4

A Tale of Two Villages

CRAIG LOOKED AT his feet and frowned. For hours, he had been riding in the passenger seat as his dad, Ken, drove hurriedly through a series of quiet, exquisitely manicured neighborhoods in search of a stolen vehicle that belonged to Ken’s father, Ken Sr. “Aw, man, I got my flip-flops on,” said Craig, a college freshman on break. “I wish I had my sneakers on. If we catch this kid, we’re going to have to run him down.”

Such an event was starting to seem unlikely. The sun was now hanging low in the sky, and Ken pulled the visor down to keep it out of his eyes. Neither wanted to say what they were both thinking: how their chances of finding the stolen vehicle were fading with every passing minute. How an expression of defeat would spread across Ken Sr.’s face when they returned empty-handed.

Then they rounded a corner and saw their target idling next to the road. As Ken pulled up, Craig jumped out of the still-moving car. He sprinted over and slapped his open palm on the stolen vehicle’s windshield. “Don’t move!” he yelled. Meanwhile, Ken wrenched his steering wheel to the right, hemming in the vehicle with his own car. There wasn’t just one thief, he was surprised to find, but three. They all looked at each other.

The two perps up front were 17. The driver was small and twitchy, but the one in the passenger seat was big and mean looking. After a moment of panicked eye contact, they climbed out and scattered in all directions.

Ken hustled over and managed to grab the driver by his collar. Another kid, who had been clinging to the back of the vehicle, got away, bolting toward the town square. The big one headed toward the woods.

He never got there. Craig, a college lacrosse star, took off like a missile, tackling him in the small of the back. The kid tried to get up, raised a fist.

“Don’t even think about it,” Craig said. “I will drop you so fast.” He meant it. This wasn’t the Wild West. This was The Villages, the largest retirement community in the world. There were rules here. And the kids had stolen his grandfather’s golf cart.

LET’S PAUSE FOR a moment at this scene of vigilante justice and rise upward through the muggy Central Florida air to take a bird’s-eye view of the surroundings.

As we hover, the first thing you’ll notice is the sheer number of fairways below, sprawled about like emerald amoebae. The Villages offers 630 holes of golf—more, its marketing department will gladly tell you, than any other one place in the world. The golf courses are surrounded by over 50,000 standalone houses, notable mainly for their structural homogeneity and the uniform green of their lawns. Their driveways look clean enough to slurp spaghetti from, and golf cart paths, totaling over 100 miles of asphalt, extend in every direction. They cross over highways and tunnel under thoroughfares, connecting not just courses and homes but also three master-planned town squares, a multitude of swimming pools, fitness centers and community centers, several fishing reservoirs, and a polo stadium. Nearly every household in the Villages has at least one golf cart, and residents use them to go everywhere. On the outskirts of town, the cart paths lead to supermarkets and box stores galore.

And finally, witness the ubiquity of the golf carts, 50,000 strong, crawling steadily along the paths and roads. Once, just for kicks, Villages residents made the world’s longest golf cart parade and had it entered into the Guinness Book of World Records. Nowhere have more retirees gathered together to live out their days in comfortable-yet-active bliss, separated, for the most part, from everyone under the worthy age of 55. The growth of the community has proven extraordinary, especially in recent years. Between 2010 and 2015, The Villages’ population more than doubled. At the time of this writing, nearly 124,000 people live there, and it’s been the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States for four years running. In 2011, one of the worst years for new home sales in recent US history, The Villages announced that its sales accounted for nearly 1 percent of the nation’s total.

There’s a single, very good reason so many flock to The Villages: it makes its residents happy. The community is beautiful, in its way, and filled with decent people who worked hard to earn the leisure-filled lifestyle it offers.

And yet, The Villages gives me pause. Not because I have any particular problem with the way of life there: I want people to be able to decide on an individual basis how to live in old age, and it’s not my job to tell them which lifestyle to choose. (Besides, as I mentioned earlier, I’m a Jimmy Buffet fan, and no true Parrothead has much compunction about easy livin’. In fact, Buffet has announced plans to open his own string of sunny, Margaritaville-themed retirement communities.) No, what worries me is The Villages’ awesome narrative power. The place is so geographically large—bigger than Manhattan, and growing—and the vision of life it paints is so vivid yet familiar, that once you know it exists, it can be hard to look away. A narrative force on this scale has the power to warp our very understanding of what’s normal and desirable in old age, biasing the thoughts of those considering where and how to live, not to mention companies seeking to understand what will inspire aging consumers.

Imagine having just sat down at the world’s best restaurant. Without warning, all the lights go out. Although you’ve been told the menu is filled with all kinds of wonderful things, many of which you’ve never experienced before, you can’t read it. Suddenly, a candle is lit at a nearby table; the rest of the restaurant remains shrouded in darkness. You turn to look and lay your eyes upon the best-looking plate of steak and potatoes you’ve ever seen. The steak can be cut with fork, and the potatoes are softly glowing like golden embers of deliciousness. But still, it’s steak and potatoes—and you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to try something new. What do you order?

I actually really enjoy steak and potatoes, probably a little too much. But it would be a shame for someone hoping to try quail eggs or blood sausage—or even spaghetti and meatballs—to have their options limited to steak because it’s the only guaranteed item on the menu. The lifestyle offered by The Villages is like that lone, illuminated steak dinner. To many who find themselves seeking a viable way to live in old age, it can seem like the only good, reliable option, simply because it’s the most visible choice.

The inability to perceive alternatives to The Villages’ lifestyle poses a particularly serious hazard to product developers, designers, and marketers. In theory, by prioritizing the job of the consumer, longevity-economy innovators should be able to break free of the old narrative and address aging consumers’ upper-level goals and aspirations, not just fundamental needs. (In some cases, companies will even compete to define what tomorrow’s older adults will want.) But all that will be for naught if said innovators, upon first considering their consumers’ aspirations, immediately seize upon The Villages as the answer. If you, as a younger product designer, internalize the notion that every older person hopes to live in a sun-drenched, leisure-oriented, age-segregated retirement community, then that idea will likely worm its way into your work, whether you intend it to or not. In this roundabout way, The Villages may lead to products that fail to jibe with the sort of life most older adults want for themselves. Despite the place’s hypervisibility, the lifestyle on offer there isn’t all that popular—at least, not on a national scale. Eighty-seven percent of those over 65 would prefer to “age in place” in their own homes and communities than move to a retirement destination, as would 71 percent of those aged 50–64.

