DO YOU WANT TO LIVE IN LEISUREVILLE?

There is an interesting new book out - " Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Communities". in which a journalist takes a look at what he calls "Age-segregated housing".
This survey of the Sun Cities of the country and how that housing segregation is affecting the nation's culture is fun to read. You can put all of your own praise or criticism of these enclaves of senior citizens into play when you read it. I have my own, God knows, having tried briefly to exist in a retirement community. I have also witnessed the birth of a senior sub-city in Arizona, and watched it almost kill an entire previously healthy school system, its neighbor.

First, what's good about it? Getting old is really a downer. When you are all together with all your wrinkles, thinning hair, hip replacements and the like, you don't feel so much a figure of fun. You can get a walker and it's all right. You don't have to see the bright eyes and smooth skin of the young, hear the new vocabulary you have no knowledge of- you are safe and secure. When you talk about "the war" everyone knows which war you mean. It's comfortable.

That is good, but what is the down side to the senior community? The worst is that living there engenders selfishness and (dare I say it) meanness in a large part of the population. Hence the fervid, cantankerous antipathy toward paying taxes. In Phoenix, for example, the local Sun City enclave voted every school levy down, time and time again. Finally in desperation the boundary was changed, and Sun City was put in a special and unique capsule, with no responsibility for any
of this community obligation. This reluctance to support schools is surprising, given that Sun Citians were educated in public schools and land-grant state universities, as were their own children. The attitude seems to be "I've educated mine, and that's the end of it." The author of "Leisureville" attributes this to a declining notion of community.

The newspaper's letters to the editor columns are usually filled with angry letters from the age segregated communities, a sad negative note. It's true. Part of it, in my opinion, comes from the lack of respect or interest in seniors seen in the outside world. When these people are clumped together in a segregated community, resentment grows.

What is the future of the senior communities? According to the author, not much. When you don't care about future generations, you don't invest for the future. It's a glide to the finish. Read this book, and see what you think.


"Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias" ( Atlantic Monthly Press) by
Andrew D. Blechman