Leisureville

by Andrew D. Blechman

  American municipalities are as eager to attract age-segregated housing complexes as developers are eager to build them. States, counties, and cities are competing fiercely for retirees. Zoning laws are hastily being amended and density restrictions lifted in a bid to attract age-segregated housing. Why? Although families with children generally consume more, many of today’s seniors nonetheless have plenty of money to spend. A good number of Villagers, for example, outfit their new homes with all new furnishings, electronics, and appliances. They’re like free-spending tourists who bring their life savings with them and never leave.

  And retirees generally don’t commit crimes, so they are less of a burden on police services; they tend not to drive as much, so they put less stress on a town’s roads; and their housing developments usually care for their own landscaping, reducing hassles for the public works department.

  Best of all, they don’t use the schools. Any municipal accountant will tell you that residential housing generally loses money because schooling kids costs a lot of money and local property taxes don’t come close to bringing in enough revenue. That’s why most municipalities bend over backward to attract businesses: a business pays a lot in taxes but doesn’t burden the system with more children. Seniors can be viewed in much the same light.

  The next morning, the man introducing the conference’s keynote speaker revs up the audience with some pleasing statistics. “The elderly are the fastest-growing segment today,” he says. “For the next twenty years, boomers will be turning into seniors at the rate of 10,000 a day. In ten years alone, they will represent nearly 80 million consumers. And in a few short years, half of all American housing will be owned by someone over fifty.” One can almost hear a cash register going cha-ching.

  Next up is the keynote speaker, a renowned expert in generational marketing. His presentation is unusually entertaining, but also sobering. Marketing to the new crop of seniors will be anything but easy, he says, and he suggests that the communities we visited yesterday on the bus tour will soon be “dinosaurs.”

  The audience is silent; some of the listeners look perplexed and deflated. Nobody can predict exactly what the baby boomers will want, but what they won’t want is another Sun City, he says, adding that his research shows that boomers don’t like giant “one size fits all” planned communities. “They’re used to specialized services and products that meet their unique needs and convictions,” he continues. “And most of them don’t want to move far away from their families or live in the sunbelt. They want a more ‘authentic’ lifestyle experience.”

  In broad strokes, he relates the following attributes about the boomers and the vastly different generations that preceded them.

  Members of the “GI generation” (born 1901–1924) and the “silent (or Eisenhower) generation” (1925–1942) generally didn’t question authority but rather obeyed it. They held low-risk jobs that supplied steady paychecks. Retirement for them represented an opportunity to finally take it easy and relax after a lifetime of toil. They prefer group activities to individual pursuits. They like communal hobbies; and when they travel, they often do so in large groups. These are the folks who have enthusiastically populated retirement communities modeled on Sun City.

  By comparison, he continues, the boomers are risk takers searching for purpose. Whereas Sun Citians flocked to hear Lawrence Welk perform old favorites at the Sun Bowl, boomers were camped out in the rain at Woodstock listening to Jimi Hendrix reinterpret “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They’re the generation of LSD, the Pill, Watergate, and protests against the Vietnam War. “They are active, adventurous, and individualistic, and you’re more likely to find them mountain biking, surfing, and sipping espresso at sixty-five than playing shuffleboard, clog-hopping, and square dancing.

  Given their penchant for rebellion, he says, boomers are unlikely to embrace their parents’ vision of retirement, just as they rejected their parents’ definition of adolescence. They don’t like rules, let alone the sorts of rules and regulations that rigidly define acceptable behavior at a planned retirement community like Sun City.

  He continues: The vast majority of boomers (some surveys indicate seventy-five percent) don’t plan on retiring. Many find meaning (“a mission”) in their work; others haven’t saved up enough for retirement, preferring to earn and spend as they go. Others are fearful that they will be financially sandwiched between paying for their children’s education and paying for their aging parents’ medical bills. After a decade or two of fun in the sun, many retirees return home to rely on their boomer children to help care for them as their health fails.

