TO GAIN A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF THE TREND TOWARD AGE SEGregation, I return to Phoenix to attend a “50+ Housing Symposium” sponsored by the National Association of Homebuilders. Several months after my first visits to Youngtown and Sun City, I once again find myself touring age-segregated communities in the desert, but this time on a large air-conditioned bus packed with developers and their employees chattering away excitedly about “boomers”—the generation born after World War II when the GIs came home and got down to the long-delayed business of making whoopee. According to demographers, they kept at it for another eighteen years.
Today, roughly 78 million of these boomer babies are still living. It’s a giant generational bulge moving inexorably from middle age to retirement. Right now one American in eight is a senior citizen. In twenty years, the boomers will swell that proportion to one in five. The ratio represents an unparalleled business opportunity, and one that will probably skew commerce toward the needs and wants of senior citizens in coming years.
I hear a woman behind me chatting excitedly to her seatmate, “I was building for sixty-two-plus, but they just keep getting younger. Now I’m marketing to people in their forties and fifties.”
A man across the aisle points out the window as we drive by a cemetery. “Hey, we just passed an ‘inactive adult community,’” he says loudly, and gets a chorus of chuckles. “I guess you could call that ‘aging in place.’”
My own seatmate, Laurel, is working on Albuquerque’s first age-segregated community, which, she says, is selling like hotcakes. “A lot of the realtors were like, ‘Gosh, it’s about time,’” Laurel tells me. “We sold thirty lots before we even completed our model homes and clubhouse. That’s very unusual.”
The fifty-five-plus housing in her development is part of a larger planned community designed for all ages. “A certain market segment doesn’t want to deal with kids,” Laurel says. “People say they feel ‘younger’ or ‘ageless’ when they are surrounded by people their own age. I hear that in focus groups.”
Focus groups helped the national developer for whom she works decide to pursue age-restricted housing rather than age-targeted housing. Age-targeted housing is merely suggestive of age exclusivity: instead of playgrounds, there are dog parks and walking trails; and homes have fewer bedrooms. “You just have to design it in such a way that people with 2.3 kids won’t be interested,” Laurel says. “We chose age-restricted because it differentiates us in our market, and we wanted to make sure our message was clear. A lot of people in the focus groups said they like to see their grandkids but they’d also like to see them go home at the end of the week. They don’t want to be designated babysitters; they want to lead their own lives.”
We continue west from Phoenix into the flat, expansive West Valley, passing strip mall after strip mall, McDonald’s after McDonald’s, and countless housing developments, most of which are bordered by concrete privacy walls. “This all used to be agricultural land,” the bus driver informs us over the loudspeaker. Aside from water issues, building in the desert is pretty easy, he says. “All you do is scrape the dirt and start pouring foundations.”
Our first stop is an “affordable” age-segregated community called Sundance. When it is built out, it will consist of 1,000 homes on 800 acres. According to our handout, the residents’ average age is 62.5, their average income is $70,000, forty-percent are still employed, and the major “draw states” are Arizona, California, Washington, and Illinois. The most popular floor plan is 1,800 square feet, with upgraded kitchen cabinets and two small master bedrooms located on opposite sides of the house. The two bedrooms are a favorite feature for wives whose husbands snore.
Our caravan of three buses pulls over and we pile into the sales office, an attractive building that I am told will eventually be discarded to make room for another home. We gather around a diorama the size of a pool table in the center of the room. “These lots over here all border the golf course,” a salesman explains. “Those homes pay a onetime $2,000 premium for that privilege.”
Though golf courses are often considered prestigious and can help a developer sell homes, they’re also money pits, the salesman explains. “To keep residents’ amenities fees down, the developer continues to own the golf course even after build-out, unless, of course, he’s lucky enough to sell it.
“If the monthly fees get too high, you risk hitting the ‘fear factor,’” the salesman continues. “Retired folks are sensitive to monthly expenditures. The vast majority of people don’t golf and only thirty or forty percent use the recreation center. They don’t want to pay big association fees. It’s a competitive market, and the key is to position yourself properly so you can compete. We’ve positioned ourselves to capture people that are particularly sensitive to price points.”
