Freeway of the future?

Freeway of the future?

Why are retirees locking themselves away in leisureville?

William Hanley, Financial Post Published: Saturday, May 17, 2008

Had Walt Disney envisioned the housing development of 2008, he might easily have conjured up The Villages north of Orlando in central Florida. Had George Orwell envisioned the housing development of 2008, it also might have been The Villages, a sprawling age-segregated and gated retirement community that could have the motto: In Golf We Trust.

Indeed, after reading Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, I'm inclined to believe The Villages is Disney's Magic Kingdom for the over-55s with an undertone of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a place where utopia meets dystopia, where endless leisure coexists quite comfortably with numbing, autocratic conformity.

Author Andrew D. Blechman, a young New Englander, at first can't believe the descriptions of The Villages provided by a retired older neighbour who is moving there with his wife. They seem so over the top and kind of creepy. After all, the largest gated community in the world has 75,000 residents (with another 35,000 on the way), spans three counties, two zip codes and 8,000 hectares, sports three dozen golf courses and has 160 kilometres of trails for golf carts, which are the primary mode of transportation for the Villagers.

In this totalitarian gerontopia for retirees, residents can drive their golf carts to movies, supermarkets, churches, recreation centres, clinics, dozens of pools or two crime-free "village" centres. Just about everything can be found in this peculiar paradise except for one thing: children.

The Villages, like thousands of gated retirement (and non-retirement) communities across North America, offers residents not necessarily a world without children, but a world with children on demand. A person must be at least 55 to buy a home in The Villages and no one under 19 may live there. Children can visit, but their stays are limited to 30 days a year.
The rules of The Villages are strictly enforced:Weeds must be removed, lawns -- at least 51% sod -- edged and hedges over four-feet high are prohibited. So, too, are clotheslines and individual mailboxes. Pets are limited to two per house, window air conditioners are forbidden, Halloween trick-or-treaters are not allowed.

And big neighbour, like Orwell's Big Brother, is always watching. Golf-cart passersby are sure to complain if these and other covenants are broken. Further, the local newspaper, The Daily Sun, is a junior league Ministry of Truth of the corporation that runs The Villages, so bad news is no news.

Though Blechman was both dismayed and amused by descriptions of The Villages, he decided to visit with his older friends and find out for himself what the attraction is behind retirement community gates. Leisureville is not exactly an expose of age-segregated retirement living, but a lively and thoughtful account of a lifestyle that can be at once entertaining and appalling. The book is full of warm, appealing characters. It also has tinges of the sadness and wistfulness that often accompany the later years.

Blechman goes beyond The Villages -- "a retirement community on steroids" -- to Arizona and to the oddly named Youngtown, the first elders-only community, and to Sun City, which once bloomed in the desert but is now a half-century old and showing it. The many problems and issues that have caught up with Sun City, the butt of many an ageist joke in my youth, will likely one day visit The Villages and its smaller kin, he says. They include, most notably, a lack of tax-base support for local schools as retirees say they've paid their education support dues over their lifetimes. Blechman talked to many Villagers who said they'd also paid their share and were tired of giving back.

Blechman wonders what, exactly, they've given. "Blessed to be born into one of the richest generations in the history of the world, they've led a life that most people can only dream of. Such good fortune wasn't a matter of luck: it was given to them by previous generations who made untold sacrifices through two world wars and a devastating depression. ? Surely today's retirees have something more to pass on than a love of golf and perceived entitlement to lock themselves away

in leisurevilles. That's no citizenship; that's secession. It's a form of surrender, an acknowledgement of societal failure."

Hold on, Andrew. This is not the end of the world.

While there is something to worry about in the trend to leisurevilles, only a small percentage of retirees and Boomers will opt to lock themselves away. Indeed, well over half of Boomers say they're not going to retire. They and most others will stick around and work and coexist like the rest of society, possibly escaping for some R&R during the winter months.

In the meantime, many of those in The Villages and elsewhere will tire of the lifestyle, forgo the weather and head back home -- even if it is just for the summer or to visit family occasionally.
And those who stay the course will find their communities necessarily morphing over time into places resembling towns with the usual needs and problems.

The prospect of retiring to The Villages or any other gated retirement community doesn't interest me.

I've never even been in one, but I have this strong feeling that they're ghettos for the elderly --grey-ttos, if you will.

Yet, while I can't quite understand the desire some folks have to retire to such white-bread conformity, I respect the right of those who do. Even Andrew D. Blechman acknowledges that leisurevilles are "a powerful vision that has proved to be very appealing to a sizable segment of aging Americans."

whanley@nationalpost.com