Cathy Zimmerman: Can't feel at ease over leisurevilles movement
Sunday, July 20, 2008 12:28 PM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
This Day editor
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E-mail this articleIn our early years on Field Street, our cross-the-street neighbors included the Whitesides, a retired school principal and his teacher-wife. He cleaned the gutters and enjoyed a pipe outside on a summer night; she worked on her roses until she was in her 90s.
When David was 3, he used to escape and run over there. He’d say to Mr. Whiteside, “Take me to your woman!” And Mrs. Whiteside would give him cookies she had made.
Aside from sitting him in the time-out chair and lecturing about the danger of cars, I also taught Dave that he could not ask for cookies.
If he’d be polite, I promised, I’d take him to see his white-haired friends.
On our first foray, he strode up to Mrs. Whiteside and said, “I can’t ask you for cookies, so you’d better give me some.”
The point of this story is that he was crazy about them, and vice versa.
When Mr. Whiteside died, we sat out on our porch and listened to his adult grandson play the violin inside a house filled with grieving kin.
I thought of these neighbors, and so many others we have watched grow up or grow old, when I read about the “leisureville” phenomenon in the United States.
According to an LA Times story, more than 12 million Americans in the next 10 years will live in communities that ban young families.
Age-segregated communities started about 50 years ago in the Southwest, the story reports, and have exploded in popularity. In Florida, the world’s largest retirement community “is nearly twice the size of Manhattan and will have a peak population of 110,000. ...
“The Villages has two manufactured downtowns owned by one person (a third is on the way) with faux historical markers, more than three dozen golf courses and golden oldies pumped out of lampposts. Residents tool around on 100 miles of golf trails, often in carts pimped out to look like Hummers and Corvettes.”
What a sunny picture. Golf courses, line dancing, no unruly teens or babies or .... people with different tastes, different means.
The dark side is a new kind of segregation, and a new demographic driven by self interest.
In one Arizona enclave, “a couple was fined $100 a day for sheltering their grandson from a physically abusive stepfather. And in Sun City, residents defeated 17 school bond measures in 12 years (before de-annexing from the school district) because they had little interest in educating another generation of children.”
Age discrimination is protected by the federal Fair Housing Act. But we always think of it as happening to the old.
I like order and quiet as much as the next aging Boomer, but other pleasures of my neighborhood are just as important. They include the Wilkins, our gracious, green-thumbed neighbors in their 80s; Nick, the fair-haired toddler across the street; single homeowners, a three-generation household, young couples, and families who’ve been in place since we moved here 32 years ago.
I look out the kitchen window to see the little boys whose mothers I knew as “the Hannah girls,” tumbling in the yard while their grandma pulls weeds. Or Doris, walking her curly dog, Pollyanna. A middle-aged neighbor who’s raising her little granddaughter has reached out to a new elderly neighbor. The three of them take walks and go grocery shopping together.
One of my favorite oldies is “Different Strokes.” If people want to live in leisureville, that’s fine by me.
I just hope the trend doesn’t get out of hand. A democracy thrives when the needs of the many regularly trump the wants of the self. We all need all of us — to remember where we came from, to remember where we’re going, and to keep the grand idea of a polyglot society balanced on the edge of a home-baked cookie.
Originally published July 20, 2008.
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