The decision not to gate the community also helps keep monthly fees low. Gates mean a larger staff and more street maintenance. Another way to keep down costs is to buy land in the middle of nowhere because it’s cheaper; that is exactly what this developer has done. There’s a lonely stretch of interstate nearby, but not much else, at least not yet.
The 15,000-square-foot recreation center houses an exercise room, six pool tables, a card room that seats sixteen, and a “library” with several dozen books. Outside there are two small pools, neither of which is big enough for swimming laps. An activities board lists a book club, a diabetes club, and a training class for people who want a concealed handgun permit.
Down a hall, I find three women in a windowless crafts room contentedly soldering stained-glass butterflies and other knickknacks. “My husband and I have met so many people who told us they always wanted to work with stained glass,” one woman tells me. “Now they have the time. In two months we’ve taught thirty people how to do it.”
The crafts rooms are also used for sewing, quilting, and scrap-booking. To keep costs down, there are no specialized rooms for pottery, woodworking, or metalworking. “They didn’t put any sinks in the crafts rooms,” one woman complains. “And windows. Windows would be nice, too.” I look around the room. She’s right; it’s just a fluorescent-lit box with tables and chairs. “We have too many tennis courts,” another woman says. “People our age like to play pickle ball, not tennis.”
I walk to the end of the hallway and leave through a side door. The blinding desert sun greets me, as do a row of empty tennis courts. In the distance I see a green golf course surrounded by vacant desert. When the wind blows, I can taste the dusty brown dirt.
Back inside, I run into a developer from Mexico who is also attending the conference. He is contemplating bringing age-segregated housing across the border—but for American expatriates in Baja. A lot of Mexican families tend to live together as a matter of tradition and economic necessity, he explains. “I don’t think this housing would be very popular with my own people.”
Pebble Creek, the next community we visit, outside the town of Goodyear, is decidedly more upscale. Gushing fountains and impeccably green lawns greet us as we drive down the long entrance driveway. The developer expects to build out to 6,250 homes on 2,400 acres. The statistics are similar to those for Sundance, with the exception of the average preretirement income, which is around $200,000. More than half of the residents are still employed in some capacity; many commute to Phoenix during the day and relax at night in their gated resort community. Pebble Creek aims a certain portion of its properties (necessarily less than twenty percent, so as to remain legally age-segregated) at people over forty. Of the dozen or so floor plans, one has a second floor. With two luxurious clubhouses with a combined total of nearly 100,000 square feet, Pebble Creek is clearly designed for those who have “arrived.” The $1,200 annual amenity fee is about triple that of Sun City.
The caravan stops outside the larger of the two clubhouses, named Tuscany Falls. Inside, a gas fireplace big enough to swing a cat in greets visitors. The fireplace mantle is ten feet off the ground and about the length of a small room. Around the corner in one direction is a large, attractive theater with rows of plush seats descending toward a stage.
Nearby, I find a handsomely appointed library with 1,000 or so books. I browse the collection and find The Life and Works of Lord Byron, The Writings of Jonathan Swift, and a book about Italian Renaissance painters. I’m impressed by the worldly and eclectic nature of the collection. Because I am an occasional fan of the romantics, I reach over and select the works of Byron. When I pull on the spine, the whole row of books pops out and falls to the floor with the gentle bounce of weightless Styrofoam. Curious, I reach for another book. It’s handsomely bound in real leather and contains actual printed pages. Regretfully, it is written in Swedish.
A developer with a background in carpentry inspects the construction of the lounge next door. The giant antique wooden beams are actually a combination of embossed plastic and stained pine, he concludes. He then walks over to an entryway to inspect the doors and quickly announces his verdict: “The only way you could make a more flimsy door is to use love beads.” He steps over to the bar. “Now, that’s a nice piece of granite. They saved the quality material for the stuff you can actually touch and feel.” He points to the shelves behind the bar, which have an eighth-inch veneer of oak over plywood. “I guess you could say the veneer’s ‘authentic,’” he concludes.
I ask an Australian who was on the bus with me if age-segregated communities are popular in his part of the world. “They’re growing in popularity,” he says. “Our cultures are actually very similar, except we don’t do all this fantasyland in the middle of the desert sort of thing. You Americans like everything to be fake.”