  Perhaps most important, boomers have no intention of growing older. Boomers typically list eighty-five as the age when they will finally consider themselves “old.” Not surprisingly, that’s two years longer than actuaries predict many of them will live. They may just get their wish after all, the speaker says.

  Anyone who thinks that they can put up a cookie-cutter age-restricted community and walk away with a tidy profit is kidding himself, the presenter cautions. “The future of boomer retirement housing is wholly uncharted and full of potential pitfalls,” he says, “but we had better be ready, because the surge of boomers is just around the corner.”

  The speaker ends his presentation with a question: How many people in the audience are baby boomers? The auditorium is a sea of raised hands.

  I see a lot of stunned attendees stumble out of the auditorium into the painfully bright Arizona sunshine. “Wow, it’s a lot more complicated than I thought,” I hear one woman say. “I thought I knew my market,” another woman remarks. “Now I have to rethink my niche.”

  I happen upon the Australian from yesterday’s bus tour. “You got to wonder what’s going to happen to all these giant Club Med–like communities that don’t appeal to boomers,” he says.

  Looking for answers, I approach an architect from Washington, D.C., named Neal, whom I met at the exposition. “Look, I’m fifty-three, but I feel like eighteen,” he tells me. “I have lots of energy and I’m just figuring things out. I play tennis with my friends and Rollerblade with my daughter. You can’t tell a boomer like me that a place like Sun City is a place that I will want to retire to. I live three blocks from the National Gallery, one block from the metro; Kennedy Center is just down the street. And I’m going to keep on working. I like what I do. I like the challenge. It’s rewarding. I’m going to age my own way—and at home. This is what makes sense to me.”

  The crowd soon splits up as people make their way to a variety of seminars. By early afternoon, the shock of the morning’s presentation appears to be subsiding, and the participants I speak with tell me that they are feeling a bit more grounded. They remain confident that age-restricted housing will continue to be the hottest housing sector for years to come, for a number of reasons.

  Boomers may say they don’t like today’s age-segregated housing, but who can be sure they’ll stay true to these convictions in fifteen years? It’s a generation full of contradictions. Many boomers took drugs to think outside the box, but now give their kids Ritalin to ensure that the kids remain inside it. Women who once burned their bras now pay handsomely for expensive brassieres and plastic surgery. Many of the folks who ran around naked at Woodstock ended up espousing traditional family values and voting for Ronald Reagan. Other boomers never rebelled to begin with and don’t fit into these stereotypes.

  The fact is that nobody knows what the boomers want. They’re like a tsunami (some call it an “age wave”) rolling over the housing industry; and trying to predict what they will want is like trying to predict the weather twenty years from now. There is no magic formula: the boomers are simply too diverse and too hard to pin down.

  But given their staggering numbers, even if a development appeals to only a small minority, that market segment can still represent several million people and billions of dollars. As one attendee told me, “People are always asking me what they should build for the boomers. I tell them
, ‘Everything.’ There are enough boomers to support just about any business model.”

  How many boomers will opt for age-segregated housing is anybody’s guess. One implausibly optimistic consultant at the conference suggests that seventy percent of boomers will seek a life secluded from children. Another study proposes that fifty percent will opt for such housing. Others consider the gold standard to be Del Webb’s research, which suggests that twenty-five percent of boomers will actively seek age-segregated housing. A more conservative estimate of fifteen percent is also bandied about, but even that low figure still represents 12 million Boomers—or at least one in twenty-five Americans.

  If Sun City is to be shunned, then just what will these communities look like? Research indicates that the vast majority of boomers are emotionally closer to their children than previous generations, and consequently, they don’t want to move more than 150 miles from them, or move to another state. And with so many expected to continue working, employment is another factor in choosing a locale.

  Rather than expecting boomers to relocate to leisurevilles, developers are bringing Sun Cities to them, albeit on a much smaller scale. In 1995, nearly eighty percent of all age-segregated communities were built in the traditional sunbelt. Ten years later, sixty percent of them are located in northern states, such as Michigan and Massachusetts. This trend is accelerating, even though there are many challenges associated with constructing Sun Cities near Chicago or New York City: a dearth of large tracts of land; the high cost of whatever dirt remains; and more restrictive zoning.

