Why are young people moving to The Villages?
The world’s largest retirement community runs on young people. Are they welcome next door?Through her high school years, Brandy Brown watched as the undulating farmlands surrounding her hometown of Coleman were eaten up by golf courses and khaki-colored homes. When she moved back after college, it seemed like all of her friends were working for the retirement community next door.
Soon, she, too, was employed in The Villages, the adult community in central Florida so large it spans three counties and has its own census designation.
The problem is, it isn’t really next door.
Brown, 38, is a nurse and her husband is a contractor in the community. They drive for roughly an hour to get to work each day, she said.
“In order to live close to your job, you would have to live in The Villages,” said Brown.
https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2021/10/08/why-are-young-people-moving-to-the-villages/
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/trump-florida-seniors-retirement-voters
It promotes itself as “Florida’s friendliest hometown”, a retirement playground where seniors while away their golden years in a carefree world of golf, swimming, fine dining, drinking, and nightly line dances in the village square. But one reckless and controversial retweet from Donald Trump, featuring some ugly racism from a resident in a golf cart, and The Villages’ carefully crafted image as a peaceful utopia for retirees began to dissipate. As elderly white voters, one of Trump’s key voting blocs in 2016, show signs of abandoning the erratic president, some are even wondering if the door has been opened for Democrats here, an area that until now has been unashamedly “Trump country”. “He’s definitely turning off some of the older voters in The Villages,” said Chris Stanley, president of the Democratic Club in the 32-square mile retirement community of 125,000, and a resident herself for almost six years. “They’re concerned about his plans for Medicare and social security of course, but they also didn’t allow their children to behave like this, they don’t allow their grandchildren to behave like this, and they’re very much turned off by it. “This is the generation that watched Walter Cronkite, had John F Kennedy, and Eisenhower, when politics was a whole different animal. When even if your party or your chosen candidate didn’t win, you were never afraid of damage done to your family or your country. And now? Whoever thought we’d see something like it is right now?”
The resident captured on the video yelling “White power! White power!” at a demonstrator was taking part in a parade of golf carts, the preferred mode of transport in The Villages, organised by Villagers for Trump, a rightwing group of residents that claims a membership of 2,000. Although the group has distanced itself from the comment and asserted the person is not a member, there are other allegations of the president’s more fervent supporters behaving badly. Golf carts bearing signs for the Democratic party or Joe Biden, Trump’s presumptive opponent in November, have been vandalised, Stanley says. Pre-pandemic gatherings of Democrats were assailed by residents hurling insults; pro-Democratic golf cart rallies have received social media threats of participants being pelted with rotten tomatoes or roofing nails left on trailways. And there are also tales of villagers leaving bags of dog excrement in the carts of those with differing political views. “It’s very hostile,” Stanley says. “Even on Facebook, you’re a libtard, you’re a demon-rat. It’s a constant barrage of hate.” Stanley, who has helped to marshal teams of Democratic volunteers for phone banking and mailing campaign flyers while the coronavirus pandemic prevents traditional door-to-door stumping, is under no illusions about the challenge in November.
Trump carried the three conservative Florida counties that incorporate The Villages – Lake, Sumter and Marion – by more than 115,000 votes in 2016. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of more than two to one. Yet Stanley also believes that Trump’s agenda of marginalising minorities has disenchanted plenty of voters in The Villages, where 98.3% of residents are white and 80% are older than 65, according to US census figures. “Many are grandparents who have multiracial grandchildren, gay grandchildren,” Stanley said. “These are people in their 70s and 80s who lived through a difficult time in American history, desegregation of schools, the civil rights era … and are now seeing the reverse steps. That concerns them more than the threat to Medicare and social security.” Her evidence? Increasing numbers of residents she says are calling to offer help and support: “fence-sitters here, there and everywhere; people who voted Trump in 2016 for whatever reason; people turned off by the vitriol he spews all day long”. Dee Melvin, an air force veteran who moved to The Villages in 2014 with her husband, has also witnessed a darkening of the political skies since Trump’s election. “Politically, it’s no longer America’s friendliest hometown. It gets tougher every day,” she said. “When we moved here I honestly didn’t realise there was strife going on politically. Even in 2016 it wasn’t unbearable, but this cycle, since 2016, it gets worse and worse.”