That said, the minority of people who do like what’s being sold at The Villages really like it, and it’s easy to see why: life there simply makes sense at a gut level. At a moment when it feels like there is no single, normal, agreed-upon way to thrive in old age, that coherence is spellbinding. It shines in the dark as an example of something that simply works. And unfortunately, that means that it has the potential to outshine any nascent, alternative modes of later life. Should longevity-economy businesses issue products as though all their customers were would-be Villagers, any older adult who hopes to live otherwise may find herself unable to obtain the tools she needs to thrive. The idea that older adults are a needy, greedy drain on society will only strengthen its hold on our minds. Worst of all, as I will explain, the notion that older people are frittering away generous Social Security checks in a manicured, age-segregated paradise may well set generations at each other’s throats—at exactly the moment when austerity-minded politicians are likely to consider cutting back on entitlement spending.

In short, although The Villages as a product may achieve the commendable goal of making older people happy, The Villages as an idea threatens the entire project of building a better narrative of aging and may act as a wet blanket on the longevity economy. But that doesn’t mean that companies hoping to understand tomorrow’s older society have nothing to learn from the place. More than any other mode of later life that you could point to, The Villages’ lifestyle is both coherent and compelling. It makes sense to a generation facing a protracted, unfamiliar stage of life, and it does so in a manner that draws in both widespread attention and eager, new residents.

In the future, any successful vision of later life will share these attributes. In fact, one notable upstart is already attempting to define a new way to live in old age, and some older adults are already finding it hard to resist. This community is also a village of a sort, but it lacks The Villages’ most notable drawbacks. It was created by older people, for older people, and yet it presents a way for different generations to coexist in something resembling harmony. For product designers and other innovators hoping to get a picture of what an aspirational, coherent, compelling old age might look like, this second village is a great place to start.

Whether it or any other alternative vision of late life can go toe-to-toe with The Villages in a battle for narrative dominance remains to be seen, however. To find out, we must first delve into the source of The Villages’ magnetism. Let’s plunge back down to the level of its streets and golf cart paths. What makes retirees want to drop everything and move there? And what can go wrong when they do?

The Villages’ Lifestyle

The Villages wasn’t always such a gleaming testament to tiny cars and easy living. It started out as a late-1960s’ mistake. A Michigan land speculator, Harold Schwartz, had been selling parcels of Florida woods, farms, and pastureland by mail order when a 1968 federal edict banned the practice. Stuck with acres upon acres of low-value land, he and a partner built a mobile-home park in what today is the oldest part of The Villages. Perhaps because the park was in the middle of nowhere, buyer interest remained low. After a decade of trying, the duo had sold only 400 units.

In 1983, at age 73, Schwartz had the breakthrough he’d been waiting for when he visited his sister in Sun City, Arizona, where Del Webb had built one of the world’s first master-planned retirement communities. Like Schwartz’s holdings, Sun City was an island of civilization miles away from any nearby cities—Phoenix hadn’t yet sprawled so widely—although its brand of wilderness was more gila monster than alligator. But compared to Schwartz’s mobile-home park, Sun City was beautiful. Its homes, pools, and roads were conspicuously well appointed, and more importantly, the community had become massive enough, and had enough going on, that its own gravitational pull kept the homebuyers streaming in, checkbooks in hand. Sun City wasn’t a place where people could get away from it all, like backwoods Florida. Far from it: it was a destination.

That year, Schwartz bought out his partner’s share in their land holdings and brought in his son, Gary Morse, to help him create a new, Floridian Sun City. The question was how to prime the pump. What could attract that first crucial wave of homebuyers who would go back up north and tell their friends, come on down, the weather is fine?

Morse had the answer. He instructed landscapers to plant a local watermelon field with dense, close-cut grass, and had a few ponds and sand pits installed. Finally, he had nine small holes cut in the ground, stuck flagpoles in them, and commenced a two-word ad campaign: “Free Golf!”

During the decades of meteoric growth that followed, the promise of “Free Golf!” has remained encoded in the DNA of The Villages. There are now 36 “executive,” nine-hole courses, which are “free” for residents (actually covered by a monthly, $145 “amenities fee,” which all Villages households pay), and eleven 18- or 27-hole “championship” courses, which charge discounted greens fees to residents. The centrality of golf to Villages life, in addition to drawing in the sport’s aficionados, accomplished something far more important: it made golf carts ubiquitous, which solved a good deal of the sprawling community’s elder-transportation problem. The fact that residents, even many of those no longer licensed to drive, could maintain their independence by riding their carts into town became one of The Villages’ major selling points.

Today, when not whacking the pockmarked ball, residents can hit nearby pools and fitness centers; tennis, pickleball, and bocce courts; and far more. Every week, more than 1,000 weekly activities are open to the Villages’ public, organized by a dedicated Recreation Department. At night, house parties flourish, and the bar and nightclub scene resembles that of a college town, albeit one that goes to bed early. The wine flows like beer, and the beer flows like water—in fact, some restaurants pipe it underground from a central microbrewery. Martinis can be had for three dollars.

It says something about the current moment that this leisure and consumption-oriented lifestyle, though not universally appealing, is achieving such remarkable resonance among a subset of the older population. The life stage of retirement is on the wane, in the sense that more and more people are saying that they hope to work at their current jobs right through their 65th birthdays or else shift gears and find a job somewhere new or work part time. But at the same time, plenty of people are still retiring for good, and that poses the same problem of identity that has been vexing retirees for a century: Without your job, what are you? Senior vice president of your living room? Admiral of the bathtub? And when you don’t know what you are, how do you know what to do when you get out of bed in the morning?

If anything, the sense of identity loss posed by retirement is now more confusing than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when the idea of the “golden years” first emerged as a response. For one thing, those who “work in retirement” find themselves straddling categories, teeter-tottering between production and repose in a way retirees of yore rarely had to consider. For another, it was originally mainly men who faced an identity crisis upon receiving the gold watch; now, it’s an equal-opportunity pickle. Add in all the other ways later life is changing—technological progress; shifting consumer attitudes and demands; increased longevity; dissolving institutions, including religious communities; geographically dispersed family structures; fewer children; heightened divorce rates—and suddenly, if you’re near the traditional age of retirement, you’ve got an unexpected and unexplored new terrain in front of you.

For many, life on this untrammeled landscape is intolerable. “Those who move to any new frontier are likely to pay a price, in loneliness and discomfort,” wrote David Riesman, the midcentury sociologist I mentioned earlier, in his 1952 essay on leisure and consumerism. And if life on any frontier is “awkward,” as he put it, plagued by “formlessness” and “aimlessness,” that’s especially true of the retirement frontier. Having a career in middle age is like living in a town: whether you’re a butcher or a baker or a candlestick maker, you know where you stand relative to your peers. But travel far enough beyond the city limits—or live long enough past the age of retirement—and those labels cease to matter. The wilderness has a way of obliterating one’s socially derived sense of identity, which can feel freeing during a weeklong camping trip, but disconcerting when it’s a permanent state of affairs. And so it’s inevitable that some, upon discovering themselves thrust out onto the frontier of old age, hasten immediately over to the biggest settlement where life seems to make sense.