Next we drive to our third and final destination, Corte Bella, which is across the street from Sun City West and is one of the Del Webb Corporation’s newest offerings—an “active adult country club community” for the affluent. Someone on the bus tells me that the company didn’t know what else to do with this remote property. It takes several miles of driving down an awkward access road, which skirts Sun City West on one side and a flood wash on the other, just to get to the front gate.
Inside, there are three ritzy clubhouses: one for fitness, one for socializing, and one for golfers. There’s no hint of shuffleboard or horseshoes, but there are plenty of tennis courts. The literature states that Corte Bella is designed in a “Santa Barbara style,” and that the housing development is “How a Country Club Should Feel … downright friendly, a quality you don’t often find at country clubs. You will at this one, the country club where everyone belongs.”
With just one country club restaurant and no retailers other than a small pro shop, I can’t help wondering what the residents do all day in this exclusive wonderland. The marketing material seemingly anticipates my hesitation: “Every second of your day counts. That doesn’t mean you have to fill them all up.”
We leave the clubhouse and explore a street of large, richly appointed model homes. The neighborhood is eerily silent, except for cheery music piped out of rocks placed beside cacti. Several homes have exercise rooms, which are really just bedrooms outfitted with treadmills and stationary bikes. These luxuries strike me as yet another way to isolate oneself—even from immediate neighbors.
One model home forgoes the exercise equipment, opting instead to deck out the small guest room for a hypothetical homecoming. There’s a chalkboard with “Welcome Home, Boys!” in big, enthusiastic lettering, and twin beds pushed against the wall with cheerful signs above that say “Mike” and “Chris.” There’s an assortment of college pennants, as well as a baseball mitt and a football. This room is slightly larger than the second walk-in closet in the master bedroom at the other end of the house.
I run into two bankers from Switzerland looking for investment opportunities. “I don’t see how this could work in Europe,” one of them tells me. “Europeans want to be close to a city, drinking the culture. Here the residents are in the middle of nowhere.”
His partner, Dietrich, agrees. “Why would anyone over fifty-five want to live in an environment without people of all ages?” he asks. “Family life is still important in Europe. I don’t understand this attraction to age restriction. It’s a bit of a ghetto, no?”
Even if the concept were popular in Europe, there are too many other hurdles, Dietrich adds. “We don’t have this kind of cheap empty desert to build on, and our land-use policies are much more restrictive. And these homes; they’re so cheaply built, like they would never stand up to the weather. We couldn’t get away with that, either. The costs for a European version would be prohibitive.”
Later that afternoon, I wander around the conference’s exposition room, which is filled with dozens of vendors and hundreds of attendees. The booths run the gamut from architects who specialize in age-segregated housing to people who sell handicap-accessible bathroom fixtures and others who analyze market data (“We help you capture boomers”). Much of the networking takes place in front of several seafood buffets and adjoining makeshift bars used to celebrate opening of the conference. The majority of attendees are small regional builders who, as one industry expert tells me, know how to build houses but not communities. They are here to learn from the bigger players in the age-segregated marketplace.
“Active adult” housing is the fastest-growing sector of the housing market, and these folks want to know how they can grab a piece of the pie. The Homebuilders Association formed the 50+ Housing Council about six years ago. It was originally named the Seniors Housing Council; but boomers don’t identify with, or particularly like, the term “senior”—hence the name change. About thirty developers attended the first conference; this year there are more than 800.
American municipalities are as eager to attract age-segregated housing complexes as developers are eager to build them. States, counties, and cities are competing fiercely for retirees. Zoning laws are hastily being amended and density restrictions lifted in a bid to attract age-segregated housing. Why? Although families with children generally consume more, many of today’s seniors nonetheless have plenty of money to spend. A good number of Villagers, for example, outfit their new homes with all new furnishings, electronics, and appliances. They’re like free-spending tourists who bring their life savings with them and never leave.
And retirees generally don’t commit crimes, so they are less of a burden on police services; they tend not to drive as much, so they put less stress on a town’s roads; and their housing developments usually care for their own landscaping, reducing hassles for the public works department.
Best of all, they don’t use the schools. Any municipal accountant will tell you that residential housing generally loses money because schooling kids costs a lot of money and local property taxes don’t come close to bringing in enough revenue. That’s why most municipalities bend over backward to attract businesses: a business pays a lot in taxes but doesn’t burden the system with more children. Seniors can be viewed in much the same light.
