Interesting piece in the Tampa Bay Times this week about the growing political clout of The Villages, a massive retirement community in Central Florida that, like so many of its ilk, seemed to spring up overnight in local pastures like psilocybin mushrooms on cow patties after a summer rainstorm:
For several consecutive years, The Villages has been the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States, drawing retirees to an area northwest of Orlando with endless recreation, relative affordability and an almost jarring level of cleanliness and order. Now more than 124,000 people live in the metro area.
The Villages proper has soared from 8,300 residents in 2000 to more than 66,000 today, with a median age of 67. There are two Republicans for every Democrat…
Overwhelmingly white and Republican, The Villages and surrounding areas have offset the rise in Hispanic residents in Central Florida, part of the vaunted I-4 corridor where elections are decided. In a state with a history of bitterly close elections, small shifts matter greatly and this one played a key role in Donald Trump’s narrow victory.
I’ve complained in this space before about these retirement communities, and like a cranky old aunt who repeats the same story at every family gathering, I’m going to do it again. In a way, I understand the attraction. I don’t particularly enjoy sharing my town with yowling toddlers and skulking teens either.
But walling oneself off like that is avoiding real life. It’s choosing to live a Fox News bubble made manifest, an alternate universe of modular villas where you can drive a golf cart everywhere and rarely encounter someone who doesn’t share your background, skin pigmentation and opinions, let alone a person under age 55 who isn’t paid to serve you.
I don’t think it’s healthy for the people who live there, and I don’t think it’s healthy for the communities they leave behind or even the Florida towns that surround and serve them. All that wisdom and life experience entombed behind stucco walls, where too often it curdles.
But unlike so many of the ills that currently beset us, this will be a self-correcting problem. Even Florida Republicans can see that:
Democrats live here but maintain a lower profile, outnumbered 2-to-1, more so if right-leaning independents are counted. After Clinton’s loss, Democrats nationally bemoaned their sliding grip on the kind of white voters flocking to The Villages.
But the GOP faces its own issues for relying so heavily on white voters in a diversifying country and a state like Florida.
“The Republican Party is becoming an all-white party, unfortunately,” said GOP strategist Mark Zubaly of Tallahassee. “We need to wake up to that,” he added. “Eventually the rush of baby boomers from the north will end.”
Yes, it will end. And ironically, it will be the greed of the corporate parasites who benefit so mightily from The Villagers’ political leanings that kills the Republicans’ golden goose. The vast majority of people born in the 60s or later won’t have the option to retire in Florida with a nice pension and spend their golden years golfing and bitching about Kids Today.
Anyhoo, as a grizzled native, I tell fellow liberal Floridians who complain about retirees blighting our political prospects that previous influxes of folks from “up North” are what made this state not-Alabama. The worm will turn again. Our retirement might be a hobo adventure, but the future, such as it is, is ours.
Nicole
I know I often comment on how depressed I am by realizing how deeply racist and misogynistic this nation is, but posts like this really do give me a bit of hope, Betty. You and I aren’t that far apart in age, and we have spent the majority of our lives watching the pendulum swing from Left to Right. I think we’re at the beginning of it swinging Left again, and it’s a bummer to think I may not live to see it at it’s Leftmost peak (these things take time, after all), but I have to remember, it’s the campsite philosophy- try to leave things in better shape than when you found them, so someone else can enjoy them, too.
The article in WaPo about the eight statewide races that flipped blue since 2016 was heartening, too. After all, that’s where the Red wave started, decades ago- at the state level.
oatler.
Mmmm…Florida psilocybin…happy memories!