What’s not immediately apparent, however, is how The Villages causes life to make sense. Some prospective residents see that Villagers seem to enjoy themselves, and that’s evidence enough: they waltz in with open arms. Others, however, sidle in more furtively, like a cowpoke entering an unfamiliar saloon, and look around for the catch. Villages resident Donald “Smoke” Hickman belongs to this second group. Smoke (I’ll continue to refer to him by his nickname because to do otherwise would be a waste) would never bring it up unbidden, but his long and illustrious career in the US Navy culminated in the rank of rear admiral. By the end of his career, he had assumed authority of the Navy Systems Supply Command and oversaw significant modernization of the Navy’s supply chains. At that time, because he was a member of the military, Smoke’s retirement schedule was a known quantity, and as his last day of service approached, he decided to tackle his transition to civilian life with all the planning and pragmatism of a battle plan.

Stopping full-time work “was just one of my objectives,” he said. But there was more to it: a question of who he would become and what he would do with his time. “You’ve got this goal: ‘I’m going to retire,’ but, well, what are you going to do?” he said. And equally pressing: “Where did I want to live, then?”

Today, he counsels new retirees as they grapple with these sorts of questions. But 10 years ago, when he first retired, he thought he had it all figured out. He and his wife moved to a beach house in Jacksonville, Florida. Which, they quickly discovered, turned out to be a boring beach house in Jacksonville. “We’d get up in the morning and walk the beach, come back, look at one another, go back in the evening, walk the beach. You’d see the same people on the beach every morning and every evening. It just wasn’t a lifestyle that I wanted to continue for however many years I have left,” Smoke said.

So they reassessed and hit the road: traveling all over Florida looking for a place where there was more to do. “We kept coming back to visit our friends here in The Villages, and we were so impressed with, not the housing per se, because there’s a lot nicer houses out in other communities, but with the activities”—that is, the long litany of club meetings, games, sporting events, and other goings-on heralded every day in the local newspaper, The Village Sun. It sounded wonderful, but they worried there was a hidden catch, so they hedged their bets by buying a smaller villa than they otherwise would have. “This place is almost like a dream that’s too good to be true,” Smoke said. “And so you keep saying, ‘There’s got to be something wrong.’”

It’s not hard to find reasons why someone might approach The Villages with skepticism. For one thing, the cost of living does feel too low to be true: housing is relatively cheap; the $145 amenities fee (plus a small bond) covers everything from golf to fitness centers to swimming pools; and, during happy hour, beer costs even less than soda. For another, the place gets interesting press. If you’re younger than The Villages’ target demographic, and you knew its name prior to reading this, it was probably because the media gleefully reported on its sexually transmitted infection rate, which spiked in the late aughts. Articles and television segments about The Villages tend to fixate on these sorts of lurid details—if not the STIs, then the colorful bar scene or the fact that The Villages has placards set up that celebrate fake historical events. There are also more significant reasons for a potential resident to worry, however. For instance, The Villages’ developer runs various arms of the local media, including television, newspaper, and radio, which tend to focus on nonnews or, worse, serve as pro-Villages marketing.^* Perhaps the most serious charge against the community can be found in journalist Andrew Blechman’s book Leisureville (the source of some of the historical facts in this chapter), which contends that The Villages, with its lack of children, functions as a haven from local school taxes. Ultimately, the perhaps unfair sense you can get of The Villages by reading about it and watching the news is that it’s decadent—in both the “pleasure-seeking” meaning of the term as well as in the decline-and-fall sense, which is what happens to societies that refuse to pay for the education of their children.

And yet, Smoke and his wife moved in to “check it out and find out what was wrong,” as he described it 10 years ago. After six years, they upgraded to a newer, slightly larger home, and settled in for the long haul. If there was a catch to the place, they hadn’t discovered it. Property values had stayed strong, even through the housing bust that had left the rest of Florida reeling. The aspects of Villages life they signed on for never diminished: the cart paths stayed clean, the grass stayed green, and the other residents remained as friendly and engaged as ever. Most important, The Villages had provided an answer to Smoke’s question of identity. It wasn’t that the community provided its residents with replacements to fill in the void left by their primary careers. Rather, The Villages diminished the need for such replacements through a form of imposed equality that, were it to occur in any other kind of community, would be considered radical.

In a world where you spend less time in your car than your golf cart, the comestibles are uniformly affordable, and houses are, for the most part, strikingly similar, conspicuous consumption falls off the map, to an extent. The most ostentatious thing a Villager can do is trick out a golf cart and hope people notice. (Everyone there has seen the cart that looks exactly like a yellow Hummer, faithfully reproduced at one-third scale.) Or if you want to, you can buy one of the community’s hulking, “Premier” homes; most prospective Villagers, seeking to downsize, chose instead to live in modest, single-level houses. And that’s about it: there are few other major class signifiers, at least of the sort money can buy, to be had. Meanwhile, there are many other luxuries to be enjoyed, but they’re all communal in nature. Regardless of income or savings, everyone shares the gleaming roads, cart paths, health clubs, pools, and decent, cheap restaurants. The golf remains free at many courses, and it’s affordable at the rest. At the polo grounds, everyone can support the imported hometown riders—an extravagance for the whole community.

“The developer here just had a vision,” said Jane Boldrick, one of Smoke’s neighbors. “He was going to provide a place where people who had had careers, where you have pensions and benefits, plus Social Security, you could live what he calls the lifestyle of the millionaire.” Another Villager even averred that it would be possible to live on Social Security alone in The Villages, assuming you owned your house outright.

To Smoke, who had lived for decades as part of a rigid, military pecking order, the resulting sense of equality was a major part of what made him want to stay. “Everybody’s the same. That’s what I really enjoy,” he said. “No one ever says to me: ‘What did you do before you moved here?’ There’s no social hierarchy here that says, ‘Well, I was the director of umpty-ump. Some people can get pretty carried away with those kinds of titles, or so I’ve found. But here, no one even cares what you did before you lived here.”

In terms of its leveling effect, the closest analogue to The Villages isn’t an independent living facility but rather a college dorm where the offspring of royalty intermingle with kids from all walks of life. With all that equality, all that activity, and all those material comforts, the chief psychological problem of retirement becomes far less pressing. Socially, it no longer matters if you’re rich or middle-class, nor does it matter what you once did for work. When, as Smoke said, nobody cares if you were the “director of umpty-ump,” the need to define yourself as what you were during your primary career falls away. Crucially, you become not who you were in the past but rather what you do in the present. And because, more often than not, “what you do in the present” becomes nearly synonymous with what one chooses to do socially, people who move to The Villages often discover that their social lives flourish. A full schedule of get-togethers is the norm; even more so on special occasions. One New Year’s Eve, in the afternoon, Lee, the mother and grandmother, respectively, of the heroes of the aforementioned golf cart chase, discussed her plans for the night.

