Leisureville

by Andrew D. Blechman

  Countless bingo games later, I’m bored and exhausted, and my nerves are frayed. I haven’t won a single dollar and my mood has noticeably darkened. A bingo monitor politely asks me not to crumple up and throw my losing bingo sheets against the wall. I stare him down. My eyes are bleary, my leg is shaking like a sewing machine, and I want to tell ornery Dotty to shove her lucky porcelain puppy up you know where. I look at the time display on my cell phone: I’ve been playing for three hours. The room is littered with stained coffee cups and stale popcorn. Marianne left an hour ago.

  The next game is for the jackpot. The room is absolutely silent. I can hear the Ping-Pong balls bouncing on the stage all the way at the far end of the room. Moments later, some jerk yells, “Bingo!” The crowd groans and heads for the bathrooms.

  Outside, I stretch my legs and breathe in the scent of orange blossoms before driving to yet another recreation center, where Ellen and her friends are gathered to play their weekly card game, called “Hand and Foot.” The room is packed with people seated around long folding tables. There is little socializing between the tables, but the affable participants evidently prefer the hum of a large room to private play at home.

  Sitting at Ellen’s table are her cousins Pat and Eunice. The two sisters have lived together since their early twenties; Pat is retired, but Eunice works at a nearby pharmacy. Debbie from the Massachusetts Club is also there, as are two friends named Connie and Roberta.

  “I miss my grandkids,” Roberta says. “But they’re getting older. When they’re young they want you around. But when they’re teens, you don’t exist.”

  “With these new phones you don’t miss a thing anyway,” Connie says. “My grandson hit a home run the other night and my daughter called me from the bleachers. They can even take a picture with the phone. I’m not missing out on anything.”

  I ask the women if any of them are lonely. “No, no, no,” they say, practically in unison. “There are too many of us to hang around with for any of us to be lonely,” Ellen says.

  Eunice’s job at the pharmacy gives her a firsthand look at the habits of senior singles on the prowl. “You should see all the guys coming into buy condoms, lubricated jelly, and massage oil,” she says. “And the women buy the wrinkle creams. Believe me, those creams don’t work.”

  “The single men strut around Spanish Springs like a bunch of Don Juans,” Ellen says. “And the women are all over them. I’ve got a friend who has a guy living with her. She gets mad because we don’t call her anymore when we go to the movies. But why should we call her? She’s got a guy living with her.

  “I knew this one guy whose girlfriend threw him out,” Ellen continues. “He asked me if I could put him up. I asked him if he had a car. He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Good, go sleep in it.’” The women all laugh.

  I excuse myself to use the bathroom. An older man at the urinal next to me, wearing pressed jeans and a purple polo shirt, grunts and holds his breath as he rocks back and forth in his loafers. “Prostate,” he says with a grimace. “It’s killing me.”

  Back at the table, the women are still talking about men. “Take a look around,” Connie says. “There’s nothing here of interest. Take a look and tell me if I’m being harsh.”

  The man with the purple polo shirt and the enlarged prostate strolls up to a table of women across from us. His unevenly dyed shoulder-length hair is combed back and topped with a pair of aviator sunglasses. He leans against a chair and casually sweeps a hand through his hair. “Hey, ladies,” he says. “Don’t you all look pretty tonight?”

  The women at the table greet him warmly. Ellen and her friends are clearly disgusted. They pause in the game just to watch, horrified. Ellen sticks her fingers in her throat and pretends to gag. “Barf,” she says. “What a zero.”

  I decide not to tell Ellen that a far more adept romancer—Mr. Midnight—has invited me to spend a week at his den of iniquity, to research the Village’s single life from inside the mother ship.