The next morning, the man introducing the conference’s keynote speaker revs up the audience with some pleasing statistics. “The elderly are the fastest-growing segment today,” he says. “For the next twenty years, boomers will be turning into seniors at the rate of 10,000 a day. In ten years alone, they will represent nearly 80 million consumers. And in a few short years, half of all American housing will be owned by someone over fifty.” One can almost hear a cash register going cha-ching.
Next up is the keynote speaker, a renowned expert in generational marketing. His presentation is unusually entertaining, but also sobering. Marketing to the new crop of seniors will be anything but easy, he says, and he suggests that the communities we visited yesterday on the bus tour will soon be “dinosaurs.”
The audience is silent; some of the listeners look perplexed and deflated. Nobody can predict exactly what the baby boomers will want, but what they won’t want is another Sun City, he says, adding that his research shows that boomers don’t like giant “one size fits all” planned communities. “They’re used to specialized services and products that meet their unique needs and convictions,” he continues. “And most of them don’t want to move far away from their families or live in the sunbelt. They want a more ‘authentic’ lifestyle experience.”
In broad strokes, he relates the following attributes about the boomers and the vastly different generations that preceded them.
Members of the “GI generation” (born 1901–1924) and the “silent (or Eisenhower) generation” (1925–1942) generally didn’t question authority but rather obeyed it. They held low-risk jobs that supplied steady paychecks. Retirement for them represented an opportunity to finally take it easy and relax after a lifetime of toil. They prefer group activities to individual pursuits. They like communal hobbies; and when they travel, they often do so in large groups. These are the folks who have enthusiastically populated retirement communities modeled on Sun City.
By comparison, he continues, the boomers are risk takers searching for purpose. Whereas Sun Citians flocked to hear Lawrence Welk perform old favorites at the Sun Bowl, boomers were camped out in the rain at Woodstock listening to Jimi Hendrix reinterpret “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They’re the generation of LSD, the Pill, Watergate, and protests against the Vietnam War. “They are active, adventurous, and individualistic, and you’re more likely to find them mountain biking, surfing, and sipping espresso at sixty-five than playing shuffleboard, clog-hopping, and square dancing.
Given their penchant for rebellion, he says, boomers are unlikely to embrace their parents’ vision of retirement, just as they rejected their parents’ definition of adolescence. They don’t like rules, let alone the sorts of rules and regulations that rigidly define acceptable behavior at a planned retirement community like Sun City.
He continues: The vast majority of boomers (some surveys indicate seventy-five percent) don’t plan on retiring. Many find meaning (“a mission”) in their work; others haven’t saved up enough for retirement, preferring to earn and spend as they go. Others are fearful that they will be financially sandwiched between paying for their children’s education and paying for their aging parents’ medical bills. After a decade or two of fun in the sun, many retirees return home to rely on their boomer children to help care for them as their health fails.
Perhaps most important, boomers have no intention of growing older. Boomers typically list eighty-five as the age when they will finally consider themselves “old.” Not surprisingly, that’s two years longer than actuaries predict many of them will live. They may just get their wish after all, the speaker says.
Anyone who thinks that they can put up a cookie-cutter age-restricted community and walk away with a tidy profit is kidding himself, the presenter cautions. “The future of boomer retirement housing is wholly uncharted and full of potential pitfalls,” he says, “but we had better be ready, because the surge of boomers is just around the corner.”
The speaker ends his presentation with a question: How many people in the audience are baby boomers? The auditorium is a sea of raised hands.
I see a lot of stunned attendees stumble out of the auditorium into the painfully bright Arizona sunshine. “Wow, it’s a lot more complicated than I thought,” I hear one woman say. “I thought I knew my market,” another woman remarks. “Now I have to rethink my niche.”
I happen upon the Australian from yesterday’s bus tour. “You got to wonder what’s going to happen to all these giant Club Med–like communities that don’t appeal to boomers,” he says.
