Transcription
This is me on a golf cart in The Villages, the largest, most cult-like retirement community in the world. There are thousands of nearly identical houses here, golf courses for miles... "So much golf." ...and a microcosm for the United States of America. “130,000 seniors.” "The land of the loofahs." "A town where people's dreams really can come true." Nine out of ten houses here belong to someone retired to live the good life. (“To the spirit in the sky”) Retirement... I don't know if that will ever happen for me.
By understanding the very specific story of how The Villages was built and how it works, we can understand how the United States of America got the way it is today—a story about how one generation built a doomsday shelter to escape the society that they built leaving another generation on the hook. He’s about to back up the golf cart for the first time. And there he is. Let's look at Google Earth for The Villages. Zoom back to 1985. It's basically nothing. By 1994, it was already a world apart, building its own special terrain of golf carts, a universe that would greatly expand. Here are the 1994 boundaries. And here's today. That means that there are miles and miles of trails. How did The Villages build this dense network of, like, rec centers with sweet pools and squares, with dancing and concerts, all accessible via golf cart?
So that's Will Chilton pulling the golf cart out of our Airbnb. A little bit ago I had live-streamed and I said that I was thinking about visiting a "sort of utopian community with a dark side..." and Will guessed The Villages. "Don’t spoil it, Will!” I was a fan of his channel. His last video, he went to South America and tried out BYD electric cars, so... "EVs and emerging markets are really competitive products." ...so that's the type of interest that he has. But I didn't know him well. And anyway, a few weeks later we were in a golf cart together. "How well would you say that we knew each other before this on a scale of 1 to 10?” “I've talked to some people about this. So, like, we first…” “Like a three? Like a two?" We were using The Villages' custom golf cart navigation app. Our village, and the rec center that we visited, was in kind of an older zone of the Villages — "This is like they... they're very Westworld about it, you know? Like, like there's like different themes.” “Okay.” “Like the Spanish theme is the first one." We started by playing ping pong, and a woman immediately told us that the loofahs were just a rumor. "Loofahs are on top of cars, on top of golf carts. Different colors. So what's the deal? "Loofahs are a way people can tell by the color of the loofah what you're into when it comes to, let's say, rendezvous and the boudoir." Why is the rest of the country not like this? Why is this so unusual?
The Villages began as Orange Blossom Gardens, a perma-mobile home community that you can still find on the map today. “Do you need directions?” "I get the sense that you don't know what we're doing any better than I do." "I don't." "Shiny Happy People (music)" "My gosh." "We're on a bridge just for golf carts." Ultimately led by real estate developer Harold Schwartz and his son H. Gary Morse, he began adding amenities, and in 1992 it was renamed The Villages. Each little neighborhood is a different village. It is organized into Community Development Districts, CDDs. That is a Florida innovation that supercharges developer-dominated communities and allows for them to issue bonds to fund development and amenities. Imagine a golf course. The CDD issues a tax-exempt bond. Investors buy it. And the developer gets a ton of cash. Villagers get the golf course right away and residents pay off the bondholders over decades through a special assessment. This is like a little power pill for developers. They don't have to wait to build more and more golf courses because they're able to get the money right away. The scale of this CDD funding is so big that the IRS investigated it in 2008. Thanks to CDDs, all the golf cart roads, the mini pools, the mini courses could all be aggressively built and funded. That is why even the water towers are branded.
Our neighborhood was one of the oldest, and I immediately noticed how closely the homes were packed in. This was pretty dense and to me it felt like, if not urban, but maybe like a really packed together suburb from the 1920s. Even as you go southwest and the homes get a little bit larger, they're packed in densely and they are kind of modest. Most of these houses are not that expensive. I mean, these are modest homes, but like, they're not hugely priced. And I don't know, to me they seem pretty nice. Like, look at that golf cart, garage, kitchen, two-bedroom home. But and it looks like for brand new homes, the most expensive one is $538,000. Not saying that's not a lot of money, but it's not like decadent. This is a three-bedroom, three-bath thing. The idea is clearly here to get out of the house and get into the community where you can enjoy all these amenities and, honestly, the proximity to your neighbors. "Rec center over there. It's just, like, very calming, very calming. Hard to freak out right now."