“We’re going to go to different houses. Everyone has to bring something,” she said. At the first house, the hostess would provide wine, “and the rest of us will just arrive with an empty wine glass. And then we’ll go from her house to another house for hors d’oeuvres, then another house for coffee and desserts. And then the last house is champagne only. And we never leave the neighborhood. And it’s so funny. Everybody’s out walking, yelling. Some are in golf carts. Some aren’t.” She paused to laugh, then stopped. “We had a death once, early on. And they had a celebration-of-life party at the house. And I was walking down the street with a casserole and I said, ‘It’s like Little House on the Prairie.’”

In “The Villages life,” as residents frequently refer to it, people know where they stand with their neighbors, and they know what to do on a given day. The Villages, then, is a coherent response to the fuzziness of postcareer existence. But is it truly compelling? Set aside the majority of people beyond The Villages’ gates who would prefer to age in their own longtime homes and communities. To the subset of people willing to uproot in retirement, how seductive is it, exactly?

Judging by the testimony of Jodie Elliot, who lives in a neighborhood just outside The Villages, the answer is highly. Elliot and her husband are in their mid-40s. When her parents moved down to The Villages from a suburb of Boston, the Elliots decided to follow. But they have two kids, and children are only allowed in The Villages as visitors. So they did the next best thing to moving in—they built a house just outside The Villages’ gates, where they could bide their time. Architecturally, their home greatly resembles those inside The Villages, with a screened-in, lanai-style patio and stucco walls. The main difference is that it’s bigger and has a second story, where bedrooms and a dual-purpose play and study room can be found.

At first, Elliot said, “we thought we needed a better school system. We thought we needed to be closer to an airport.” But once they traveled down to scope out what they thought would probably be a vacation home, they decided, “No, we can live here! Let’s live here.” Now, Elliot homeschools the kids while her husband, Robert, works from a home office.

“We hope to retire early. We, throughout the years, have decided like not to have cable, not to have the latest and greatest cars… because we’d rather save for retirement, and retire early. That would be better to us than having all that stuff. I mean, we do pretty well anyways. But if we can retire early… then we can play! We can ride bikes and do whatever!”

The Elliots already had golf carts and access to The Villages facilities, thanks to guest passes procured from her parents. But still, they yearned to be inside the gates.

Their daughter had just turned 10, she said. “So we can move in, like, less than nine years, because she has to be nineteen, and she’s our youngest.” (Adults between 19 and 55 can live in The Villages, just not own property there.) “So we’re talking eight years, ten months—What time is it?—three hours. Yeah, we’re definitely moving into The Villages.”

Although Elliot was half-joking about counting down the days until her kids came of age, the fact remained that The Villages exerted a magnetic pull on her, even at the young age of 45. From a perspective like hers, The Villages is more than heaven’s waiting room—it’s the end goal.

It’s hard to overstate how compelling The Villages is to people like Elliot. Prior to the release of a new Apple gadget, people will sometimes camp out for days in front of the company’s stores. When the Elliots finally make it into The Villages, they will have camped outside for over a decade.

More Equal Than Others

Though Villagers find their community both coherent and highly compelling, there’s one good reason why it can’t be the answer to the question of how we’ll all live tomorrow. Life inside The Villages may simply work, but the relationship between communities of this sort and everyone outside their gates is intrinsically unstable, and likely to become more so.

To return to our earlier analogy, one aspect of the American frontier too easily forgotten is the dozens of experiments in living that were once tried there—by transcendentalists, utopian socialists, free lovers, vegetarians (once seen as very strange), anarchists, and many others. In almost every case, the most notable exception being the Mormon settlement of Salt Lake City, these communities failed. Whether it was due to personality clashes, power struggles, natural disasters, war, disease, or simply the slow, westward creep of American society, frontier experiments died and disappeared. In the end, the only communities that survived were those that proved stable in the face of wild nature and human nature alike.

Settlements on the frontier of our new, longer lives are no different. Human nature will prevail above the best-laid plans of housing developers—even at The Villages, which isn’t all happy hours and holes-in-one. There’s a dark side to the place that makes me question its long-term survivability. And it starts with the kids who stole Ken Sr. and Lee’s golf cart.

Immediately after tackling the biggest of the golf cart thieves, Craig, the college athlete, stood up and dragged him by his sweatshirt back to Ken’s car, where a passing woman stopped to alternately berate the kid and warn Craig not to let him go. Meanwhile, Ken got a hold of his wife, Jackie, who called the police. They soon arrived in three cruisers.

“The kid’s cursing, and one of the other kids are bleeding,” Ken said. The third had hightailed it, and so the police asked one of the two in custody what the third looked like and headed into town to see if they could find any likely suspects.

“They picked up this big kid that was in town,” Ken said, who turned out to be the wrong guy. They brought him back and got the right one.

It turned out that two of the kids were brothers whose father had just gotten out of jail that morning. The third was in his grandfather’s custody. The golf cart theft was part of a miniature juvenile crime wave. “What they do is they steal the golf carts, and they either run them out of gas or until they have no more juice, and then run them into the lake or a pond or something,” Jackie said.

The kids in question were apparently out to do some damage that day. The driver “was such a punk,” Ken said. “As they got him, he says, ‘That thing’s never going to run the same. We took it over these speed bumps.’” Ultimately, a judge required the kids to write a letter of apology, which Jackie said never arrived.

“So that’s basically the story,” Ken said. “We got the cart back, and we’re heroes.” True, but one question remains: what, beyond a normal teenage appreciation for chaos, made kids in The Villages want to inflict so much damage? Clearly, there were multiple possible factors at work, including socioeconomic issues and disrupted family lives. There’s reason to believe something else was going on, however. At The Villages and other retirement communities like it, although the amenities may all be first class, children are second-class citizens.

Two-and-a-half hours southeast of The Villages, there’s a 55-and-over gated community called Woodfield, where children are not allowed to spend more than 30 overnight visits per year, but day visits are unlimited. Until November 2013, Bhaskar Barot, 63, lived there peacefully, occasionally babysitting his four-year-old granddaughter at his house. But on the morning of November 14, that peace was shattered. Barot woke up to discover huge, yellow letters spray-painted, in what looked like the unsteady handwriting of a kindergartener, across the hood and sides of his Toyota Camry and his wife’s grey minivan. The graffiti read, again and again: “NO KIDS.”