Corner Stone
Puheurto Rrrico, here we come!
aimai
Yes. My in laws moved to Florida with other Democrats (i.e. Jews from New York) to the Boca Raton/Boynton Beach area. They brought their politics with them and were reliable democratic voters. They moved with their entire friend community, it sometimes seems like, because the COL was lower than New York and people with mobility issues and one lung (for example) could no longer tolerate the NY winters. But they didn’t get involved in local politics because for a long time they still voted in NY, where they understood the local politics and they felt rooted. Now my FIL has just died and my MIL is having to make the decision whether to die there, alone in assisted living, or move back north to be near us (poor thing!) and die here with her one lung when pneumonia gets her. No one I know is planning to retire to Florida–no one can afford to retire full stop. It beats me who will buy their retirement home from them. So I don’t think the Villages (which really do sound like a damned place from all accounts) will keep growing at the rate they have. There is going to be regression to a new meaner mean as even old white people don’t have enough money and privilege to retire.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Yeah. It’s only a matter of time. The GOP made a huge mistake in becoming a racist, white majority party. It’s helped them in the short term, but will become a liability in a few short decades. Expect them to fall when the US loses it’s superpower status and all the privileges that has provided Americans to go away.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Corner Stone:
Florida will be the new Puerto Rico.
Chyron HR
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Never fear! The fever will break by 2050! 2060 at the latest.
Thru the Looking Glass...
Ah yes… today’s GOP…
An ever-increasing percentage of an ever-decreasing demographic…
Kinda like a political black hole… collapsing in on itself due ti its own gravitational pull…
Yellowdog
Not all retirement communities are like the Villages. I live in one in Maryland. It is at least one-third non-white and includes people of varying economic strata. There are few golf carts used off the golf course. People WALK places. And when you pass them on the street they smile and say hello. My SO said one of our senators (both Dems) told him he got more votes in our community than in all of Western Maryland (this may be an exaggeration…but western Maryland IS Appalachia). Membership in the Democratic Club outpaces the GOP club by about 4 or 5 to 1.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Chyron HR:
It’ll have to break at some point. Nothing lasts forever.
BBA
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
In the long run, we are all dead.
Major Major Major Major
Stuff like this is why I think Snow Crash feels like a likely sci-fi future.
bystander
I love that the Dutch word for “damned” is “Verfloekten”. Perfect.
Mark Hodgson
Interesting little factoid from the world of public health, the city in America with the highest rate of STDs is also its fastest growing city…. when we talk about “endless recreation” should we admit that we are using a certain amount of ambiguity.
Mustang Bobby
Yes, The Villages has a big clout in Central Florida, but given that Miami-Dade, Broward (Ft. Lauderdale), Monroe (the Keys), and to some extent Palm Beach Counties are still Democratic strongholds, at least by the count of the voter rolls, they can outweigh the alt-white community up north. Add to that the population of the Southeast counties will continue to expand with younger voters while the actuarial tables will not change up there. And if there is an influx of people from Puerto Rico, they will remember who helped after the hurricane, and once on the mainland, they will vote.
Mnemosyne
The subliminal message of Village of the Damned is all about the fear of the Baby Boom. Maybe the filmmakers were onto something … ?
Also, for people who have never seen it, it’s a quietly menacing and ultimately very poignant movie. It’s one of George Sanders’ best roles.
J R in WV
@ Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) :
Yes, because it is EVIL to turn into the party of NAZIS!!!
A Ghost to Most
“Some people stop living
Long before they die”
No thanks. And apologies, my father and step mother added to the snowbirds (Ruskin). At least he already self-corrected himself.
Baud
The GOP can instantly etch-a-sketch into anything they want as soon as white fascism is not longer beneficial to them. How many pivots has Trump been given already?
Hungry Joe
Just thinking about the Villages reminds me of my reaction when, many years ago, a Realtor insisted on showing us a McMiniMiniMansion in a cookie-cutter suburb. Plastic doors, oversized houses plopped down on undersized lots, snout garages (they jut out past the house, presenting a blank face and an implied Finger to the rest of the world), every four-block section walled off. I thought, “Any kid who is raised here and doesn’t take drugs is seriously fucked up.”
Mike in NC
My last surviving uncle passed away about a year ago. He moved to Sarasota when he retired, into a gated community with a new wife. Never saw it but he said it was usually too hot to go outdoors during the day, and people typically watched a great deal of TV. That was in the pre-Fox News era.
Starfish
My in-laws live in another community like the Villages except it is in Georgia. They were so happy with their community where they were surrounded by all their lily white neighbors, but it pissed me off. There was an app called Yik Yak which involved mostly high schoolers complaining into the ether about their rich out of touch grandparents. The only complaints the grandparents had were about other people’s miscreant grandchildren driving golf carts into the lakes on the golf courses.
