Florida's Activity-Loving Village People

It may seem a little odd to see a bunch of granddads doing battle on a professional-grade softball diamond. But this is just a glimpse of the frenetic hive of activity that is The Villages, a retirement community so big and sports-obsessed that it supports 90 softball teams — not to mention 25 golf courses and a 1,000-seat polo stadium. Though this is just a midseason, recreational-league game, the teams play all-out, with deft double plays and nose-to-nose arguments with the umpire. And the media attention is genuine: Tomorrow's paper and TV news will give the players their due. After all, this is a community that takes play seriously because play proves that "older" doesn't mean "old."

A mini-city 90 minutes north of Disney World — in the middle of nowhere, in other words — The Villages has quietly grown to become quite literally the biggest retirement community in the country, by taking the "what, me retire?" movement to a new extreme. While traditional retirement communities might seem like sleepy enclaves sheltered from the outside world, The Villages is a self-contained replica of that world, designed so that inhabitants never need to leave. Some 200 restaurants and stores cluster around two artificially antiquated town squares. Villagers have their own movie multiplexes, their own radio station and their own "college" — albeit one where cake-decorating and watercolor lessons replace physics and Econ 101.

This exurb for the Ex-Lax set offers an exaggerated version of the kind of retirement that more and more of us say we want. Today's older Americans insist that their leisure years be as intellectually and physically stimulating as their careers were — they don't even like the word "retirement." Consequently, the "active-adult community," which combines low-maintenance homes with recreational amenities, has become one of the hottest trends in real estate. In a 2005 survey by home builder Pulte, 59% of respondents between the ages of 40 and 49 said they intended to move when they retired. Builders are assuming that places like The Villages might be their destination, and there are now about 1,250 active-adult housing complexes in the U.S., more than three times as many as a decade ago.

Still, none of those developments match The Villages for sheer size, or for its activity mania. It's a testing ground for the notion that the average seventysomething can and should be just as busy as the average fortysomething. And for residents who keep their vigor, it's like Christmas every day. Still, even here you can't avoid reminders of the physical and emotional challenges of growing older, and in the face of that reality, The Villages' life-as-permanent-vacation philosophy raises its own questions. This is, after all, a community that has more bowling lanes than hospital beds, and that's not always the right balance — as the action back at Saddlebrook shows. Lee Applegate, himself nursing a knee injury that has sidelined him for months, watches as two more players hobble off the field with strains and sprains. "I worry a lot about these guys," he says. "Everybody comes out here, tearing around like they're invincible."

If history is any guide, they'll fill up fast. The Villages had 11,000 residents in 1992, 21,000 by 2000 and 60,000 by this summer. If this were a city, instead of an amalgamation of "community development districts" managed by The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc., it would be the 40th biggest in Florida. The developers add 4,000 homes a year, and early next decade they'll reach "build out," with 110,000 residents in 56,000 houses. Considering that the average active-adult enclave has about 400 units — and that there are only 500,000 such homes in the country — The Villages comes across as a freak of residential planning, The Truman Show on steroids.

And it's nothing if not planned. The founding developers, Gary Morse and his father, Harold Schwartz, who died in 2003, fueled The Villages' boom by appealing to seniors across the income spectrum. New homes range from modest two-bedroom "Villas," starting at around $150,000, to "Premier Homes" that can reach $1 million, with sprawling great rooms and fairway views. Homes of all sizes share the same unassuming Brady Bunch ranch exterior styles. They're built on one story, with "easy living" (read: "handicapped accessible") floor plans. The developers planned each new neighborhood around its own nine- or 18-hole golf course, and the streets bend gently around their contours. Today the developers have golf down to a formula: "One hole for every 90 residents," says Gary Moyer, the executive in charge of development. The royal and ancient game has given The Villages perhaps its most enticing advertising slogan: "Play Golf Free for the Rest of Your Life." (Though in fact, golf is free only if you play without a cart; to cruise the courses you pay about $135 a year in trail fees.)