In Leisureville, Blechman notes a general sense of antipathy toward local kids at The Villages. “I’m always getting in trouble for trying to skateboard there,” one preteen boy from an adjacent town told him. “I haven’t seen a sign saying ‘No Skateboarding,’ but they take your skateboard away anyway.” The issue isn’t that people who seek out age-segregated communities are child haters—for the most part, anyway. But, as a retirement housing developer told Blechman, “they don’t want somebody else’s grandkids peeing in the pool. Kids can be messy.”

But kids are also inevitable. Like most age-segregated communities, The Villages offered no schools during its first 17 years of operation. As it grew, however, filling up with stores, restaurants, and theaters at the same time that the developer’s operations became more and more complex, enticing people to work there became an issue. In less ambitious gated retirement communities, workers routinely drive in from the outside and drive home at the end of the day. But The Villages sprawled too wide and too far from other population centers to support that model. Employees needed to be able to live within The Villages, and their offspring had to be cared for and educated during the day. The Villages, to its credit, didn’t skimp on its obligation: it built charter schools for those kids—really nice ones. The multistory school buildings are gleaming edifices, and the grass on the athletic fields surrounding them is every bit as lush as the nearby golf courses.

Those schools and fields testify to the fact that no community can survive without children. But except for kids of Villages employees, resident children are still verboten there—for reasons of peace and quiet, adult conversation, and, most justifiably, a respite from an increasingly youth-focused media and commercial landscape. Villagers don’t just enjoy the “lifestyle of a millionaire” by sharing luxury products and avoiding comparison to the trappings of the super rich. They also gain value by dodging the insults of a culture that unthinkingly praises youth and unflinchingly disparages age. In this respect, The Villages can feel like an island of sanity. But excluding the young comes at a price. When kids are raised in places that are intrinsically biased against them, it shouldn’t be surprising that some develop a chip on the shoulder. And those golf carts look awfully fun to drive.

It may seem unfair to blame the rules of a retirement community for teenage vandalism and destruction—and indeed, plenty of age-integrated communities also have their share of young miscreants. But consider: not only are age-restricted retirement communities the only federally protected form of housing discrimination in the United States, but they are also deeply alien relative to almost every other form of community that has ever existed. Even those experimental, 19th-century frontier towns included children. When strange conduct emanates from strange social structures, it’s not unreasonable to wonder to what extent those structures are responsible.

I’m not overly concerned that the residents of gated retirement communities and a handful of teenagers might wage an eternal prank war against each other. Rather, I’m worried that the antagonism on display represents the potential for something far wider-reaching and worse. Will we look back on these incidents of theft and vandalism as the first shots in a much larger intergenerational conflict—guerrilla attacks against the enemy’s mode of transportation? It’s easy to imagine such small acts of resentment writ large, especially as the older population expands and younger demographics change.

Ever since it was first defined as a worthy-yet-pitiable problem at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, the population of “the aged” has enjoyed one distinct advantage over other groups that draw assistance from tax revenues: at some point, almost everyone joins the club. Consequently, to the younger people paying the bills, the support of older generations feels not just altruistic but also like an investment in themselves.

For this arrangement to endure, however, younger people must continue to see their future selves in their present elders, an act of recognition that will soon come under demographic stress. As the United States becomes a majority-minority nation and similar trends unfold in Europe and elsewhere, most population growth will come from first- and second-generation immigrants, a consequence of immigration itself as well as the fact that immigrant families tend to have higher birth rates. Meanwhile, it’s a deeply unfair truth that white older adults in the United States, Europe, and Australia have higher life expectancies than most^* other races in these countries. The result of both trends will be older generations that are far whiter than younger ones. There’s no way around the fact that when tomorrow’s younger people look at their elders, the faces that stare back will appear strange to many of them.

Now, to add to this possible source of contention between generations, mix in an actual one. The Villages, as a beacon of narrative, reinforces the widespread perception that older adults are not just needy but also greedy: resource-hungry golf aficionados enjoying the “lifestyle of a millionaire” thanks to payroll taxes imposed on working-age families. Worse still is the implication, not entirely without merit, that retirement destinations function as school tax havens. Already, the more older adults living in a community, the less it spends on schools, an effect that is particularly pronounced in places where the older population is largely white and the school-age population is black or Latino. These trends go back to the first major retirement community, Del Webb’s Sun City. As Blechman recounts in Leisureville, over a dozen years starting in 1962, Sun City residents voted down 17 school bond measures, eventually causing a budget shortfall so severe that the local school district could only accommodate its students in staggered time blocks. The district ultimately deannexed Sun City in order to regain control.

Finally, add in the biggest stressor of all and pray that the contract between generations doesn’t break: supporting tomorrow’s enormous older population will be very expensive. Perhaps the most systematic accounting of everything that can go wrong given our upcoming demographic reality (and assuming few changes to the way old age works) can be found in economist Larry Kotlikoff and journalist Scott Burns’s gloomy book The Coming Generational Storm. In it, they make the mathematical argument that if things continue as they have, with older ranks swelling, birth rates waning, and medical costs increasing, US children born in 2006 or later will have to pay double-sized tax rates just to keep Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid afloat. In other countries such as Japan, where the demographics are more severe and national debt is higher, the tax situation could be far worse.

Already, there are those who would advocate extreme action—the rationing of health care for older people; the diminishment or eradication of Social Security, its equivalent in countries other than the United States, and public pensions. The effect would be catastrophic: an amplification of the ongoing, global shift of risk from the collective to the older individual. That, given the breakdown of the safety net once formed by family members all over the world, is a fancy way of saying overcrowded, understaffed nursing homes and homeless elderly people in the streets.

Currently, the “greedy geezer” image is balanced against that of the loving grandparent, the future self, and the worthy, poor senior. But given the demographic and economic trends at hand, the idea of a resource-hungry elder class, unstinting on its own comforts yet miserly toward children, has the potential to turn toxic. Should that framing of old age gain traction, it could provoke a revolt among young taxpayers. It’s worth mentioning that the kids who stole Ken Sr.’s golf cart are now all of voting age.

Of course, the senior voting bloc (which is less unified than many think but will likely congeal should Social Security or Medicare come under attack) will fight mightily against any threat to its benefits—toward which, thanks to FDR’s initial framing of Social Security, it feels a deep ownership. It would vote in self-defense, and soon we would have a civil war of sorts: not brother against brother but grandson against grandmother. Everyone would be so busy taking sides and defending territory that we would forget to push forward the frontier of longevity and fail to work together to make it livable. Any gains we’re currently making in the fight against ageism—in the workforce, media portrayals, marketing, and product and environmental design—could easily disappear in this course of events, as the young turn their backs on the old.