Though some jobs did go to the locals, one year they were using those visitors visas to hire people to work in their cafeterias because “no one wants those jobs,” and I didn’t yell at them that maybe rich people needed to pay enough money and give some benefits to the people from Savannah to afford gas to get to their stupid gated community. Fortunately, those visas became more restrictive, and they were unable to do that the next year.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Baud:
I’m not so certain of that. I think too many people within the party’s base and even the electeds are too ideologically committed to “white fascism” at this point. For some, it’s a huge part of their identity.
rk
As I grow older I despise older people more. I had a lot of respect for older people at one time (a long, long, long time ago). What opened my eyes was the raging hypocrisy and selfishness of my parents and a lot of their friends. The older generations have been selfish and stupid for the most part. They’re not wiser (except for a small percentage) or better humans.
I prefer living around young people. I don’t get to interact with young people much, but I want to live in a community of mixed age groups and ethnicities. Death would be better than living in an all white old gated community.
jeffreyw
@Major Major Major Major:I saw where Amazon was developing something from Snow Crash.
Duane
These “Villager’s” , who so enjoy their social security and medicare, have forgotten which party provided those benefits.I’m in their age range, and when I call them out on it, they have nothing to say.
IGMFY is all they got.
bemused senior
This Boomer just took a full-time job because my millennial kids can’t make enough money to live here and raise a family. Fortunately me benefits include working remotely and seeing my twin grandchildren every day. My main concern is what happens when my husband and I can’t do it any more.
Starfish
@rk: The people who live in these communities are not living near their grandchildren. They are not there to take the grandkids for a day so their children can finish planting their avocado trees. They just sit there and complain about their tax dollars paying for the schooling of the kids who are not their grandchildren. It is really annoying.
Major Major Major Major
@jeffreyw: I did too! Hope it’s good!
Gin & Tonic
Born in the 50’s, I am probably fortunate enough that I could have that option. But I’d rather take a bullet to the nuts.
debbie
They had these places back (way back) when I was in high school. My friend’s aunt let us stay with her and caught all kinds of hell from her neighbors. And we were just three girls who stayed at the beach all day, every day.
Carl Weese
In 2012 I did a weeklong artist-in-residence stint with the Firehouse Cultural Center in Ruskin, Florida. Along with presentations and workshops, my main brief was simply to “do my thing” making photographs in Ruskin and vicinity. There was plenty that was new to me, since I’d never spent time in Florida before, but the strangest was nearby New City Center, with the cookie-cutter housing and the duffers driving around in golf carts oblivious of traffic rules, as though they’d forgotten a car might come through. Now, I was 63 at the time, so some of these folks were likely younger than me, but the situation surprised me. We have retirement communities here in Southern New England, but they are basically smallish condo developments, tucked into a town with some other regular condos, and, you know, like, the town. The extent, and emptiness, of this community startled me. I only made a few pictures, because it was obvious that I could only have a superficial look at the surface of the community in my limited time frame. But I can guess everyone was inside looking at TV, because the guys on the golf carts were the only moving objects I saw.
Daddio7
Blacks vote as a block as do most Hispanics voting in their own best interest. When whites do it we are called mean and despicable. I have my own place in north Florida where I have lived and worked since 1971 and didn’t need to move when I retired. Oddly three of my four children live in Orlando.
tjlabs
Here’s a fun fact. Since none of the females who reside in the Villages can get pregnant, this idyllic community has the highest rate of STD’s in the state of Florida. Don’t believe me? Google it. They spend their days screwing like rabbits.
Mokum
@bystander: vervloekten. Unless you are from Amsterdam, then you would pronounce it with an f.
Actually the poster must be from Belgium, being bilingual.
NotMax
The Villages?
“Be seeing you.”
Betty Cracker
@Carl Weese: You’re thinking of Sun City Center. It was one of the original age-restricted communities, IIRC. Hope you got to see Cockroach Bay and environs while you were in the area.