  12

  Chasing the Elephant

  TO GAIN A CLEARER UNDERSTANDING OF THE TREND TOWARD AGE SEGregation, I return to Phoenix to attend a “50+ Housing Symposium” sponsored by the National Association of Homebuilders. Several months after my first visits to Youngtown and Sun City, I once again find myself touring age-segregated communities in the desert, but this time on a large air-conditioned bus packed with developers and their employees chattering away excitedly about “boomers”—the generation born after World War II when the GIs came home and got down to the long-delayed business of making whoopee. According to demographers, they kept at it for another eighteen years.

  Today, roughly 78 million of these boomer babies are still living. It’s a giant generational bulge moving inexorably from middle age to retirement. Right now one American in eight is a senior citizen. In twenty years, the boomers will swell that proportion to one in five. The ratio represents an unparalleled business opportunity, and one that will probably skew commerce toward the needs and wants of senior citizens in coming years.

  I hear a woman behind me chatting excitedly to her seatmate, “I was building for sixty-two-plus, but they just keep getting younger. Now I’m marketing to people in their forties and fifties.”

  A man across the aisle points out the window as we drive by a cemetery. “Hey, we just passed an ‘inactive adult community,’” he says loudly, and gets a chorus of chuckles. “I guess you could call that ‘aging in place.’”

  My own seatmate, Laurel, is working on Albuquerque’s first age-segregated community, which, she says, is selling like hotcakes. “A lot of the realtors were like, ‘Gosh, it’s about time,’” Laurel tells me. “We sold thirty lots before we even completed our model homes and clubhouse. That’s very unusual.”

  The fifty-five-plus housing in her development is part of a larger planned community designed for all ages. “A certain market segment doesn’t want to deal with kids,” Laurel says. “People say they feel ‘younger’ or ‘ageless’ when they are surrounded by people their own age. I hear that in focus groups.”

  Focus groups helped the national developer for whom she works decide to pursue age-restricted housing rather than age-targeted housing. Age-targeted housing is merely suggestive of age exclusivity: instead of playgrounds, there are dog parks and walking trails; and homes have fewer bedrooms. “You just have to design it in such a way that people with 2.3 kids won’t be interested,” Laurel says. “We chose age-restricted because it differentiates us in our market, and we wanted to make sure our message was clear. A lot of people in the focus groups said they like to see their grandkids but they’d also like to see them go home at the end of the week. They don’t want to be designated babysitters; they want to lead their own lives.”

  We continue west from Phoenix into the flat, expansive West Valley, passing strip mall after strip mall, McDonald’s after McDonald’s, and countless housing developments, most of which are bordered by concrete privacy walls. “This all used to be agricultural land,” the bus driver informs us over the loudspeaker. Aside from water issues, building in the desert is pretty easy, he says. “All you do is scrape the dirt and start pouring foundations.”

  Our first stop is an “affordable” age-segregated community called Sundance. When it is built out, it will consist of 1,000 homes on 800 acres. According to our handout, the residents’ average age is 62.5, their average income is $70,000, forty-percent are still employed, and the major “draw states” are Arizona, California, Washington, and Illinois. The most popular floor plan is 1,800 square feet, with upgraded kitchen cabinets and two small master bedrooms located on opposite sides of the house. The two bedrooms are a favorite feature for wives whose husbands snore.

  Our caravan of three buses pulls over and we pile into the sales office, an attractive building that I am told will eventually be discarded to make room for another home. We gather around a diorama the size of a pool table in the center of the room. “These lots over here all border the golf course
,” a salesman explains. “Those homes pay a onetime $2,000 premium for that privilege.”

  Though golf courses are often considered prestigious and can help a developer sell homes, they’re also money pits, the salesman explains. “To keep residents’ amenities fees down, the developer continues to own the golf course even after build-out, unless, of course, he’s lucky enough to sell it.

  “If the monthly fees get too high, you risk hitting the ‘fear factor,’” the salesman continues. “Retired folks are sensitive to monthly expenditures. The vast majority of people don’t golf and only thirty or forty percent use the recreation center. They don’t want to pay big association fees. It’s a competitive market, and the key is to position yourself properly so you can compete. We’ve positioned ourselves to capture people that are particularly sensitive to price points.”

