"REALITY IS SUBMERGED IN FANTASY": THE VILLAGES IS A BOOMER'S UTOPIA--AND DEMOGRAPHIC TIME BOMB
Florida’s Trump-loving retirement community was meticulously created “to make boomers in particular feel comfortable and happy,” as Philip Bump writes in his forthcoming book, Aftermath. But behind its idyllic façade lurks a crisis that the Villages—and the rest of the country—have yet to reckon with.When you consider how the baby boom has affected America, it’s impossible not to contemplate its natural conclusion.
There was a sudden, unexpected surge in births—and within a decade, diaper services went from a novelty to the equivalent in 2021 dollars of a nearly half‑billion‑dollar industry. Cities rushed to build more schools. Then a bit later America had millions of teenagers, so businesses and industries reorganized around them.
Over and over, age‑dependent systems struggled to accommodate the encroaching boomers. To use a boom‑appropriate analogy, America has been a nation of Lucille Balls scrambling to handle the conveyor belt of chocolates. And now, more than 75 years into the boom, you might be able to predict which systems will be overrun.
Harold Schwartz made just such a prediction back in the early 1980s.
Schwartz had been selling tracts of Florida real estate by mail until the practice was banned in 1968. After a brief foray into mobile‑home parks, Schwartz brought in his son Gary Morse, an advertising executive from Chicago, to overhaul the sales strategy. Morse shifted the focus to houses, including offering prospective retirees a half‑hour “video tape tour” of the concept by mail. The pitch went from shoddy to showbiz.
The eventual result was the Villages, a series of interconnected housing developments—the “villages” themselves—marketed as an all‑inclusive lifestyle that redirected retirement from senior community centers to senior‑ centered communities. Year after year over the past decade, the Villages landed among the fastest growing regions in the United States. In 2010, the Census Bureau estimated that about 86,000 people lived in the area. By 2020, the population neared 130,000. More than 7 in 10 of those residents are aged 55 or over, the largely inflexible minimum age required to own a home in one of the villages. Most of the Villages is contained within Sumter County, where, in 2003, 21.3 percent of its population were baby boomers. In 2019, 42.8 percent were, the third‑highest percentage of any county in the United States. The Villages grew so fast that, in the past two censuses, it helped Florida’s center of population stop moving toward Miami and start moving back toward Sumter County.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/the-villages-is-a-boomers-utopia-and-demographic-time-bomb
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I'd live in Hell and rent out the house in The Villages."
It seems like a good setting for a horror movie. 
or summer heat by doing tasks in the morning and - before the heat retention caused by urbanization - at night. But the beauty of working around heat, rather than cold, is that the heat doesn’t have to be shoveled, you don’t slide off the road into a heat bank, you don’t have to pull on layers of clothing and boots. You just work in an air conditioned office or, if retired take a nice siesta in mid-day.
We don’t, according to everything we hear, including a recent story in the NYT about a local sub-division being cut off from Scottsdale water, have much to worry about short term on the water issue. Agriculture, which uses about 77% of our water, will have to make adjustments long before households will have to make major ones. Of course, most of us do what’s feasible now to cut down on water use. I have low use toilets, washer, dishwasher and just installed a small water heater under my primary bathroom sink, to cut down on waste while waiting for water to heat up.
In the 30 years since I move here, the Phoenix metro has gone from the 14th largest to the 5th largest in the country. The quality of my life here is extraordinary, and my children have recently bought a home here in anticipation of retirement in a few years. But it’s getting crowded, and I therefore encourage everyone other than my own children to retire elsewhere.
