Leisureville (27 page)

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?”

M
R
. M
IDNIGHT GRACIOUSLY INVITES ME TO SPEND MY LAST WEEK AT
his den of iniquity in order to, as he says, “live the life.” Intrigued, I accept, and trade the dependable comforts of Dave and Betsy's place for the vagaries of bachelor living.

To further get into the swing of things, I finally rent a golf cart at a dealership in downtown Sumter Landing. I've resisted renting one until now because my travels have frequently taken me beyond the borders of Gary Morse's “golf cart nation.” But according to a state transportation study, as many as ninety percent of all daily trips made by Villagers remain within The Villages—and that doesn't even take golf carts into account. If it did, the number would be closer to ninety-nine percent. It's not unusual for Villagers to go weeks without leaving their all-inclusive community.

After looking around the glitzy showroom, I choose a worn rental in a dull shade of cream from the back parking lot. It's the sort of clunker you'd expect to see on a public golf course, and it even comes with a clip on the steering wheel for a scorecard and two stubby pencils. My humble ride is a far cry from the pimped-out leisure chariots with their supersize aluminum wheels, chrome grills, and burled dashboards that I see many seniors tooling around in.

Golf carts were introduced on a grand scale in the early 1950s. Lazy golfers immersed in a car-crazed culture weren't the only reason. Golf carts sped up the game so that more paying customers could be cycled through a golf course. Perhaps it was the introduction of the Pope-Mobile or the Queen Mum's royal golf cart that spurred interest in taking golf carts off the golf course. They are now ubiquitous in many gated communities. The Villages' own golf cart dealership, which displays its models just like automobiles, sells a few thousand golf carts a year. There are several private dealerships off campus that seem to be doing a swift business as well. The vast majority of Villagers own a golf cart in addition to a car and many homes even have separate five-eighths-scale mini-garages to house them. It's not the fastest means of travel, but when you live in a retirement community, what's the rush?