LEISUREVILLE

A sharp take on care- and child-free “Active Adults” communities, where golf carts have replaced the automobile, downtowns are make-believe, the days are filled with sunshine and restrictive covenants enforce conformity.

Blechman (Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird, 2006) spent time at The Villages, a sprawling retirement complex in central Florida that “spanned three counties and two zip codes, and more than 20,000 acres,” with a population of 75,000 and plans for 35,000 more. He profiles some of The Villages’s most colorful residents, chronicling in wondrous, often sad detail their ersatz surroundings, sex lives and drinking habits. These seniors have willingly swapped the ballot box for the suggestion box, he asserts, leaving the concerns of the larger world behind and ceding the details of local government to the developer. Blechman includes a bit of history, describing the 1950s birth of Youngtown, Ariz., the nation’s first age-segregated residential development, and the subsequent creation by Del Webb of nearby Sun City. He probes the inevitable difficulties of maintaining communities inhabited solely by aging seniors on fixed incomes. In his view, “cloistered playgrounds” and “gated geritopias” filled with disengaged seniors are a sign of a societal failure; he is dismayed by the thought that as the baby-boom generation retires, millions of Americans may be buying into them. Describing the marketing strategies for reaching boomers laid out at a “50 Housing Symposium” sponsored by the National Association of Homebuilders, Blechman reports that future retirement complexes may be smaller and closer to population centers, with lots of appealing amenities. As an alternative, he urges that we try to make our present mixed-generation towns and communities as elder-friendly as possible and keep the old folks where they belong: living among us, sharing their valuable perspectives and life experiences.

A disturbing portrait of the business of retirement-center development and the deracinated lifestyle it fosters.