Leisureville (32 page)

In a twist on modern planned communities, quasi-governments, and America's long history of religious utopias, the founder of Dominos Pizza is now financing a new for-profit Catholic-themed community in Florida named Ave Maria. It will feature both age-integrated and age-segregated neighborhoods, thus giving dedicated pro-lifers the choice of living with children or keeping them at bay. One wonders how the “pizza pope” will govern his private theocracy, and how residents will respond to his occasional edicts. He says he is following God's will. Before construction had even begun, he expressed his opposition to the sale of condoms and other contraceptives at future on-site pharmacies, and to the offering of X-rated premium channels by cable television providers.

The lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender communities will soon be coming online as well, with Billie Jean King workout rooms and
drag cabarets, much to my gay brother's delight. He says these marginalized populations are seceding for their own safety—and sanity. “We're terrified, understandably, of ending up in an ordinary retirement place, where a heterosexual lifestyle and sensibility could be ‘imposed' upon us,” he tells me. “Many of us would be misfits, and a lot of us would die of boredom.”

I suspect that as a dedicated New Yorker, he'd be less than thrilled by the canned environment in such a community, gay or straight. But many in the industry expect so-called “affinity communities” to gain in popularity with retirees. New entrants might include artists, environmentalists, athletes, and “new age” devotees. Regardless of the infinite ways to self-segregate, all these groups have one basic commonality—a desire to live without children.

The housing market, once rocket-propelled, is taking a plunge, so the industry is bracing for a cyclical slowdown. Some of the midsize players have already declared bankruptcy—often leaving behind thinly populated “communities” with only partially realized clubhouses, pools, and “neighborhoods.” Many of the bigger developers have begun to reduce their staffs and cancel some planned projects. This is a possible preview of what could happen when all such communities outlive the boomers.

For now, developers are working hard to sell the product, but regardless of how beautiful the weather is in North Carolina or some such place, it's hard to persuade people to buy a new home if they can't sell their present one. I've been offered reduced financing, unsolicited advice on how to sell my existing home (plants help), and three years of free heat and electricity if I buy a new home. And in keeping with the perceived fascination retirees have with the
Guinness Book of World Records
, I have also been invited to participate in a contest involving stacking golf balls.

My favorite marketing ploy was a folksy letter from a senior sales executive named Mike, questioning the importance of a softening in the housing market. “It's not a good time to buy real estate?”
he asks. He then quotes a happy customer: “Mike, if we waited until someone else told us it was a good time to buy something, we could be waiting the rest of our
lives
!” Mike writes that this “prophetic” comment “floored” him.

Meanwhile, the spotlight remains on the self-obsessed boomers, wrinkles and all. They helped manufacture the cult of youth in the first place, and owing to their sheer numbers they're in no fear of age bias and marginalization as they grow older. The business world is already devising products and services to cater to them and the trillions of dollars they have to spend. This will soon change the way nearly all consumer products—such as cars and houses—are designed. And so, as books move to larger type, homes exclude stairs, and cosmetics models proudly display gravity's inevitable toll, it's possible that our current cultural obsession with youth might graduate to at least middle age.

Given my own age, I can still only guess what it's really like to be old, and I can't say I look forward to old age. The daily newspaper feature “Fifty Years Ago Today” brings back no memories, and probably won't bring any for another two decades or so. Indeed, I have difficulty imaging my own retirement, or how I will navigate it, and even thinking about it makes me rather eneasy. I'm still too busy climbing up the mountain to know what the other side looks like; such worries remain abstractions that I'd rather not dwell on yet.

I miss my friends in The Villages and keep in contact with a number of them. Few of them are actually old—many of them are younger than my parents—and so they're doing just fine. My wetblanket prognostications seem to have little effect on them; they're too busy having fun.

The Andersons are happy to report that they have a new golf routine. Instead of playing on an eighteen-hole championship golf course, they now play two nine-hole executive courses and bring
along a picnic lunch to eat between tee times. “It's a great way to split up the game,” Betsy informs me. “It's even more relaxing.”

A year and a half after moving to The Villages, Dave writes to tell me that they have finally ventured out for a cruise around the Caribbean. “While most folks were frantically searching for sun and relaxation—actually wearing themselves out in their quest—we knew ours was just an extension of our life in the Villages, minus the golf,” he explains. “In some ways we felt like Peter Pan and Wendy. I guess the decadence of the experience was wonderful (didn't Adam eat the apple?), but when superimposed on the dire poverty of the islands it makes me wonder, and a little sad.”

Mr. Midnight continues to write to me about what he describes as his life of Riley, and always lets me know that there's a room available for me. For a short while, it appeared as if his Teflon facade was cracking. He met an airline stewardess in her mid-forties whose job necessitated accommodating Mr. Midnight's “three-day rule.” “She's wonderful,” he writes. “I think I could actually fall for her. And her schedule's perfect: I still need my space.”

I remained dubious and he chided me for having so little faith in him. A few weeks later, my suspicions were confirmed. “She wants to get married,” he wrote tersely. “She is history. She knew the rules.”

At age sixty-five, Wendy Marie is no longer half a man. She had the surgery in Thailand as planned. The recovery was daunting and weeks later landed her in the Villages Regional Medical Center. But she is happy to report that her Florida driver's license now has “F” for female. She still contemplates leaving The Villages, but has no idea where she'll feel comfortable; and after $100,000 worth of surgeries, finances remain a very real concern. “The older you get, the tougher it is to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life,” she explains.

I'm told that Kat continues to show her mouse tattoo to startled acquaintances at Katie Belle's, and that the Prosecutor is still the
captain of Holly's ship. Ellen and her friends are as sharp as ever and continue to meet weekly for dinner and cards.