The lifestyle represented by The Villages, then, though coherent and compelling to the people who live there, drives home an image of later life that is likely to lead to a poorer (in every sense of the term) old age than we want or deserve. It’s unstable in the face of current political and demographic reality, and businesses should be aware that to support such a vision in products and marketing, or even to assume that typical older adults desire such a lifestyle, is to veer toward a world where their customers are having their funding, jobs, and other forms of support pulled out from beneath them. (And on a more personal level, business leaders might want to reflect on the fact that intergenerational resentment makes for awkward holiday dinners.)

Happily, for companies hoping to understand how tomorrow’s older consumers might want to live in the future, there is another model that can serve as a lodestar. It addresses many of the same demands as The Villages. However, because its members still live and interact with other age groups, it does so without painting older people as “greedy geezers” desperate to escape the society they rely upon. This vision of later life is perhaps the most radical solution anyone’s ever come up with to promote the care and happiness of older adults, and yet, its profile is low. In fact, it could very well exist in your own city and you might not even know it. That’s what happened to me: this new sort of village first sprung up right under my nose, in a burg of Boston that I can see right from my office window, and I didn’t catch on for years.

The Other Village

Joan Doucette was sipping coffee in the small café on the ground floor of the David H. Koch Center for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, with her bicycle resting on its kickstand next to her. The Institute tends to frown on bringing bicycles into buildings, but only a hard soul could have stopped Doucette from wheeling in hers, with its ribbons streaming from the handlebars, white tires, and a front basket filled with yellow and pink flowers. The demeanor of the 75-year-old cyclist was just as sunny. Doucette peered up from what looked like, and turned out to be, a travel itinerary for a trip to Chicago.

“There’s going to be 20 of us going,” she said. “We’re going to take a river trip. We’re going to go to the museums… then we’re going to the Russian tearoom. So we’re very busy. And then we’ve got a tour of the skyscrapers. And then a lot of us are going to the Frank Lloyd Wright house. So very busy.”

Doucette spoke with, at least to this unschooled ear, a highly refined English accent, redolent of her native Surrey, where she was born in 1938. As a young woman, she trained to become a nanny—”that was the only way we could really travel”—and became involved with the US embassy in London, which assigned her to foreign posts where she cared for diplomats’ families. When the father of one of those families died, however, she moved with the mother and kids from Hungary to Dedham, Massachusetts. “I was their nanny until I married and their mother remarried. And those children are now in their fifties and we’re still very close,” she said.

In 1970, Doucette began a storied career at MIT, moving over the course of years between jobs in the Institute’s libraries, alumni relations department, Center for Transportation Studies (now the Center for Transportation and Logistics, home of the AgeLab), industrial relations and corporate development, and more. She retired at 62, after having worked at MIT for 25 years.

“What am I going to do with my days?” she wondered. The answer that presented itself seemed merely opportune at the time. She had no idea how revolutionary it would become.

Shortly after retiring, Doucette and her husband moved to a new apartment on Beacon Hill, one of the oldest, and in many ways ritziest, areas in Boston. They moved in part because they had been living in a tiny apartment, and when Doucette retired, she came home with box upon box of possessions she’d been keeping in her office, for which she now had no room. In her new neighborhood, she didn’t know anyone who lived nearby, and so she worried about her social life. Soon, however, an answer came in the mail. She received an invitation to join something called the Beacon Hill Village. “My husband said, ‘This is for you.’”

The Beacon Hill Village wasn’t really a village per se. Rather, it appeared to be a loose confederation of older people who already lived on Beacon Hill, who, instead of moving out to a community or facility devoted to old age, wanted to stay in their own homes, interact with their longstanding group of friends, eat at their own favorite restaurants, and attend their favorite local cultural events for as long as humanly possible.

Initially, the idea was focused on needs. Many of the Beacon Hill Village’s founders had seen care gone wrong and resolved to find a better way. “Each of us had witnessed firsthand the distress our relatives experienced as they aged: a mother in a retirement community in Florida who felt lonely and abandoned; a parent in a nursing home, marginalized and overdrugged; an uncle with very limited means and no immediate family to help out,” Susan McWhinney Morse, one of the founding members, has written.

In 1999, when those Beacon Hill neighbors first began to consider building something different, the instructions pervasive in the culture were clear. When you grew old, whether it was an independent or assisted living facility, a country-club retirement community or a nursing home, there was only one thing to do—move.

“Why,” writes McWhinney-Morse, “should we have to pull up our roots from a community we love just to be ‘safe’? Why did we need to lose our history, our friends, our identity? Why did we have to compromise our lifestyles before it became absolutely necessary, just to fit into a pre-designed community?… Why would we ask our children whose lives were already hectic with jobs and children to take us on, too? And what about financial considerations? Moving is an option available only to a small group of us who could afford it. Although we conceded that warmer climates and segregated communities were good choices for some people, they were not a viable or attractive option for us.”

The solution they came up with couldn’t exactly do everything for everyone, but it was a start. From the very beginning, the Beacon Hill Village’s members agreed to help each other with the small things that come up with age and to help each other find help for the big things. Today, thanks to a force of dedicated volunteers comprising both members and younger folks, Beacon Hill is able to offer aid with occasional tasks like grocery shopping, home visits, pet care, light housework, and repair. For issues that pose a greater challenge, be they health or caregiving related, financial in nature, or something else, the organization curates lists of trusted service providers, who often provide Beacon Hill members with discounts.

“I’ve learned that if I don’t know what to do about something, I just call them. The worst that can happen is that they’ll do the research,” said a member. She described buying a sleek new television for her home and carrying it home from the store. When she prepared to set it up, however, she realized that the big, clunky TV she was replacing, which sat on a high shelf, was far too bulky to take down by herself. So she called the Beacon Hill Village, which connected her with a young, local woman who removed the old TV and set up the new one, wiring and all. It cost an extra fee beyond Beacon Hill’s annual dues of $675, but she found the experience highly satisfactory, because she felt she could trust the woman whom Beacon Hill had recommended.

Beacon Hill also provides access to vetted drivers—still helpful, even in this age of Uber, when it comes to transporting elderly individuals who require special consideration while getting into and out of cars—and far more. “They’ll take you shopping for your groceries. And then if you’re having an operation they’ll come and pick you up and take you home,” said Doucette. “When I had the new knee put in last September, somebody came and picked me up.”

But perhaps the most essential aspect of life in the Beacon Hill Village is what might at first sound like the least important: the fun.

