This article tries to exocitize (and perhaps fetishize) something I'm quite familiar with, so I figured I'd share my perspective. My parents live in one of these such communities in Florida and I'm afraid they're much less outlandish and exotic than you might expect. When people get to retirement age, they suddenly have have more time than they've had in 40 years, and they're unsure how to spend it. These planned communities (Margaritaville is mentioned in the article, but Century Village is the undisputed king of south east Florida) help solve that problem - lots of facilities and activities and most importantly, lots of people who suddenly have the same problem.
The thing that's striking about these communities is that they're extremely lucrative business opportunities. Obvious revenue streams come from initially selling the lots, but I'm sure they're making a ton of money from the quarterly association dues and the incidental fees and concession sales.
My mother lived near a golf course that was for many years disued. Eventually, an investment group purchase the course for low seven figures, and then turned around and developed it into a retirement community with 150 lots, selling each (with a semi-customized, templated house on it) for mid 300s. I'll let you do the math, but they made a fortune.
If you take away one insight from this article, it's that the middle class from the last 40 years needs a place to retire to that doesn't have snow or high taxes and there's a lot of money to be made from this opporunity.
Retirement income can't support high annual tax burden unless you're at the upper end of annual social security benefits and have a significant asset base (whether that's capital market investments or real estate rentals/commercial real estate throwing off passive income).
It's why people accumulate wealth in high cost of living areas (typically, where wages are higher), and retire/move to low cost of living areas (pre remote work normalization). High taxes are drag on quality of life when you're on a fixed income and you’re not dependent on services high taxes would provide.
An old friend of my wife retired to The Villages in Florida and my wife went down there and stayed for a long weekend. Her impression was it was one of the strangest places she'd ever been - on the surface everything looked perfect. But the general vibe of the residents was classic 7th grade angst. Everyone talking about everyone, very critical and petty. I highly recommend the movie "Some Kind of Heaven" for a look at The Villages in particular, and Florida retirement cities in general.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad. "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" comes to mind. Retirement, like middle school, sounds like it will likely be very low-stakes (you're not significantly driving the overall course of your life) so for many people, socializing and jockeying for position might be all there is.
Sounds better than living in a neighborhood or building where you no longer know anyone.
If you consider that historically elders would play community role, assist in rearing children, etc., it would be bad. Given this generation though I don’t think there’s much to offer in those. So it’s probably better to see them amass in Florida and gossip amongst themselves.
Hilton Head is the same way. Especially the plantation. One thing I'll never understand is spending 10s of millions on a house with a 20 minute long drive from the community entrance before you see any houses and then all of the houses are right on top of each other and every one of your neighbors is the nastiest, most entitled person you've ever met.
I would rather blow my brains out than spend any more time there.
I don't know your age, and I can't predict the future, but I can say that in my 20s to early 30s I had trouble keeping a positive bank account balance and yet I was able to retire in my mid 40s.
Max out your 401k. People are really bad about thinking in terms of exponential growth, and it kind of sneaks up on you out of nowhere.
Margaritas aside, it’s distressing that it’s rare in America to find walkable communities where there is any activity outside the bubble of the house or megastore. We need to lean more towards developments that are built at human scale, not car scale. Margaritas or no.
The community aspect of this kind of place is very attractive, but I find the actual photos fairly off-putting. It's very suburban-sprawl-looking, and the article touches on how this is part of the "Margaritaville" mega-brand.
I wish there were more places in between this sort of life (too corporate) and the communes like twin oaks (too many sacrifices for communal life imo, e.g. almost no pets, restricted housing). Maybe what I want is just an ordinary friendly small town, but if people have suggestions for places where you can find deep community that would fit an academic/tech-inclined personality-type, I'd love to hear it.
> Maybe what I want is just an ordinary friendly small town
Life in Europe is not perfect by any means, but I had a better social life there and felt more in touch with people.
An anecdote: our home there was one unit in a six-plex that we owned, which is a pretty common arrangement for middle-class-ish people who live in a city rather than the countryside. Several times a year, another couple in the same building would organize a dinner where they'd put up a big table outdoors and grill up some food. Everyone else brought a dish or two, and of course there was lots of wine.
Padova, Italy. I also lived in Innsbruck for a bit, and I agree it's not quite as "friendly". It was difficult for me to compare too much though, because I speak Italian fluently, but don't speak German, so it's natural for me to be able to connect more closely with people in Italy. I found people in Innsbruck to be pleasant and polite and enjoyed my time there.
It's kind of difficult to describe what 'friendly' meant in Italy. Maybe 'social' is a better word. It's not like some movie where you chat with someone and all of a sudden they're you're best friend and invite you over for dinner. Just people are kind of 'easy going' socially where it's just pleasant and easy to have a conversation with someone.
You know what? They kinda are. The gables are a bit much, as are the colors, but…no stairs leading up to the entranceway, no basements, seemingly an open floor plan with room for mobility devices like scooter, walk-in/roll-in showers…looks like sensible retirement design.
Just something that caught my eye, as my elderly parents are attempting to get out of their split-level home, a very Midwestern house design that almost seemed architected to kill old people with all those damn stairs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-level_home)
Oh yes, split-level homes are terrible. In the cheapest area of the US to dig a proper basement, you have a house where they are too cheap to dig a proper basement.
I kept expecting a line to drop about a weird murder ala Carl Hiaasen. Florida seems almost impossibly remote from where I live in Oregon in a lot of ways, not just geographically.