The United States is not generally like this. Why? People say that this article was the first. This is another article that I could find about NIMBYs. It describes a phenomenon—"not in my backyard"—that slowed development in America. And rather than reversing it, baby boomers sped it up. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, baby boomers discouraged development of new housing through this method. What development they did allow was generally sprawling and relatively light on amenities. Look at this chart, right? It shows young adult home ownership. It peaked in 1980, and since then it has been on the decline. And there's a reason for that: the supply has been limited. Boomer development was the polar opposite of The Villages. The Villages developers are able to build a lot super quickly because they have political control. The boomers took a different approach in the communities that they lived in. They spent middle age reinforcing the car-dependent America and then fled to the polar opposite, to places like The Villages, a dense, constantly growing transportation alternative. "Wow, dude, I mean, look at it. And right now on the left are the new... the new developments." "And then on the right is... that's so crazy. Yeah, like the contrast." "They've got all the piping and everything, all the utility. Get the structure where you go for these houses. It's very, very well planned. Clearly they... they're very good at building this."
After driving about half the day, we reached the end of The Villages. But you realize that the end is just the beginning. "Right. There's Will running around like a Vice employee from 2014. Who time-traveled and showed up here in The Villages." And that reveals the next advantage that they have. "(music) We are the Village Green Preservation Society. God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety. We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society. God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties." It was 2 p.m. on a Sunday and the Villagers were clubbing. We had reached another one of the town squares, Brownwood Paddock Square, an invented pastiche of Old West stuff with made-up landmarks. "You know the view of Scooples from here...it's breathtaking." "Wow."
The entirety of The Villages was younger and livelier than I had expected. Brownwood Paddock is where we met Jeff and Lori, two YouTubers who call themselves the Gen X Villagers, and they dispelled some myths about the place as well. "Do you feel like there's a difference between kind of the baby boomer and older generation and the newer Gen X generation that is coming in? Is that—" "Yeah, yeah. That's correct. I think that, just as a general rule, the baby boomers are more reserved. They want more quiet, more... they have a closer-knit group of friends. Yeah, yeah. And they just want life to slow down a little bit, and that's fine. The Gen Xers that are coming in and buying the new homes in the South, mostly in the South—it's just, again, as a general rule, we like to have a lot more fun. And we're a little louder, a little more... and a little more active." "Yeah, yeah." "And another thing is a lot of us down south, on the south end, we haven't retired yet. We still work full-time, and that is—a large majority of people down there still work. They work remote." "Okay." "Are there misconceptions like—" "Oh yeah.” "One is the loofah thing." "Okay, can you describe what the thing is since you mentioned it?" "Google the loofahs. Okay." "All right.” “The rumor came out of the '80s of STDs. Okay. So depending on what color loofah you have hanging off your golf cart is what you would be okay to be in on." "Okay, okay." "And have you seen any loofahs?" "I have not, no, no." “It's our third time here, and now we live here. I still have not seen any loofahs." "It seems like a waste of a perfectly good loofah, to be honest."
As young as Jeff and Lori are, The Villages is almost exclusively a 55-plus community, and that is actually one of its superpowers. I want to show you a painting. In a normal village, you have all types of people: older people, younger people who are working, and kids. This was the world that the baby boomers grew up in—one where repetitious houses were arrayed around their flourishing. Education spending as a percent of GDP, for example, doubled from 1950 to 1970, bumping up less than a percentage point since then. Imagine that you could build a place without the criminals, the poor, and the children. You have a lot of money that you can use on amenities. In 1995, the Housing for Older Persons Act passed, HOPA. It was backed in part by Sonny Bono— "And baby I got you." —of Sonny and Cher. It simplified and expanded an earlier part of the Fair Housing Act. It inevitably raised costs for families who couldn't have access to housing, but it reduced long-term costs for senior communities. HOPA was sold to the public for seniors living in mobile homes, but The Villages residents have the same allowance. That reduces costs for these communities because they get to fund different types of services that only this particular age group needs to use. Having preserved housing exclusivity through construction rules, now boomers had a way to keep the young out of The Villages that they built. In 1995, one scenery-chewing senator spoke against it: "It makes it a lot easier. They don't have to be a senior facility. They can just not like kids. They can just not like kids around." But there was still one big problem for The Villages and for baby boomers. All this—it still wasn't enough.