  The decision not to gate the community also helps keep monthly fees low. Gates mean a larger staff and more street maintenance. Another way to keep down costs is to buy land in the middle of nowhere because it’s cheaper; that is exactly what this developer has done. There’s a lonely stretch of interstate nearby, but not much else, at least not yet.

  The 15,000-square-foot recreation center houses an exercise room, six pool tables, a card room that seats sixteen, and a “library” with several dozen books. Outside there are two small pools, neither of which is big enough for swimming laps. An activities board lists a book club, a diabetes club, and a training class for people who want a concealed handgun permit.

  Down a hall, I find three women in a windowless crafts room contentedly soldering stained-glass butterflies and other knickknacks. “My husband and I have met so many people who told us they always wanted to work with stained glass,” one woman tells me. “Now they have the time. In two months we’ve taught thirty people how to do it.”

  The crafts rooms are also used for sewing, quilting, and scrap-booking. To keep costs down, there are no specialized rooms for pottery, woodworking, or metalworking. “They didn’t put any sinks in the crafts rooms,” one woman complains. “And windows. Windows would be nice, too.” I look around the room. She’s right; it’s just a fluorescent-lit box with tables and chairs. “We have too many tennis courts,” another woman says. “People our age like to play pickle ball, not tennis.”

  I walk to the end of the hallway and leave through a side door. The blinding desert sun greets me, as do a row of empty tennis courts. In the distance I see a green golf course surrounded by vacant desert. When the wind blows, I can taste the dusty brown dirt.

  Back inside, I run into a developer from Mexico who is also attending the conference. He is contemplating bringing age-segregated housing across the border—but for American expatriates in Baja. A lot of Mexican families tend to live together as a matter of tradition and economic necessity, he explains. “I don’t think this housing would be very popular with my own people.”

  Pebble Creek, the next community we visit, outside the town of Goodyear, is decidedly more upscale. Gushing fountains and impeccably green lawns greet us as we drive down the long entrance driveway. The developer expects to build out to 6,250 homes on 2,400 acres. The statistics are similar to those for Sundance, with the exception of the average preretirement income, which is around $200,000. More than half of the residents are still employed in some capacity; many commute to Phoenix during the day and relax at night in their gated resort community. Pebble Creek aims a certain portion of its properties (necessarily less than twenty percent, so as to remain legally age-segregated) at people over forty. Of the dozen or so floor plans, one has a second floor. With two luxurious clubhouses with a combined total of nearly 100,000 square feet, Pebble Creek is clearly designed for those who have “arrived.” The $1,200 annual amenity fee is about triple that of Sun City.

  The caravan stops outside the larger of the two clubhouses, named Tuscany Falls. Inside, a gas fireplace big enough to swing a cat in greets visitors. The fireplace mantle is ten feet off the ground and about the length of a small room. Around the corner in one direction is a large, attractive theater with rows of plush seats descending toward a stage.

  Nearby, I find a handsomely appointed library with 1,000 or so books. I browse the collection and find The Life and Works of Lord Byron, The Writings of Jonathan Swift, and a book about Italian Renaissance painters. I’m impressed by the worldly and eclectic nature of the collection. Because I am an occasional fan of the romantics, I reach over and select the works of Byron. When I pull on the spine, the whole row of books pops out and falls to the floor with the gentle bounce of weightless Styrofoam. Curious, I reach for another book. It’s handsomely bound in real leather and contains actual printed pages. Regretfully, it is written in Swedish.

  A developer with a background in carpentry inspects the construction of the lounge next door. The giant antique wooden beams are actually a combination of embossed plastic and stained pine, he concludes. He then walks over to an entryway to inspect the doors and quickly announces his verdict: “The only way you could make a more flimsy door is to use love beads.” He steps over to the bar. “Now, that’s a nice piece of granite. They saved the quality material for the stuff you can actually touch and feel.” He points to the shelves behind the bar, which have an eighth-inch veneer of oak over plywood. “I guess you could say the veneer’s ‘authentic,’” he concludes.