Doucette, an immigrant from the United Kingdom, has no immediate family in the United States, and so upon retiring, “I thought I’m going to be lonely,” she said. As a result, when the invitation to join the Beacon Hill Village arrived, she didn’t see it in terms of its potential to fulfill medical or caregiving needs but rather social ones.

She and her husband joined the first year the Beacon Hill Village became open to the public, in 2002. At that time, it was still little more than the fanciful idea of a dozen-or-so retirees. But the Village soon began building out its membership base as well as relationships with local, trusted vendors, providers, and contractors. Doucette began building as well. Her contribution was to the social schedule, which, these days, is full.

“On Mondays we have a movie group that come in my house, and we have tea, and I stream a movie. And there’s about ten of us do that. And on Tuesdays, twice a month, there’s another group that meets down at 75 Chestnut”—a snug Beacon Hill restaurant—“and we talk about anything we want to, mostly about theater and movies. And that’s called Terrible Tuesdays. And then every Wednesday a group meets on Charles Street in one of the restaurants there. And we talk world affairs mostly… And then on Thursdays I got my husband to go and do First Drink, because that’s for the men… He’s not a joiner. So I managed to get him to do that.” Doucette’s groups are so popular, she explained, that she’s started to set up satellite gatherings in other parts of the city. “And then this weekend we’re off to Chicago.”

My immediate response was skeptical when I first heard murmurs that something special was going on right across the river from my MIT office. Older people helping each other as needed sounded great in theory, but the pragmatist in me made me wonder how long such an altruistic collective could really last. After all, none of the many utopian frontier societies of the Pioneer Era survived as such. The Beacon Hill Village, “erected” by and for people with significant needs, seemed destined to wind up in the well-intentioned-but-naïve section of the dustbin of history.

But after a few years, the Beacon Hill Village was not exactly foundering like I had feared. Quite the opposite: it had grown in size and reputation, and almost every day people were mentioning it to me as a new model of how aging could work. As time went on, I grew quite bullish on Beacon Hill’s prospects and viewed it as an alarm bell—perhaps even a death knell—for any old-style, age-segregated community that failed to take notice.

Today, however, it is clear that communities such as The Villages in Florida have done just fine without taking one single iota of notice. But so, fascinatingly, has the Beacon Hill philosophy, which has spread far from the old-money Bostonian knoll on which it spawned. In the United States, a national organization, the Village to Village Network, has emerged to facilitate the development of Beacon Hill-esque in situ communities. According to the Network, at this time of writing there are 190 villages built on the “Beacon Hill model,” as it’s become known, in all but four states, and 150 more are in development. The phenomenon is spreading internationally as well. At the AgeLab, I’ve personally welcomed groups from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China, all of whom have dropped by on the course of pilgrimages to Beacon Hill, where they hoped to see where and how it all started.

As these Villages have sprung up over the past decade and a half, several themes have emerged. One is the spontaneous development of a pay-it-forward ethos. Paid Village staffs tend to be very small, averaging between one and two-and-half full-time employees, and so the majority of what Villages provide their members comes from volunteers, most of whom are other members. Typically, younger, healthier members—often people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who have joined for the social aspects of Village life—provide occasional care to the Village’s older members, who are often in their eighties and nineties. This care isn’t usually medical in nature or extremely painstaking, such as care with activities of daily living, which usually requires help from professionals or family members. Rather, Villagers help each other with the hard-to-predict issues that inevitably come up over the course of a full life.

At the headquarters of the San Francisco Village, in the city’s oft-fog-shrouded Inner Richmond neighborhood, one highly engaged member, Bill Haskell, explained that he had originally joined his Village hoping to “pay it forward” in the local older community. Fate had other plans. “Within 30 days of joining the Village, my partner found out he had to have open-heart surgery. So we needed not to volunteer, we needed help. I needed a lot of help because I’m his primary caregiver. Bob had a difficult surgery with a lot of complications. He was in the hospital for two weeks”—far longer than the three days in the hospital that doctors had told them to expect. “Then there’s the home period. And so I called the Village.” The San Francisco Village provided Bill with vetted referrals for home care agencies, and for times when Bill needed to run out to the store or the gym but no professional caregiver was scheduled, the Village sent over a volunteer to sit with Bob. “People who are members of the Village brought over meals when I couldn’t cook any longer,” Bill said. “People we didn’t know brought over dinner for us.”

As appealing as this pay-it-forward mentality may sound on paper, there are drawbacks. For one thing, it’s hard to market. The Villages in Florida started as a leisure community and only later added caregiving facilities and services; as a result, no one thinks of it as a place where older people go to get taken care of—although it is, and they do. Meanwhile, Beacon Hill started as an organization devoted to mutual care and only later took on its social-club vibe. That intrinsic focus on care can scare off potential members who don’t think of themselves as patients. At one San Francisco gathering of members of Stitch, the dating site, the handful of people who knew about the San Francisco Village frowned when its name came up. There, and in many other cities, the most common refrain I hear is, “Oh, isn’t that, you know, for ‘old people’?” This sentiment, coming from members of a dating site reserved for the 50-plus, was especially telling. Socially, Stitch performs a service similar to that of the Village to Village Network: creating new, local social networks out of whole cloth by facilitating the making of friends, socialization, and travel. And yet, there was a serious perception barrier preventing people—even those evidently quite happy to join a service explicitly for older adults—from seeing themselves in a club designed to provide care for its oldest and frailest.

Not only does the Beacon Hill ethos sometimes come across as less than compelling to potential members; it also doesn’t offer an entirely coherent solution to the problem of identity in retirement. In many ways, however, this is a feature, not a failure. At The Villages in Florida, residents find themselves able to shed their former identities but only because their new community is cut off from society at large and embraces a single, specific lifestyle. Beacon Hill, in contrast, embraces complexity. Members are free to not just pursue a leisure-oriented idea of retirement but other aspirations and motivations as well, including caregiving, interacting with other generations, patronizing cultural institutions, volunteering, and working. After Joan Doucette’s retirement, for instance, she returned to take on a part-time office job at the lab of Bob Langer, one of MIT’s foremost luminaries. (“Oh, tissue engineering he mostly does,” she said, airily.) With the active social role she plays at Beacon Hill, she said, “I don’t know how I have time to come into work.”

But if Beacon Hill’s embrace of complexity over clarity makes sense for its members, it also poses a liability in terms of defining and marketing a new way of life in old age. It’s hard for Beacon Hill’s subtle, complicated message to compete with the volume, vividness, and simplicity of the story broadcast by The Villages. There is a way Beacon Hill can fight back, however: by doubling down on its own model and offering even more services and activities. Increasing the number of social events it puts on, in particular, would create the opportunity for those in the midst of a gradual transition away from a primary career to wrap themselves in new interests. And a wider variety of workshops, classes, clubs, and volunteer opportunities would increase the visibility of the model—turning Beacon Hill into, well, a beacon on a hill.