Looking for answers, I approach an architect from Washington, D.C., named Neal, whom I met at the exposition. “Look, I’m fifty-three, but I feel like eighteen,” he tells me. “I have lots of energy and I’m just figuring things out. I play tennis with my friends and Rollerblade with my daughter. You can’t tell a boomer like me that a place like Sun City is a place that I will want to retire to. I live three blocks from the National Gallery, one block from the metro; Kennedy Center is just down the street. And I’m going to keep on working. I like what I do. I like the challenge. It’s rewarding. I’m going to age my own way—and at home. This is what makes sense to me.”
The crowd soon splits up as people make their way to a variety of seminars. By early afternoon, the shock of the morning’s presentation appears to be subsiding, and the participants I speak with tell me that they are feeling a bit more grounded. They remain confident that age-restricted housing will continue to be the hottest housing sector for years to come, for a number of reasons.
Boomers may say they don’t like today’s age-segregated housing, but who can be sure they’ll stay true to these convictions in fifteen years? It’s a generation full of contradictions. Many boomers took drugs to think outside the box, but now give their kids Ritalin to ensure that the kids remain inside it. Women who once burned their bras now pay handsomely for expensive brassieres and plastic surgery. Many of the folks who ran around naked at Woodstock ended up espousing traditional family values and voting for Ronald Reagan. Other boomers never rebelled to begin with and don’t fit into these stereotypes.
The fact is that nobody knows what the boomers want. They’re like a tsunami (some call it an “age wave”) rolling over the housing industry; and trying to predict what they will want is like trying to predict the weather twenty years from now. There is no magic formula: the boomers are simply too diverse and too hard to pin down.
But given their staggering numbers, even if a development appeals to only a small minority, that market segment can still represent several million people and billions of dollars. As one attendee told me, “People are always asking me what they should build for the boomers. I tell them, ‘Everything.’ There are enough boomers to support just about any business model.”
How many boomers will opt for age-segregated housing is anybody’s guess. One implausibly optimistic consultant at the conference suggests that seventy percent of boomers will seek a life secluded from children. Another study proposes that fifty percent will opt for such housing. Others consider the gold standard to be Del Webb’s research, which suggests that twenty-five percent of boomers will actively seek age-segregated housing. A more conservative estimate of fifteen percent is also bandied about, but even that low figure still represents 12 million Boomers—or at least one in twenty-five Americans.
If Sun City is to be shunned, then just what will these communities look like? Research indicates that the vast majority of boomers are emotionally closer to their children than previous generations, and consequently, they don’t want to move more than 150 miles from them, or move to another state. And with so many expected to continue working, employment is another factor in choosing a locale.
Rather than expecting boomers to relocate to leisurevilles, developers are bringing Sun Cities to them, albeit on a much smaller scale. In 1995, nearly eighty percent of all age-segregated communities were built in the traditional sunbelt. Ten years later, sixty percent of them are located in northern states, such as Michigan and Massachusetts. This trend is accelerating, even though there are many challenges associated with constructing Sun Cities near Chicago or New York City: a dearth of large tracts of land; the high cost of whatever dirt remains; and more restrictive zoning.
Consequently, age-segregated communities are shrinking in size, and often include attached townhouses and apartments. Whereas the original Sun City has upwards of 40,000 residents, newer communities generally have fewer than 1,000. That figure is down from an average of about 3,500 just a decade ago. But by most estimates, boomers who opt for age-segregated housing prefer smaller, more intimate communities anyway.
This means that children will probably live nearby, but gates and age-segregation policies will keep them from intruding onto the grounds of these smaller housing projects. Active adults can thus venture into the age-integrated “melting pot” for work, shopping, and other activities, but breathe a sigh of relief at day’s end when they then return home and the security gates close tightly behind them.
A sizable number of boomers also like city life. That is why developers of age-segregated housing are turning their attention to urban “infill” projects, such as converting old hotels and office buildings into age-segregated luxury lofts, with elevators, shared gym facilities, and concierge services. These apartment buildings become child-free zones in the midst of a bustling cityscape, much like the smaller age-segregated housing units near traditional suburban housing and strip malls.
But if the trend is to live closer to home in more “authentic” communities, then why bother moving to an age-segregated community at all? Why not just stay put in a traditional neighborhood?