  I ask an Australian who was on the bus with me if age-segregated communities are popular in his part of the world. “They’re growing in popularity,” he says. “Our cultures are actually very similar, except we don’t do all this fantasyland in the middle of the desert sort of thing. You Americans like everything to be fake.”

  Next we drive to our third and final destination, Corte Bella, which is across the street from Sun City West and is one of the Del Webb Corporation’s newest offerings—an “active adult country club community” for the affluent. Someone on the bus tells me that the company didn’t know what else to do with this remote property. It takes several miles of driving down an awkward access road, which skirts Sun City West on one side and a flood wash on the other, just to get to the front gate.

  Inside, there are three ritzy clubhouses: one for fitness, one for socializing, and one for golfers. There’s no hint of shuffleboard or horseshoes, but there are plenty of tennis courts. The literature states that Corte Bella is designed in a “Santa Barbara style,” and that the housing development is “How a Country Club Should Feel … downright friendly, a quality you don’t often find at country clubs. You will at this one, the country club where everyone belongs.”

  With just one country club restaurant and no retailers other than a small pro shop, I can’t help wondering what the residents do all day in this exclusive wonderland. The marketing material seemingly anticipates my hesitation: “Every second of your day counts. That doesn’t mean you have to fill them all up.”

  We leave the clubhouse and explore a street of large, richly appointed model homes. The neighborhood is eerily silent, except for cheery music piped out of rocks placed beside cacti. Several homes have exercise rooms, which are really just bedrooms outfitted with treadmills and stationary bikes. These luxuries strike me as yet another way to isolate oneself—even from immediate neighbors.

  One model home forgoes the exercise equipment, opting instead to deck out the small guest room for a hypothetical homecoming. There’s a chalkboard with “Welcome Home, Boys!” in big, enthusiastic lettering, and twin beds pushed against the wall with cheerful signs above that say “Mike” and “Chris.” There’s an assortment of college pennants, as well as a baseball mitt and a football. This room is slightly larger than the second walk-in closet in the master bedroom at the other end of the house.

  I run into two bankers from Switzerland looking for investment opportunities. “I don’t see how this could work in Europe,” one of them tells me. “Europeans want to be close to a city, drinking the culture. Here the residents are in the middle of nowhere.”

  His partner,
Dietrich, agrees. “Why would anyone over fifty-five want to live in an environment without people of all ages?” he asks. “Family life is still important in Europe. I don’t understand this attraction to age restriction. It’s a bit of a ghetto, no?”

  Even if the concept were popular in Europe, there are too many other hurdles, Dietrich adds. “We don’t have this kind of cheap empty desert to build on, and our land-use policies are much more restrictive. And these homes; they’re so cheaply built, like they would never stand up to the weather. We couldn’t get away with that, either. The costs for a European version would be prohibitive.”

  Later that afternoon, I wander around the conference’s exposition room, which is filled with dozens of vendors and hundreds of attendees. The booths run the gamut from architects who specialize in age-segregated housing to people who sell handicap-accessible bathroom fixtures and others who analyze market data (“We help you capture boomers”). Much of the networking takes place in front of several seafood buffets and adjoining makeshift bars used to celebrate opening of the conference. The majority of attendees are small regional builders who, as one industry expert tells me, know how to build houses but not communities. They are here to learn from the bigger players in the age-segregated marketplace.

  “Active adult” housing is the fastest-growing sector of the housing market, and these folks want to know how they can grab a piece of the pie. The Homebuilders Association formed the 50+ Housing Council about six years ago. It was originally named the Seniors Housing Council; but boomers don’t identify with, or particularly like, the term “senior”—hence the name change. About thirty developers attended the first conference; this year there are more than 800.