I've kept in touch with Pete Wahl, who runs the central districts. Every now and then I contact him for basic information about the sprawling metropolis he runs. He's fond of reminding me that by law he's required to provide
access
to information and no more. When I ask him roughly how many golf courses The Villages intends to build, he replies: “I do not and have never worked for The Villages, which is a private corporation, to whose information I have no right of access.”

After two decades of marriage, Elton Mayer's second wife died. “I'm no longer looking for love,” Elton told me by phone from his little home in The Village of Orange Blossom Gardens. “I'm just looking to survive and perhaps enjoy my remaining days.” He tells me he has fallen a few times lately, and one of his retired daughters is contemplating moving to The Villages to keep an eye on him. “But I still eat what I want, and take a nap when I want, no matter what time of day it is. I go anyplace I want to go in my golf cart, and I play golf once a week!”

There are occasional reminders of how cruel the real world can be. Several months after my last visit, Sassy the clown sends me a rather disturbing e-mail: two residents of The Villages (a husband and wife) were shot at point-blank range. The wife died instantly, but the husband, who ran outside to plead for help dressed only in his underwear, survived.

This incident had the makings of stereotypically brutal crime that seemingly justified a life of secession. The couple's somewhat estranged adult daughter had invited three young men to her parents' home. These men shot the parents, stole some jewelry, and then fled, allegedly taking the daughter as a hostage. The culprits were angry youths right out of central casting, and the daughter had a history of substance abuse and reckless behavior. Once captured, the men snarled at the camera, and one demanded “the best
lawyer in Florida.” The daughter maintained her innocence, but her father took out a restraining order, effectively banning her from her mother's funeral.

Sassy described the sordid crime as a parable about parenting. “When we seniors reach the retirement portion of our lives, we are not always finished being parents, and we can
never
escape our children. I have had friends in that position or with children who are still struggling to get it together and have lived with them here. You'd think by the time you reach my age the kids would be squared away, or have done themselves in by now. Thank God the worst problem my kids have is to be overweight.”

On the lighter side, The Villages was national news once again when a report cited an alarming number of sexually transmitted diseases among residents. The late-night comedy shows had a ball with this rich material.

Meanwhile, The Villages and Gary Morse have continued to tighten their noose on politics in Sumter County. As Election Day approached, the candidates backed by The Villages had amassed a huge amount of campaign funds. As expected, Gary Breeden received favorable coverage in The Villages' media, and Jim Roberts did not. Roberts's ally on the board of commissioners, Joey Chandler, faced an equally difficult primary against a candidate who was backed by The Villages and who worked for a contractor in The Villages.

The Villages' candidates ran a bare-knuckles campaign. Roberts found himself forced to run in the primaries against a shadow candidate—a twenty-one-year-old waitress who never campaigned. Her mom works for a contractor in The Villages. Villagers living in Sumter County were also the target of many so-called “impartial” telephone surveys filled with serious misinformation. A sample question: “Would you still vote for Commissioner Chandler knowing that he raised taxes twenty-two times?” The two candidates responded with a Web site that attempted to address these distortions and others coming from The Villages' media.

Not unexpectedly, Roberts and his colleague lost. They garnered plenty of votes in their own districts, but Villagers now represent a majority of voters in the county, and as seniors, they are more likely to actually vote. I must say that I felt a pang of remorse, even in distant New England.

Goodwill—which is critical to the healthy functioning of a complex interrelated society—has seemingly evaporated. The new board of commissioners is looking into moving the county government from Bushnell to a more “convenient” location beside The Villages in the county's far northeastern corner, because it is the “geographic center of the population.” Legal notices have been moved from an old countywide newspaper in Bushnell, which had published them for decades, and which was the low bidder for the contract, to The Villages'
Daily Sun
. County residents must now purchase Morse's heavily biased newspaper if they want to read such announcements. Frustrated by their marginalization, many county residents are hoping to overturn “One Sumter” or even split the county in two.

The board is also questioning the wisdom of building a park for families in the southern end of the county. “The one thing that's missing in these parks is children,” a commissioner said. He didn't mention that many of the parks are dilapidated and uninviting. The board will probably sell two-thirds of the south county parcel and ask volunteer groups to construct park facilities. And now the board wants to prohibit nonresidents of The Villages from using certain gated roads within the development, regardless of the fact that residents of the county are paying to maintain them.

The board is also moving to reduce the fees Villagers pay the county for emergency services. There's no talk, however, about the one financial issue that should be of real concern to Villages: the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt they are saddled with—an amount that is likely to rise as the community builds out.

New homes, golf courses, and recreation centers continue to
pop up seemingly overnight as the development bulldozes its way across Sumter County. The Villages has finally released information whose existence it continually refused to confirm: plans for a third “town center.” It will be named Brownwood, after the Morse family's tourism complex in Michigan, which once included Gary's failed steak house. Business in Spanish Springs appears to be brisk, but Sumter Landing continues to struggle commercially, with stores and restaurants coming and going. One wonders what effect the addition of Brownwood will have. Home sales are also slowing. Some newer residents complain that they are living in virtual ghost villages.

Morse's own Villages chamber of commerce, where I bought a map on my first day in town, has closed after “achieving its goal”—whatever that means. Meanwhile, supersize strip malls continue to sprout up all over the place.

The Villages is finally beginning to comprehensively address the concerns of residents who are actually old. A seven-story enclosed assisted living and continuing care facility is under construction across the street from the recently expanded hospital. Plans call for 250 living units, with their own pools, spas, and covered parking for golf carts. The Morse family continues to wrangle with the state over how much more development local aquifers can withstand; the water district is considering temporary water restrictions, especially in light of the continuing drought.