The answer is the amenities. People want swimming pools, tennis courts, and clubhouses; and traditional housing developments typically don’t offer such perks. Boomers also want low- or no-maintenance housing. They don’t want to mow, plow, or paint. They want a place where they can lock the door and leave for a month. And when they’re not traveling, they want to be able to come home after work to a peaceful child-free resort community where friendships with peers are easy to form. Some want a childless environment; others put up with it to reap the other benefits. But they all want an easier, more convenient way of life.
Amenities can come in many flavors. Easy access to Manhattan can be considered an amenity; so can access to walking trails, medical facilities, a college offering special classes, an outlet mall, or for that matter the Atlantic Ocean. Golf courses are expensive to build and maintain, and they take up valuable real estate. By comparison, train service for easy access to museums and the symphony doesn’t cost residents a dime in monthly maintenance fees.
The nation’s housing developers are betting heavily on these strategies. Pulte’s Del Webb division has been building age-segregated housing at the rate of 25,000 units a year. It already has more than 100 communities in various stages of planning and construction in fifty-two real estate markets scattered across the country, most of them near large metropolitan centers outside the traditional sunbelt.
“All we know is that our business keeps growing year after year,” one of Del Webb’s top executives tells me. “It’s a demographics-driven business and the floodgates are about to open. I like the odds.”
The trick, I realize, is to seduce aging boomers into believing that they need to move to an age-segregated community. To learn how, I attend an afternoon seminar about selling and marketing these communities. A grizzled veteran of the industry named Bill, and his more reserved colleague, don’t mince words.
“The biggest challenge is getting folks to move at all,” Bill says. “These folks don’t need a new house. Our job is to convince them that they want a new house. It’s a matter of upping what I call the ‘hate factor’—getting them to resent their current home enough to motivate them to pack up and clean out forty years of junk.
“We have to create the image that their current house is ‘old,’ that too many things need fixing, like the plumbing and electrical work. Let them know how much an electrician costs today. Ask them if they really want to keep mowing their own lawn. Why cut grass when you can play golf?”
His colleague cuts in. “You reach a point when you want to get rid of all the men in your life,” she says. “The plumber, the pool man, the lawn man. People want a house without maintenance issues.”
Bill continues, “Are they going to go through all the expense and trouble to remodel an old house from the 1970s, or are they going to buy a new house where they can have it all and more?” Bill continues. “Granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, high ceilings, Jacuzzi tubs—they see their friends with them, even their adult kids, and they want them too. This is their chance to loosen control and buy whatever they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford, because they were too busy paying for their kids’ braces and school. Walk them through your design center. Tell them they won’t need the expense of an interior decorator, because the builder will do everything for them. You’re selling them a lifestyle—and this is where it begins.”
Many new homes are coming with “universal design” features that help people preserve mobility and dignity as their health declines, Bill explains. Wider hallways, floor lighting, showers without steps, and first-floor master suites: these all make aging in place more convenient. “But for God’s sake, don’t mention aging in place!” Bill warns. “Tell them that it’ll make life easier when their parents visit. Nobody wants to be reminded that his or her body is deteriorating. Call them ‘lifestyle features’ for ‘easy living.’ Speak of them as ‘luxury’ components and ‘upgrades.’
“The words you use are important,” Bill continues. “Don’t call your development ‘age-restricted,’ ‘senior,’ or even ‘retirement’ housing. That’s a no-no in our business. These folks aren’t seniors, and they’re not retired either.”
Bill’s not thrilled with the other recent euphemisms either—active adult, fifty-five plus, fifty-five and better—but if push comes to shove, “make sure you at least say age-qualified instead of age-restricted. The fact is, I don’t like any of this emphasis on age or restrictions. We’re selling an ageless lifestyle, and the lifestyle should be the tagline. Fifty-five-plus? It’ll be gone in three years. You won’t hear it again.” Peel away all the distracting fancy terms and it still looks like bigotry to me, but “age segregation” is a term I cautiously avoid among boosters.
“But why would someone choose ‘age-qualified’ housing in particular?” I ask. “Why wouldn’t people choose a regular community with amenities?”
“They like seeing kids play—they like seeing happiness,” Bill responds. “But what they don’t like is kids on top of them. They don’t want somebody else’s grandkids peeing in the pool. Kids can be messy.”