Keep exploring, and you'll spot a directional sign painted in antique lettering on a disembodied arm, a look that evokes the animated sequences from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Follow the finger, and you'll reach a town square with all the trappings of a traditional Middle American Main Street — bubbling fountains, a band shell, a Starbucks — surrounded by retail and restaurants. In a blissfully air-conditioned office nearby, The Villages' director of design, Gary Mark, explains how it came into being. By the early 1990s, as the community started to boom, some residents began to lament having to drive off-site whenever they needed socks or a cheeseburger; this square, called Spanish Springs, was the ingenious solution. "Most of our residents came from small towns, so we embraced that as our model," says Mark. Of course, most Villagers' hometowns don't look like the bastard offspring of the Alamo and the French Quarter, as Spanish Springs does. The developers collaborated on the downtown with a Canadian designer whose other clients include Florida's Universal Studios theme park and the emirate of Dubai. They subsequently went a little overboard in giving the terra cotta mini-mall a fictional history. "One legend has it that Ponce de Leon created his first Florida settlement in Spanish Springs," gushes The Villages' cheerfully implausible promotional video, adding that residents believe a manmade fountain in the square is "the fabled Fountain of Youth."

But ersatz though it may be, the downtown offers something many adult communities lack — a social center that's more than a glorified bingo hall. The developers seeded the area with a street life, opening inexpensive quick-casual restaurants with names like "Café Olé" and providing reliably inoffensive live music every night. The plaza proved a huge draw, and in 2004 The Villages opened a second downtown: Lake Sumter Landing, a faux fishing village in the style of Key West. The developers' spacious headquarters overlook this square, and there on an aerial photo in development spokesperson Gary Lester's office, you can see the site for the so-far unchristened Downtown Three, as well as those of all the golf courses and homes yet to be built.

The best way to get around this sprawl — indeed, the way most of the locals do it — is by golf cart. The carts are a symbol of the freedom not to have to get anywhere in a hurry, and they're a nice proxy for the muscle cars of the retirees' glory days, since you need to reach only about 10 miles per hour to feel a convertible-like breeze in your hair. Many homes include a miniature garage, scaled to the size of a tool shed, to accommodate the owner's cart. It's not unusual to find carts that cost more than the car next door, tricked out with everything from gold wheel rims to chassis that replicate classic cars — Pimp My Ride meets the PGA Tour. The carts may also find a place in the Guinness Book of World Records: In September 2005, 3,321 of them took part in the world's longest golf-cart parade.

That activity often includes actual work. Straddling an unpimped golf cart at the Hacienda Hills course, Roger Kipf runs down the list of activities he shares with his wife, Lois. "Golf, naturally. Water aerobics, cards, bocce, our neighborhood social club — oh, and the Iowa natives' club," says Kipf, a former insurance litigation manager from Davenport. But he also puts in three days a week — earning minimum wage plus extra golf privileges — as a "course ambassador" whose duties include coordinating tee times and cruising the links to hand out cups of ice water. "I don't do it for the money," Kipf explains. "I like to meet people, and I can't play all the time."

While no one keeps track of how many Villagers hold paid jobs, various residents estimate that it's an unexpectedly high proportion for a retirement community — as many as one in three. Indeed, a visitor to the Villages is likely to encounter the over-55 crowd not only at work but in full uniform, whether checking him in at his hotel, delivering his pizza or taking his ticket at the eight-screen Rialto Theatre. More surprising still, many residents like Kipf work directly for The Villages, either for pay or as volunteers in its recreation-industrial complex. And in what any CEO would appreciate as a brilliant cost-saving move, The Villages has enticed the residents to supervise their own athletic activities and to run the clubs — of which there are more than 1,000, encompassing everyone from Civil War buffs to cloggers to scrapbook enthusiasts. "We'll help you advertise for members, and we'll book you a room," explains Assistant Recreation Director Pam Henry. "But the residents do 90% of the organizing."

Organizing sometimes means tinkering with the rules to accommodate aging bodies. At the ballpark, for example, chasing down a fly ball gets harder with age — just ask, or watch, Barry Bonds — so Villages teams play with two extra fielders. And while every morning brings out hundreds of seniors in tennis whites, most of those folks are actually turning out for pickleball, a game played with paddles and a lightweight, slow-moving plastic ball on a surface about one-third the size of a tennis court. Charlie Penta, a 78-year-old retired truck driver from the Boston area, helped popularize the sport around these parts. "Those hard courts, all those lateral moves, tennis is hard on the joints," he explains.