This seems to be a purely US phenomenon? It seems a great idea to scale retirement communities to the point of having their own hospitals and theaters etc. but I don't see it happening here. Just smaller groups of houses with maybe a few carers and an on-call nurse. And our aged care system is officially horrific and an election issue.
The word Boomer echoes loud and clear. Are there actually Jimmy Buffet fans under 50? I'm one year away from being able to live in a retirement community (gasp) and I still think I'm a college freshman, but the contrast is sharp between this article (The New Yorker) and forums such as /r/antiwork on Reddit, or Twitter in general.
In South Florida there is a way of life known as Salt Life, I describe them the rednecks of the ocean.
It doesn’t matter if they are young or old, even if they primarily listen to hip hop, they probably have fond memories of going down to the Keyes and having the time of their lives at some point listening to some Jimmy Buffet. I can liken it to Christmas music, it’s not going to be your go to or even your favorite, but it has it’s time and place when nothing can be better.
50 is right in the middle of Gen-X now. Boomers are currently about 85-68, if you take the earliest/latest start/end dates various people have given; 88-63 for the latest/earliest start/end dates.
I like your post. That said, the images don’t scale properly (at all?) on iOS, causing horizontal scroll bars and bad font scaling, among other issues I don’t know how to properly describe because I don’t do web design.
It’s a good post, all the same. I think it has to do with the mobile theme, and the photos don’t scale or resize automatically with the theme, or something. I really liked the content, and thought a bit of work on the presentation would help it get wider reach and more exposure. I shared it with some friends all the same!
Snark aside, some of the pictures don’t break the horizontal scrolling, or force the scrolling, or whatever they do to make it so that I have horizontal scrolling when I ought not to. One of the photos doesn’t scale its embed, and so it just takes up the whole horizontal real estate of the screen on iOS, causing horizontal scroll behavior that is not ideal.
Sorry, I don’t really know how else to describe it, and the site works fine otherwise, and I like the content. I hope I’m not protesting too much. I wish I knew better how to describe the issue so I didn’t seem like I’m just nitpicking. I think presentation of the content can be improved, but it is perfectly serviceable as it is.
I dd my math backwards yesterday: the earliest Boomers are 79-75, depending on whose definition of Boomers you believe, and the latest are 61-56. Whoops :)
I'm not sure whats so enraging about it. Average people having fun with a goofy lifestyle?
Some of the Jimmy Buffet stuff is tongue in cheek. I mean "cheeseburger in paradise?". Everything about the song is awful, and I think everyone understands its awful, but it's juvenile and fun. The margaritaville thing is a welcoming in-group. It's "who cares, don't worry about it, live and let live." Key West certainly reflected those values when I visited. I kinda get it now.
There is a whole genre of hate reads... I think some of them were originally unintentional, but more recently I think writers (like FB) have realized that lots of people will read stuff just to get angry.
You're angry that older people are living in a manner that they enjoy?
The initial people profiled went there for friends, not for "evermore excess":
> “In four years, we made four friends. Everyone was a part-timer. So we did some retirement math. We assessed the carrying costs.” The math, and a yearning for friends, told the Murphys to move to Margaritaville.
Is this the excess you're talking about?
> The housing stock, a range of villas and cottages, is, by today’s standards, compact and tasteful—single-story buildings with sensible layouts and patios that, typically screened in, can look like aviaries.
Or is it the community shuttle that is the excess?
> Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine.
This just sounds like a nice community-minded neighborhood. People in their mid-20s commonly miss those exact aspects once they leave college and move out into "the real world". Are those 20-somethings just yearning for excess too?
The fact that it enrages you, and you blame it on boomerdom, makes me think you're just a bigot who wants to blame others for your own failings. That's just my guess - I've never personally met a successful younger person who spews vitriol at boomers as a whole.
> The fact that it enrages you, and you blame it on boomerdom, makes me think you're just a bigot who wants to blame others for your own failings. That's just my guess - I've never personally met a successful younger person who spews vitriol at boomers as a whole.
This paragraph made me wince. Success doesn’t qualify your opinions as valid or not. Personal failings don’t invalidate a logical argument either. I don’t like shallow dismissal or criticism either, but isn’t that what you’re doing here?
Some of the criticism is of the inequality of success itself, and the trappings of it. Those who are successful in retirement communities are perhaps too easy a target, and an unfair one in some ways, as they have had more time to invest and accumulate wealth than their critical juniors in age.
It’s fine to be critical of systems and structures that disadvantage those who are already successful, like states that don’t collect the same taxes as other states do. It’s also fine to criticize others for taking advantage of these systems. I don’t find it especially productive or convincing to direct these criticisms at an individual. Directing it at the entire group doesn’t seem ideal either, as it alienates those who may otherwise be allies.
What is the solution then? I don’t know either, but wedge issues driven between generations feel like someone’s trying to pull strings and play us all for fools, devolving into infighting.
The thing that's striking about these communities is that they're extremely lucrative business opportunities. Obvious revenue streams come from initially selling the lots, but I'm sure they're making a ton of money from the quarterly association dues and the incidental fees and concession sales.
My mother lived near a golf course that was for many years disued. Eventually, an investment group purchase the course for low seven figures, and then turned around and developed it into a retirement community with 150 lots, selling each (with a semi-customized, templated house on it) for mid 300s. I'll let you do the math, but they made a fortune.
If you take away one insight from this article, it's that the middle class from the last 40 years needs a place to retire to that doesn't have snow or high taxes and there's a lot of money to be made from this opporunity.