Bill returns to his marketing presentation. “When it comes to publicizing a future community, make each construction milestone an event worthy of a party. This demographic loves to party. They’ve been partying all their lives. Make the groundbreaking an event. Make the completion of the first model homes an event. Show them a house being framed. Take them on a ‘muddy-shoe tour.’ And make sure you create a sense of urgency. There’s no better way to do that than increasing the price a notch.”
Given all the talk of boomers demanding flexible housing options and flexible communities, a branch of housing called the continuing care retirement community (CCRC) takes a hit at the conference.
The CCRCs offer several housing alternatives that represent a progression of care. As people age, they can move from independent-living housing to assisted-living quarters or to a traditional nursing home environment. It’s the ultimate in one-stop shopping for the inevitable. But whereas previous generations may be interested in such prudent predictability, boomers will supposedly scorn such attempts at easy surrender.
A feisty Texan in her mid-twenties tells me she is having none of this marketing nonsense. She manages a CCRC for her father, and over lunch she shakes her head at all these fancy consultants and their prognostications about the next generation.
“Look, people are getting older every day and they can’t help it,” she says. “Boomers might think they know what they want—until they trip and fall and break a hip. It’s a fact of life. There’s no pill or cream out there that’s going to keep them from aging.”
She points to the several hundred conference participants attending the luncheon. “All these people, they’re not going to move into an active adult community. They’re still working and traveling. They’ve got kids, and so do their peers. They’re going to keep working and living at home. If they have enough money, they may move to where their kids are.
“Who are all these folks building active adult communities for? I don’t know. If you ask them if they’re going to move into an active adult community, you’re going to hear a hesitant ‘yes’ and then an honest ‘no.’ The older senior is the one who’s moving, not the younger one, and they don’t want some big new house. My ninety-year-old resident doesn’t want a home; she wants to rent an apartment. And where else is an older couple going to go when one of them is sick? This way, they can always live near one another.
“I’m like Wal-Mart: I want the masses. Our facility is completely full. We don’t have any models to show people, because we sold them all. We have a waiting list for 510 units, and all I’m showing people are copies of floor plans I made at Kinko’s. We don’t market and we don’t advertise.
“Time’s on our side; they’ll come to us eventually. And once they do, they just move around our campus, like on a Monopoly board. Best part is—we own the land and the hotels.”
Before I fly out, I spend the day with a good friend, Stuart, at his “amenity-rich” apartment complex, located in a dusty and otherwise undeveloped “neighborhood” in nearby Tempe. The closest neighbor is a Starbucks several blocks up a multilane avenue without a sidewalk. To get to Stuart’s apartment, I have to pass through two sets of gates before I reach his locked front door.
Once I am there, he walks me down to the pool and hot tub for a dip. There’s a sizable workout room with high-end equipment, as well as a small theater. There are rules posted everywhere governing behavior.
“I could have lived in a more traditional so-called ‘neighborhood,’” Stuart tells me. “But this is so convenient. There are so many amenities. I never have to leave.” My friend is in his late thirties.
Interestingly, neither of us had ever heard the word “amenities” while we were growing up, at least not in this context. It was never a buzzword. At best, the term was a euphemism for a collection of public toilets.
The pool is inundated with attractive and scantily clad college kids who have chosen to live off campus. They’re running around, yelling, and generally annoying me on my day off. Worse yet, I feel dumpy in comparison with their sleek bodies. I turn to my friend: “Don’t you think it’d be a lot nicer if everyone at the pool were over thirty? It’d be a lot quieter and we’d all probably have a whole lot more in common.”
Stuart mulls this over and glances at the half-naked coeds splashing in the pool. “You’ve been in Florida far too long,” he says.
With a head full of prognostications about the boomers, I head back to The Villages for a reality check. Naturally, my first stop is The Villages’ Baby Boomer Club, which happens to be giving a sock hop in one of the recreation centers.
The room is filled with young retirees alternating between the dance floor and a make-your-own sundae station. Most of the women have tied their hair up in playful ponytails and wear their jeans rolled halfway up their calves, revealing brightly colored socks and sneakers. Their clean-cut husbands, dressed in patterned short-sleeved button-downs and cardigans, more closely resemble Richie Cunningham from Happy Days than they do Marlon Brando.