We stopped at a Village Square concert. A large American flag flopped in the wind as cars and golf carts traveled underneath it. I walked across The Villages' branded bridge and glimpsed part of a pool where one man swam alone. On the absolutely lovely veranda of my Airbnb, there was a sculpture of a young mother and a child, something that I hadn't seen all day. I peeked over the fence at the identical houses and listened to the hum of the air conditioner next to a tiny group of tulips. I was exhausted and slightly motion-sick from the golf cart, and looked up the dimming, but still blue, sky. The next morning, I knew the one item I had left on my agenda. I was genuinely sad about it. We got lost on a golf cart trail, and we drove. I struggled with this. Not only were the Villagers that I had met incredibly nice, but I really liked a lot about The Villages. I think it's like a really good thing in a lot of ways. The problem for The Villages is that Sumter County still had public schools—not a lot because the 55-plus housing dominated it, but they still had some. For the childless residents of The Villages, paying taxes for other people's kids was a waste of money. To the people who wrote up that education spending graph, The Villages also needed little worker bees. They needed people to run the golf courses and staff the shops. But for a place with 12% employment, that was pretty hard to find. So they came up with a solution called Middleton: a new village where everyone could live, including those under 55—a new, non-age-restricted family housing development built by the developer specifically to house the local workforce. And there was a carrot and a stick. In 1999, Ryder, a logistics and transportation company, opened the first charter-in-the-workplace school in Florida. Ryder built a school near its headquarters. Ryder employees' children got first dibs, but others could attend, which is why these ads were in the paper. Because the schools were part of the public system, they could get public funding too. It was soon closed, but the law remained. The key thing is the law for these workplace charter schools: if a parent stops being employed by the workplace, the kid can get kicked out of the school. "Changes in employment status, unpaid balances, or incomplete parent involvement hours may affect your child's enrollment status." So the company can build this really posh school. But if the employee leaves or gets fired, the kid gets kicked out of the school. Obviously, this gives the employer immense leverage over the employee. Not only do they have power over their job, they have power over the schooling of the employee's child. The jewel of Middleton is The Villages' charter high school. It looks great, it is huge, and it is exclusively open to children of employees of The Villages or The Villages-affiliated businesses. And if a business doesn't tell The Villages that employment lapsed, well, you could jeopardize your relationship with The Villages. Imagine that you are an employee in The Villages or some Villages business. Isn't that too much leverage?
So I want to make one plea for a compromise with the Villagers. And I think that this could be heard with open ears, because these are very nice people. I know because I talked to a lot of them, and also a lot of these people have served their country, so they are not strangers to making sacrifices for others. And the sacrifice that I want to propose is a very small one. It's a small compromise: it's to end the continued employment requirement for kids to be in these schools. Maybe that is what residents of an actual village would do. So how does this niche school policy connect to the country at large? Well, baby boomers built communities that were unlike the ones they allowed to be built in the rest of the country. They restricted who could get the money in these communities so that it only flowed to them, even though they were the beneficiaries of huge amounts of money in the earlier days. In The Villages, retirees get captive labor from a workforce that cannot leave. And in America, baby boomers get younger labor subsidizing their retirement. Our country's debt is increasing rapidly. Baby boomers receive Social Security payments that are indexed to inflation and use Medicare that the young don't get. We are asked to keep giving .to a generation that mostly received, and while the debt rises and rises they continue construction of new places where only some villagers can go.
Right. That's it for this one. Go visit Will's Channel if you want to see a companion video about golf carts and go to my newsletter. You may have noticed there's no sponsor to this video. The sponsor is me, and I want you to visit my newsletter. I've got a link to it. It is free to subscribe to, and I'm really just trying to get up that free number. We are almost at 6,000 subscribers. I'm trying to get up to 10,000 subscribers, and you can help me. All I do is I send out a free update when a video comes out, and I have an extra article about something that I couldn't get into in the video. And this week I'm going to talk to you about one of The Villages' hot spots that I got to eat and party at. It is called City Fire, and there are a bunch of funny stories about it. So go ahead and click over to the newsletter to check that out—again, free to subscribe to. And that is the way you can support me making videos, just by subscribing to this free newsletter so that you know when they come out.