Should a pickleballer serve a game-winning ace, she might get a Warholian moment in the media spotlight. The Villages Media Group includes three cable television channels and a newspaper, The Daily Sun, with a circulation of 30,000. The tone of their coverage is summed up by the mission statement of the flagship program on the Villages News Network, or VNN: "Tired of all the 'news' you see on television these days? Minute by Minute offers something different." In practice, that means voluminous coverage of every recreational activity in town. Each day the show airs a half hour's worth of material, introduced by two hosts with the gravitas you'd expect to see on CNN — the other NN. That telecast includes three sports segments that cover everything from bocce tournaments to grandpa-grandkid pie-eating contests. One favorite sportscast tactic is to split, say, a golf foursome's 18th-hole performance into three segments — drive, approach shot, putt — and spread them across three slots. It's a serial cliffhanger: Will Jack hole out in five? Stay tuned! But if your birdie or 7-10 split does air, you'll get maximum exposure: That half hour of coverage runs for 24 hours in a loop.

There's more to the local media than Senior SportsCenter; they often drop the veil of cheerfulness to address the anxieties of growing older. In between profiles of octogenarian archery champs, some of the Sun's best coverage grapples with issues like Medicare costs, or the pros and cons of knee implants. And Minute by Minute offers a steady stream of advice about such matters as diabetes screenings and wearing sunblock. Admittedly, the cautionary tone can become comically condescending: Emergency phones have been installed at the swimming pools — but remember, "They are not for chatting."

If there's one major blind spot in the developers' vision, it's the health infrastructure,which looks like a fleeting afterthought in the community's master plan. The Villages Regional Hospital is a comfortable, well-appointed facility, but it didn't even open until 2002, and it has only 60 beds. In winter months it often operates at 110% capacity, and incoming patients are routinely rerouted to other facilities. After Riell had his heart attack, he wound up in Leesburg, 12 miles away, getting diagnostic tests that The Villages' hospital didn't have the equipment for.

Residents who want to stay in The Villages once they need nursing care may find there's no room for them, either. The complex's only assisted-living facility, The Village of Homewood, has 50 beds, a ratio of about one for every 1,200 Villages residents. That's mind-bogglingly low: In a typical planned retirement community, the ratio is more like 1 to 10. Then again, it's hard to imagine anything more antithetical to The Villages' ethos than a nursing home. The marketing video practically gives itself cramps tiptoeing around issues of illness and injury; it introduces the community's medical facilities by saying, "With so much to do and so much to enjoy, you're going to want to keep your energy level high!"

Development executive Gary Moyer points out that his company is in the real estate business, not the hospital business: It doesn't own or operate Homewood or the medical center. The current building plan includes a site for another hospital, and it could make room for more assisted-living housing "if there's significant demand." And today construction crews clamber around the roof of the existing hospital, working on an expansion that will more than triple its size while adding cardiac care and joint-replacement surgery facilities. But clearly, The Villages is playing catch-up, and it could still pay a price for falling behind. Developers that don't emphasize assisted living risk alienating seniors who don't want to have to leave if they become frail, says Andrew Carle, a management professor who directs the Program in Senior Housing Administration at George Mason University: "There has to be a continuum of care, and communities that don't provide it won't thrive."

Still, while The Villages as an institution may close its eyes to aging's dark side, most residents do not. Few pastimes here are as popular as line dancing, which accompanies nearly every song at concerts at the town square, regardless of genre or speed. Like many things about aging, the repetitive, shuffling steps look awkward when you do them by yourself and more graceful when a group goes through the paces together. Still, Richard Neveu, a former packaging company sales executive, has decided not to join the fun. He's an avid pickleballer and golfer, but he knows his limits. "Those crowds get moving pretty fast," he says. "You slide one way, someone else slides the other, and boom, somebody's in the hospital."