call it Youngcity, Suntown, or what?”
Although the young mayor may be the face of the new Youngtown, Fooks is the architect. I met with him at his modest office in Youngtown’s ramshackle town hall. A large man with a confident smile who is fast approaching retirement, Fooks gives the impression that planning for Youngtown’s future is as easy as baking chocolate-chip cookies with store-bought dough.
Conversely, Fooks sees Sun City’s days as numbered. “These folks have lived in a bubble for years, and they’ll tell you, ‘Please don’t burst our bubble—that’s why we came here.’ It’s only a matter of time before they’re annexed. The only question is which neighboring municipality gets the honors.
“They could incorporate,” he continues. “But why go through all the trouble of building a new town hall, establishing a police force, and creating a public works department when they can just join us? We’d turn into a city of 42,000 overnight. With state revenue sharing for municipalities at $230 a head, $8 million would float down to us without us lifting a finger. Increasing our size opens us up to all sorts of money. Just think of the additional $3 million in sales tax we would get from local businesses. And we’d qualify for federal monies as well. That’s a heck of a budget to play golf with.”
Because it is unincorporated—a city in name only—Sun City cannot charge a municipal sales tax; nor is it eligible for state and federal monies. Youngtown already receives these sorts of payments, but on a smaller scale.
Fooks tells me that even if volunteerism weren’t waning, Sun City’s problems are too big for volunteers to handle. “God bless volunteers, but you can’t run a city with a bunch of amateurs. They don’t have the training to administer a city with its buildings, streets, golf courses, parks, streetlights, water, and sewers. Do you have any idea what it takes to manage a golf course, let alone a sewage treatment plant? You don’t turn a golf course over to somebody whose sole qualification is that they like to play golf. That’s why most local governments are run by trained professionals.”
Fooks predicts that the next wave of retirees (assuming there is one) in Sun City is likely to be wealthier, savvier, and more demanding of municipal services. “They’ll want to incorporate once they realize they don’t have a real voice in their own affairs,” he says. “They’re going to wonder why they don’t have a real police force, and why they have to plead with the county just to get a road repaired. Having to knock on the county’s door every time you want something is not what I would call local representation.”
The police chief, Dan Connelly, drops by the office, and Fooks invites him in to join our discussion. Connelly has few illusions about the critical choices Sun City will soon face. As far he’s concerned, it’s only a matter of time before Sun City will have to face reality. “The driving force for Sun City’s incorporation will be police protection,” he says flatly. “Crime is getting worse and there’s no way the Posse can even begin to handle it.”
In Arizona, streets in gated communities are not eligible for road repair or police patrols; therefore, there is a strong financial incentive to remain un-gated. After years of de facto solitude, Sun City remains without gates, but it is now uncomfortably sandwiched between sprawling municipal neighbors. Residents of these other cities have necessarily turned many of Sun City’s roads, such as Grand Avenue, into major arteries, and Sun City finds itself subjected to an ever-increasing amount of nonresident traffic, making it more vulnerable to crime.
“People want to feel safe, and the sheriff’s department can’t supply that with three deputies,” Connelly continues. “Besides, how many of today’s criminals are going to be scared off by an eighty-five-year-old member of the Posse wearing a hearing aid?”