A banner with the group’s logo hangs from a wall. It shows the word “Boomer” surrounded by a jagged circle exploding with energy. The industry experts in Phoenix tell me the boomers won’t gravitate toward plantation-size retirement communities in the middle of nowhere, but the Boomers Club is already one of the biggest at The Villages.
The music alternates between favorites from the 1950s and rock standards like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hard-driving “Sweet Home Alabama.” At some point the disc jockey plays the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and many of the boomers jump excitedly into neat rows and start line-dancing to Mick Jagger’s lusty portrayal of sexually exploited African-American slave girls.
I introduce myself to a man so well groomed that he resembles Pat Boone. His name is Craig, and he’s campaigning to be the club’s next vice president. The music is too loud for us to carry on a conversation, so we step into the hallway. I ask him what it’s like to live in The Villages as a younger retiree.
“People are always asking me if I’m old enough to live in The Villages,” Craig tells me. “It’s fun not to be the old guy anymore. Back home I was always cast in musicals as the king or the father figure. Here I can be the kid in the group. I’m only fifty-six, but I knew the time was right to settle somewhere like this. And I’m not alone; my age group is starting to arrive. It’s very exciting. I can’t wait to invite them to our boomer bowling nights and pool parties. I could sit here all day and list all the fun things we do.”
Craig’s wife finds us in the hallway. The dance is over, and she’s visibly upset. “Gosh, I’d better go,” he tells me. His wife’s frown remains. “We’ve already missed the last dance,” she says, walking away.
Back inside, I walk up to the disc jockey as he packs his equipment away. “I’m the music guy,” he says by way of introduction. “I DJ parties, and there are a lot of parties down here. Seems like there’s one every day. I have more friends here than I’ve had all my life. People are always dropping by my house out of the blue. They just drive on over in their golf carts, and before you know it, it’s a party. We like to say that parties ‘break out’ in our neighborhood.” He pushes his bifocals farther up his nose.
“The boomers are coming down here in droves just like everyone else. This place is growing like hotcakes. If they have a house available, they call you from a waiting list and give you three hours to decide. Pretty soon The Villages is going to be the fifty-first state.”
The growing age gap between Villagers becomes clearer to me as I drop in on a few more activities. The next day I’m intrigued by a listing for a club with the unusual name “Harmonitones.” I arrive to find a dozen retirees sitting in a semicircle, blowing into different-sized harmonicas. Hearing aids abound, and one guy is attached to an oxygen tank. A bandleader taps his baton and leads them in “Moonlight and Roses,” and then “It’s a Small World” and “Fly Me to the Moon.”
I am reminded of my first-grade recorder class, where we used to play “Hot Cross Buns” in unison. As with us, there are no Bob Dylans here yet, but the group is still proud of its progress. “That’s good stuff!” the man with the oxygen tank says after club members play “Hello, Dolly.” “Did that bring back any memories?” the band-leader asks. “Heck, let’s play that one again!”
Next, it’s “Sentimental Journey.” Between takes, a guy in a Yankees cap complains that he’d play better if his wife would just let him practice in the house. The other men nod in agreement. The bandleader smiles and gently taps his baton. “What do you say we give the ‘Pennsylvania Polka’ another try?”
In a nearby room a group of Villagers are learning to line dance. The instructor calls out the steps. “OK. Rock step, coaster step, turn hold and heel, point, point, sailor shuffle, sailor shuffle, sway, sway, cross-turn counter-step.”
That night, I head over to the Bistro, a new hangout a few blocks down from Katie Belle’s. I arrive to find Mr. Midnight’s foulmouthed friend Frank sitting on a stool nursing a beer. His eyes are bloodshot. “I just got back from a cruise,” he says. “It didn’t feel any different. The only thing that changed was the location. I’m not even sure why I went. We live on a fucking cruise ship.”
Frank asks me what I learned in Phoenix. I tell him about the experts’ dim outlook for the future of mega-developments like The Villages.
A boisterous Brit joins the conversation uninvited. “Poppy-cock,” he says. “I’ve traveled the whole world and this is the best place in it! I just turned sixty and everyone like me is going to move here.”
Frank can’t resist. “Hey, Andy,” he says to me. “Why’d ya bother flying to Phoenix to listen to a bunch of experts when you got an opinionated asshole right here?”