The barrier to achieving the kind of scale needed to do so is considerable, however. Joanne Cooper, part of the membership committee at Beacon Hill, said that bringing in new members is a continual challenge. “Two new members come in, four leave, one way or another,” whether they’re “moving to a more structured setting, or, unfortunately, passing away.” The San Francisco Village, which is relatively new, has just 300 members. Kate Hoepke, its leader, said she was “very intrigued with scale. If this works for 300, it can work for 3,000.” Nationwide, she said, Village memberships can be measured in the low tens of thousands. “You know, it should be ten times that many.” She wonders if the issue is due to a lack of funding or the need for strong visionaries. Perhaps the Village to Village Network’s perplexing pattern of growth—fast to spread across the United States and the globe, yet slow to flourish in sheer membership—may come down to the fact that “so much has happened in such a short period of time. That infrastructure isn’t there yet.”

She’s right. For radical, new ways of living in old age, radical, new kinds of physical, institutional, and cultural infrastructure are all needed. In the Beacon Hill Village and others like it, we’re probably only seeing the beginnings of that construction. Still, it’s an encouraging start.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Today, most older people want to stay connected to their community, often while still working, despite any disabilities or health issues that arise. The vision of old age that comes closest to providing that, on offer at Beacon Hill, has yet to achieve the comprehensive coherence and seduction sold in Florida at The Villages. The Beacon Hill ethos resembles Harold Schwartz’s trailer park in the 1970s: it’s got a heck of a lot of potential but isn’t yet drawing in droves of people. It took free golf to launch The Villages onto its spectacular growth trajectory. It isn’t quite clear what exactly will do the equivalent for the Village to Village Network or even whether that organization will be the one to ultimately prevail in tomorrow’s contest to frame successful, in-home, in-community aging.

The Beacon Hill Village and others like it aren’t perfect. They’re too small at present. They don’t leverage mobile technology as well as they could to improve connectedness, which will be an absolute must as they court tech-savvier baby boomers. They’re limited mainly to urban areas, and they tend to skew middle-class-and-up, leaving a lot of people out. Still, as new generations of longevity-economy products make it easier to do more in old age than merely recreate and relax, it’s easy to envision something resembling the Beacon Hill Village emerging from our current state of frontier chaos.

The most important aspect of that something would be its long-term stability. Recall the golf-cart chase at The Villages; the “No Kids” graffiti in the nearby Woodfield. Intergenerational tension is endemic to such visions of old age. A future built according to these age-segregationist ideals would be a poor place in which to grow old. It would also be a poor place to do business with the fastest-growing consumer demographic: its skills and insights squandered in walled-off communities, its pocketbooks depleted because no one will hire or fund people known for being consumers, not producers; takers, not givers.

At the Villages, “There’s an awful lot of talent that hasn’t been utilized,” said Smoke Hickman, who defies the rule by serving on several directorial boards outside of the community. There, there are a handful of examples like him and Caroline Reibholtz, a guardian ad litem for children in the local court system. But by and large, in great part because The Villages is so insular, the world beyond its gates loses sight of its individual residents’ considerable virtues and capabilities, perceiving instead the same broad, tired, narrative-constrained picture of old age.

Meanwhile, at the Beacon Hill Village, Joan Doucette recounted the ending of a simple dinner out on Boston’s Charles Street. “The young waitress said, ‘Oh, come back again,’” Doucette recalled. “She said, ‘I really enjoyed having you for dinner, you’ve been such fun.’ And that’s nice, that a young person would say that these old geezers here were having a good time and she liked serving us.”

One 2014 study found that a quarter of Beacon-Hill-model Villages are actively working to improve their communities’ attitudes toward older adults, a decent rate for small organizations that rely on a largely volunteer workforce. And every day, by going out and creating a positive impression on the community around them, the members of Beacon Hill and other Villages built on its model dispel the old myth that elders are unfit to comingle with society.

If you, like me, want to live in a world where older adults and their kids aren’t antagonists but rather invest in each other, work for each other, and help each other build things, then the Village movement, as opposed to the Villages, is a good guide to follow—in the United States and around the world. Villages built on the Beacon Hill model are finding fertile ground in countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany, where, as in the United States, older adults hope to avoid relying on their children. Other experiments in age integration are springing up as well. In the sphere of caregiving, for instance, one fascinating program in Germany and Switzerland, known as “Wohnen für Hilfe,” or Housing for Help, subsidizes the rent of carefully vetted students who want to live in older people’s homes and help out with minor chores. A similar program, Homeshare, exists in the United Kingdom. Another law provides the 82 percent of German elders who say they do not want to live in a nursing home with a grant of up to €10,000 to establish shared, community apartments, with a monthly subsidy of up to €200 per tenant.

Wherever your older consumer lives, it will be a good bet that the future will be more age integrated, not segregated. Products built with this assumption in mind are likely to fare better than their rivals, especially as connected technologies and sharing-economy services make it easier than ever for older adults to get out, do things, work, and meet people in their longtime communities and also online. If you’re selling a retirement financial product, for instance, do your commercials show people walking on a beach or a golf course or involved in their community? Meanwhile, if you’re building such a product, do you include in your portfolio real-estate investment trusts that are heavy on senior-living and retirement communities? There will of course be a market for such products in the near future, but a widespread shift toward aging-in-place may make it smaller than the raw demographics would otherwise suggest.

In terms of tomorrow’s narrative of old age, there is still the potential for things to go wrong. It won’t matter that 9 people out of 10 eschew retirement destinations: if business, government, and media messaging insists that normal, later-life behavior is to live in age-segregated communities while spending other people’s hard-earned money, then that story could well prevail in spite of reality.

Products oriented toward a new vision of aging, however, will tell a different tale. And a more connected, age-integrated generation of older adults will act as its own cultural herald, constantly disproving misconceptions about the capabilities and motivations of older people. As this process unfolds, older adults will become more attractive as hires and business partners and more sought after as consumers. In the following chapters, I’ll explain how businesses can serve those consumers and build toward this new vision of old age. Life on the frontier may feel awkward now, but it never stays that way for long.

* In July 2016, for example, the cover story of the newspaper’s monthly magazine supplement celebrated “25 Years of Hometown Banking” by Citizens First Bank, which supplies most of the mortgages in town and which is a subsidiary of The Villages’ developer.

* One notable exception to this trend in the United States is what demographers call the “Hispanic paradox,” in which first-generation Hispanic immigrants tend to live longer than whites. This advantage, whether due to a biased sample (healthier individuals tend to be the ones able to immigrate) or lifestyle, disappears by the second generation.