@Daddio7: Can you name some non-despicable interests around which a white voting bloc could legitimately coalesce? Because your comment sounds a little like, “Why isn’t there a WHITE history month?”
sharl
@NotMax: A reference i will always find welcome. Of course, in the case of the real thing, people actually move to that antiseptic community of their own volition, rather than being gassed and kidnapped. Onsite security at The (real) Villages is probably a bit different as well, although some of the guys working guard duty might bear some resemblance to big and round bouncy Rover.
Ithink
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
It can’t happen soon enough, the demographic shifts. Sadly, they’ll do all the damage they can to the world, our federal government and all their perceived & imaginary enemies until it officially comes to pass!
gene108
Republican demographic death spiral is overrated, unless the number of Representatives in the House is increased.
Doesn’t matter, if more Democratic voting minorities move to Brooklyn or CA, you still need to win races in WV or KS, which are still awfully white.
If the membership in the House goes up you can have more urban districts, which should go for Democrats and rebalance the House from over representing rural areas to better reflecting the population distribution of the country.
Mnemosyne
@tjlabs:
They actually riffed off of that (the sex, not the disease) on an episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” where Bob and Linda discover that Linda’s dad is reluctant to participate in the swinging activities of their retirement community even though that was why Linda’s mom had wanted to move there in the first place.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
Increasing the size of the House would also dilute the excessive influence of small states in the Electoral College. Every state having two Senators would mean less if they had a minimum of two Representatives, too.
Mnemosyne
@Daddio7:
Jesus, now they’re sending in the single-A trolls. Fine, I’ll bite — why is it in your interest as a white person to give the Koch brothers a bigger tax break while paying higher taxes yourself?
And Confederate statues are just the world’s biggest participation trophies. You came in second in a war — at least you tried! Here’s a participation trophy for you because you showed up!
Hungry Joe
My mom is 95 and in a retirement home — still has her own apartment in what is called “independent living.” Her only complaint about the place is that she has no one to talk politics with. “They’re all Republicans,” she says (that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one), “and all they do is complain about taxes.” This is an upscale operation, a block from the ocean in one of the nicer parts of a nice Southern California town, and these old farts are forever pissed off about a small fraction of their estates going to support the society that has allowed them to live — and to die — so well.
No Drought No More
“The Republican Party is becoming an all-white party, unfortunately,” said GOP strategist Mark Zubaly of Tallahassee. “We need to wake up to that,” he added. “Eventually the rush of baby boomers from the north will end.”
No kidding? Whatever happened to “damn Yankees”? What decade did that pejorative lose traction in Florida?
Be that as it may, “Not Alabama” would make a great state motto for Florida. It’s humble, yet proud, too..
geg6
I truly would kill myself before living in such a horrific place. Ugh, my worst nightmare. I feel the same way about gated communities.
Carl Weese
@Betty Cracker:
Yup, slip of the keys.
Carl Weese
@Betty Cracker:
Cockroach bay didn’t get in my sights perhaps because it wasn’t on my local guides’ radar. I’ll go look it up.
Betty Cracker
@Carl Weese: Was out that way a couple of weekends back. Posted a few photos here.
Anotherlurker
I moved to Fla. almost 2 years ago. I lost everything I had because of Superstorm Sandy and walking away was the best option available to me, aside from ending my life.
I tried to do handyman work here in Fla. and I found that I absolutely hated the retirees. They are, as a group, nasty, entitled and incredibly self centered. They own these beautiful, cookie cutter homes that are so obsessivly clean yet each couple seemed like they hated each other.
Because of my contact with these folks, I really can say that I dislike my age co-hort.
I would not live in a place like The Villages even if all expenses were paid. I also don’t need an S.T.D.
My apartment complex is predominently Black and Hispanic. There are many younger folks living here who have Kids. We all have a story and we all are poor. I also like having Kids around. I feel that I am living with real people, not a fearful group who cling to the philosophy of I.G.M.F.U.
prufrock
This reminds me of Subic Bay in the Philippines when as a young Marine I spent a month there back in 1991. Everything relied on the bases, and it was not good for the local population.
EthylEster
I always wondered what exactly made George Saunders kill himself.
Now I bet it was appearing in Village of the Damned that pushed him over the edge.