[ed. I've posted about The Villages before, but this is another good, ground-level perspective. Obviously, the alternative community's raison d'etre strikes a resonant chord with a number of people. Not me.]
Seventy miles northwest of Orlando International Airport, amid the sprawling, flat central Florida nothingness — past all of those billboards for Jesus and unborn fetuses and boiled peanuts and gator meat — springs up a town called Wildwood. Storefront churches. O’Shucks Oyster Bar. Family Dollar. Nordic Gun & Pawn. A community center with a playground overgrown by weeds. Vast swaths of tree-dotted pastureland. This area used to be the very center of Florida’s now fast-disappearing cattle industry. The houses are low-slung, pale stucco. One has a weight bench in the yard. There’s a rail yard crowded with static freight trains. The owners of a dingy single-wide proudly fly the stars and bars.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Wildwood’s drabness explodes into green Southern splendor: majestic oaks bearing spindly fronds of Spanish moss that hang down almost to the ground. What was once rolling pasture land has been leveled with clay and sand. Acres of palmetto, hummock, and pine forest clear-cut and covered with vivid sod. All around me, old men drive golf carts styled to look like German luxury automobiles or that have tinted windows and enclosures to guard against the morning chill, along a wide, paved cart path. It’s a bizarre sensation, like happening upon a geriatric man’s vision of heaven itself. I have just entered The Villages.
This is one of the fastest-growing small cities in America, a place so intoxicating that weekend visitors frequently impulse-purchase $200,000 homes. The community real estate office sells about 250 houses every month. The grass is always a deep Pakistan green. The sunrises and sunsets are so intensely pink and orange and red they look computer-enhanced. The water in the public pools is always the perfect temperature. Residents can play golf on one of 40 courses every day for free. Happy hour begins at 11 a.m. Musical entertainment can be found in three town squares 365 nights a year. It’s landlocked but somehow still feels coastal. There’s no (visible) poverty or suffering. Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option. There’s zero litter or dog shit on the sidewalks and hardly any crime and the laws governing the outside world don’t seem to apply here. You can be the you you’ve always dreamed of.
One hundred thousand souls over the age of 55 live here, packed into 54,000 homes spread over 32 square miles and three counties, a greater expanse of land than the island of Manhattan. Increasingly, this is how Americans are spending their golden years — not in the cities and towns where they established their roots, but in communities with people their own age, with similar interests and values. Trailer parks are popping up outside the gates; my aunt and uncle spend the summer months in western Pennsylvania in a gated 55-plus community, and when the weather turns they live in one through the winter to play golf and line-dance in the town squares.
There are people, younger than 55, generally, who suspect that this all seems too good to be true. They — we — point to the elusive, all-powerful billionaire developer who lords over, and profits from, every aspect of his residents’ lives; or the ersatz approximation of some never-realized Main Street USA idyll — so white, so safe — exemplified by Mitt Romney’s tone-deaf rendition of “God Bless America,”performed at one of his many campaign swings through The Villages. But those who live and will likely die here and who feel they’ve earned the right to indulge themselves aren’t anguishing over it. I am living here for a week to figure out if The Villages is a supersize, reinvigorated vision of the American dream, or a caricature, or if there’s even a difference. The question I’m here to try to answer is a scary one: How do we want to finish our lives?
Seventy miles northwest of Orlando International Airport, amid the sprawling, flat central Florida nothingness — past all of those billboards for Jesus and unborn fetuses and boiled peanuts and gator meat — springs up a town called Wildwood. Storefront churches. O’Shucks Oyster Bar. Family Dollar. Nordic Gun & Pawn. A community center with a playground overgrown by weeds. Vast swaths of tree-dotted pastureland. This area used to be the very center of Florida’s now fast-disappearing cattle industry. The houses are low-slung, pale stucco. One has a weight bench in the yard. There’s a rail yard crowded with static freight trains. The owners of a dingy single-wide proudly fly the stars and bars.And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Wildwood’s drabness explodes into green Southern splendor: majestic oaks bearing spindly fronds of Spanish moss that hang down almost to the ground. What was once rolling pasture land has been leveled with clay and sand. Acres of palmetto, hummock, and pine forest clear-cut and covered with vivid sod. All around me, old men drive golf carts styled to look like German luxury automobiles or that have tinted windows and enclosures to guard against the morning chill, along a wide, paved cart path. It’s a bizarre sensation, like happening upon a geriatric man’s vision of heaven itself. I have just entered The Villages.
This is one of the fastest-growing small cities in America, a place so intoxicating that weekend visitors frequently impulse-purchase $200,000 homes. The community real estate office sells about 250 houses every month. The grass is always a deep Pakistan green. The sunrises and sunsets are so intensely pink and orange and red they look computer-enhanced. The water in the public pools is always the perfect temperature. Residents can play golf on one of 40 courses every day for free. Happy hour begins at 11 a.m. Musical entertainment can be found in three town squares 365 nights a year. It’s landlocked but somehow still feels coastal. There’s no (visible) poverty or suffering. Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option. There’s zero litter or dog shit on the sidewalks and hardly any crime and the laws governing the outside world don’t seem to apply here. You can be the you you’ve always dreamed of.
One hundred thousand souls over the age of 55 live here, packed into 54,000 homes spread over 32 square miles and three counties, a greater expanse of land than the island of Manhattan. Increasingly, this is how Americans are spending their golden years — not in the cities and towns where they established their roots, but in communities with people their own age, with similar interests and values. Trailer parks are popping up outside the gates; my aunt and uncle spend the summer months in western Pennsylvania in a gated 55-plus community, and when the weather turns they live in one through the winter to play golf and line-dance in the town squares.
There are people, younger than 55, generally, who suspect that this all seems too good to be true. They — we — point to the elusive, all-powerful billionaire developer who lords over, and profits from, every aspect of his residents’ lives; or the ersatz approximation of some never-realized Main Street USA idyll — so white, so safe — exemplified by Mitt Romney’s tone-deaf rendition of “God Bless America,”performed at one of his many campaign swings through The Villages. But those who live and will likely die here and who feel they’ve earned the right to indulge themselves aren’t anguishing over it. I am living here for a week to figure out if The Villages is a supersize, reinvigorated vision of the American dream, or a caricature, or if there’s even a difference. The question I’m here to try to answer is a scary one: How do we want to finish our lives?