The atmosphere of hostility, she said, was the reason she decided to run for a seat in Florida’s house of representatives to represent The Villages, though she faces an uphill battle in November against Republican incumbent Brett Hage, elected in 2018 with 69.5% of the vote. “I’ve never been politically involved. I don’t always agree with Republicans, but honestly this is the first time ever that I’ve felt like someone is trying to tear our country apart and doing it on purpose,” she said. “I have Republican friends I know will vote for me. I have friends who were Republican and are now no-party-affiliated. There’s a difference between a true Republican and a Trump supporter. They’re two completely different people.” Republican supporters, meanwhile, don’t see the kind of backlash against Trump that others are predicting, even though they acknowledge the white power video was “embarrassing”. “Yes, he’s very popular down here, and I think he’ll run well for a variety of reasons,” said John Calandro, a former chair of the Sumter county Republican party. “He likes us, he’s been here, it’s good, solid conservative country. We will turn out on a per capita basis probably the highest percentage of voters in any county in the state. These are people who know what they believe and express what they believe through the way they vote.” As for the video, Calandro believes “some people are trying to make more of it than it really is.
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As new early retirees, we moved to the Villages! Free golf for life they said. Hubby just turned 55. Oh boy. A nightmare where the regular residents looked down on us because of our age, the ancient pool ladies screamed at our little grand kids and the golf players made hubby pull up the flags and generally do the bidding of the old guys on the course. Hated the place, we were gone in six months. I distinctly remember driving out of the place in my loaded up red truck, windows down, radio blasting the Rolling Stones! Freedom!
20 years, still driving my truck while listening to the Stones! Great idea! 
keep me alert, informed and very entertained. I can't imagine living around a bunch of old people like me. 
Sounds like that subdivision was controlled by the same kind of conservatives who 40 years ago loudly opposed making street crossings wheelchair accessible.
Fwiw, I suspect a lot of those really allergic to change and
differences don't make the giant move to Florida. They stay home and make their families and neighbors miserable. Wonder how many move to get away from them? Seriously.
Being so white is nothing to brag about, for sure, but I think most of the people excoriating TVers for this should take a look around and become more insightful.
TV was built to sell to people coming south from cold, white, northern states. Of course the market was almost all white.
An awful thing that comes to mind to say about TV is that probably most of those who dreamed of golfing and playing cards all year in a culturally homogenous community never gave a thought to moving to a city apartment for the diversity, not even enough to reject it. Overall, there probably is a higher than average premium on conformity.
But what's really so different about them, the large majority who aren't motivated by malevolence? It may not be wonderful, but it's sure extremely normal.
Young people of different races but similar income and ages fill the trendy condos built for them downtown. The mass AA migration to black communities in the south is because they're black. Development sell every day to the demographic they were built to appeal to, "15 minutes to work!"
When Bernie Sanders' NE generation (which was mine) decided to reject their parents' lives and go back to the land, it wasn't to the good and inexpensive land in the diverse states to the south and west, but to poor, rocky land with very short growing seasons in even whiter NE states.
And though I know our friends would prefer more diversity, life isn't all tennis and ceramics class, the "diversity" for the most part aren't interested. They have other choices.
I'll pass on shopping cart geographic anecdotes.
I haven't read Blow's book, but we took the NYT for years and I'm sort of familiar with hm. Since we live in the south, his observations about this region are of particular interest to to us too. I remember his, I think it was him, pointing out that if the great migration north hadn't happened, AA might mostly control the politics of the south now. (Imagine, the modern GOP without the southern states.) After 50 years of accelerating return, though, hard-core Southern racists have reason to be frightened. Not that they'll be "replaced" as they bleat, but that they'll be outcompeted at the polls and in jobs and housing markets. Not cancel culture (that'll have to wait for death), but definitely some much needed power shift.
I also remember that almost all of the cities where AA have been prospering economically and become important forces in the cities' cultures are in the south. These big trends are, of course, strongly related.
Orlando in FL, closest to TV, is similar. The black home ownership rate's quite decent there also. So who knows, if more decide on retirement that TV and its amenities are close enough to their kids in the city, lack of interest might well change.
by this mean era. Not the effusive displays at church and among friends, but more generally. It was real and charmed us when we first moved here, and it'd be a shame.
The blank faces and averted eyes now are no substitute. Of course the population explosion and cell phones (people don't need help from strangers) probably meant some of it was inevitable.
Anyway, I doubt I'll ever meet anyone new in future without some part of me wondering how he or she behaved in this era. Like the "who'd be a Nazi" speculations during WWII.
Oh, well. Chicken curry for dinner.