  Consequently, age-segregated communities are shrinking in size, and often include attached townhouses and apartments. Whereas the original Sun City has upwards of 40,000 residents, newer communities generally have fewer than 1,000. That figure is down from an average of about 3,500 just a decade ago. But by most estimates, boomers who opt for age-segregated housing prefer smaller, more intimate communities anyway.

  This means that children will probably live nearby, but gates and age-segregation policies will keep them from intruding onto the grounds of these smaller housing projects. Active adults can thus venture into the age-integrated “melting pot” for work, shopping, and other activities, but breathe a sigh of relief at day’s end when they then return home and the security gates close tightly behind them.

  A sizable number of boomers also like city life. That is why developers of age-segregated housing are turning their attention to urban “infill” projects, such as converting old hotels and office buildings into age-segregated luxury lofts, with elevators, shared gym facilities, and concierge services. These apartment buildings become child-free zones in the midst of a bustling cityscape, much like the smaller age-segregated housing units near traditional suburban housing and strip malls.

  But if the trend is to live closer to home in more “authentic” communities, then why bother moving to an age-segregated community at all? Why not just stay put in a traditional neighborhood?

  The answer is the amenities. People want swimming pools, tennis courts, and clubhouses; and traditional housing developments typically don’t offer such perks. Boomers also want low- or no-maintenance housing. They don’t want to mow, plow, or paint. They want a place where they can lock the door and leave for a month. And when they’re not traveling, they want to be able to come home after work to a peaceful child-free resort community where friendships with peers are easy to form. Some want a childless environment; others put up with it to reap the other benefits. But they all want an easier, more convenient way of life.

  Amenities can come in many flavors. Easy access to Manhattan can be considered an amenity; so can access to walking trails, medical facilities, a college offering special classes, an outlet mall, or for that matter the Atlantic Ocean. Golf courses are expensive to build and maintain, and they take up valuable real estate. By comparison, train service for easy access to museums and the symphony doesn’t cost residents a dime in monthly maintenance fees.

  The nation’s housing developers are betting heavily on these strategies. Pulte’s Del Webb division has been building age-segregated housing at the rate of 25,000 units a year. It already has more than 100 communities in various stages of planning and construction in fifty-two real estate markets scattered across the country, most of them near large metropolitan centers outside the traditional sunbelt.

  “All we know is that our business keeps growing year after year,” one of Del Webb’s top executives tells me. “It’s a demographics-driven business and the floodgates are about to open. I like the odds.”

  The trick, I realize, is to seduce aging boomers into believing that they need to move to an age-segregated community. To learn how, I attend an afternoon seminar about selling and marketing these communities. A grizzled veteran of the industry named Bill, and his more reserved colleague, don’t mince words.

  “The biggest challenge is getting folks to move at all,” Bill says. “These folks don’t need a new house. Our job is to convince them that they want a new house. It’s a matter of upping what I call the ‘hate factor’—getting them to resent their current home enough to motivate them to pack up and clean out forty years of junk.

  “We have to create the image that their current house is ‘old,’ that too many things need fixing, like the plumbing and electrical work. Let them know how much an electrician costs today. Ask them if they really want to keep mowing their own lawn. Why cut grass when you can play golf?”

  His colleague cuts in. “You reach a point when you want to get rid of all the men in your life,” she says. “The plumber, the pool man, the lawn man. People want a house without maintenance issues.”

  Bill continues, “Are they going to go through all the expense and trouble to remodel an old house from the 1970s, or are they going to buy a new house where they can have it all and more?” Bill continues. “Granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, high ceilings, Jacuzzi tubs—they see their friends with them, even their adult kids, and they want them too. This is their chance to loosen control and buy whatever they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford, because they were too busy paying for their kids’ braces and school. Walk them through your design center. Tell them they won’t need the expense of an interior decorator, because the builder will do everything for them. You’re selling them a lifestyle—and this is where it begins.”

  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 th
em. 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.