Fastest-Growing Metro Area in U.S. Has No Crime or Kids
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Having seen and dealt with lots of HOAs (and seen how incalculably awful they can be), I've got to imagine that life in The Villages is probably pretty good if you play along with all the rules, trim your hedges just so, and keep paying those dues and growing old quickly and quietly. But if you're the kind of person who wants to change something, or is unhappy about something, or wants to improve something, or wants to do something even a tiny bit outside the boundaries, life gets rough pretty quickly. "I'm sorry, the board has decided you cannot do that." ... "I'm sorry, this decision is final." ... "I'm sorry, you must comply."
In short: The Villages is probably pretty nice if you're a follower, and pretty nice if you're an owner, and probably pretty awful for anyone else.
That said, any community with the ability to push out people unwilling to abide by the communities standards will have a higher satisfaction rating with members of the community. Whether it is by incarcerating people who violate laws (general practice in most US cities), disallowing member to said people (common in private clubs), or killing and torturing their families (seems to be a technique used in less civilized places).
Some friends of mine have speculated what a retirement home for hackers would look like. Basically catering to folks who have strong opinions about "how" to live their lives. It isn't an easy question to answer.
The real problem is that the association members could change overnight and there isn't really anything you can do to stop it.
http://www.braysisland.org/ "Recognized by enthusiasts as one of the premier locations for bird hunting in the southeast, Brays Island provides everything you need for a memorable and productive hunt. Of the island's 5,500 acres, 3,500 are untouched woods, marshes and fields set aside as nature preserves to guarantee your hunting enjoyment..."
"The Brays Island Gun Club is the premier site for the enjoyment of shooting sports. With the finest facilities for clay shooting, we offer numerous forms of target shooting, including skeet, trap, five-stand, plus a newly re-designed sporting clays course featuring a picturesque 15 stations..."
I'm not a hunter, but the inn looks quite pleasant. I'd go there for a visit if I were retired.
Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating? I'm asking because I'm from Norway - a country with one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the world - almost exclusively hunting rifles and shotguns -, yet where most people would be absolutely horrified if anyone tried to push through a "US style" liberalisation of gun laws. We have very strict gun laws, both in terms of licensing, what type of weapons are allowed, and storage.
Maybe hunting is much more tied to a specific sub-culture in the US than it is internationally, I guess.
I spent a few years covering 2A topics for CBS News.com (this is before I left to found Recent.io). This is true in my experience. As <brudgers> says, you can be interested in shooting sports without being interested in hunting, but I've found that both groups of people tend to be broadly pro-2A.
Note this may not have been true a generation or so ago. But since then, we've seen a ratchet effect where anti-gun politicians have tried to impose more and more restrictions. One effect has been to turn the NRA into the potent political force it is today. This coincided with the rise of the anti-gun left, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who in this clip seems to say she wanted to ban all guns (or all rifles?) but didn't have enough votes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rA6oX6eWWs Barack Obama, or his aide, filled out a questionnaire in 1996 saying he supported a state law banning the "manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns": http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire1newes... http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns: http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/ And so on.
This has been done in the name of cracking down on gun crimes. But the same weapon that can drop a 250-lb deer can also drop a 180-lb man, and even casual gun owners have become politically active and aware in a way they were not a generation ago (when politicians on the left were not as anti-gun as they are today). Also some of the recent wave of anti-gun legislation sweeps in weapons used for hunting purposes, which helps to explain this support for 2A rights.
I know this because I was a participant in my university's minority recruitment program. They reached that tipping point and didn't realize it. No matter how much money they threw at it the numbers went down every year. Minority (specifically, black, native american, islanders and hispanic) students would arrive freshman year and transfer sophomore year. While this is typical in the entire student body it was dramatically higher for minority students. When I asked some of the students why they transfer a typical answer was lack of restaurants, shops, activities, and community that cater to them.
A place doesn't have to be or do anything racist. After a while people self select and know where they aren't wanted or catered to.
+ Retired to Play
+ Retired to Save
From a community perspective, this means that you have people who are wealthy purchasing very modest houses right alongside blue collar retirees and talking grand children and exchanging lawn fertilizers over coffee and beers. And you have blue collar and corporate VP retirees playing golf together on Tuesday morning...and one of them may live in a 3000 square foot house and the other in 1150 and there's not a good bet as to which one owns which house.
Retirement communities aren't like typical homeowner associations. There's much more self selection of residents - people don't move to a place like the Villages because of a job or schools or generally without the knowledge that they are buying into a particular image of the 'retirement lifestyle'. To put it another way, the set of people for whom a community with lots of golf courses holds appeal does not strongly overlap the set of people who take great pride in non-conformance to the social norms of golf course communities.
Unlike a general golf course community however, there isn't so much moving there because it's 'right neighborhood'. People have sorted themselves out. They're not climbing the corporate ladder. They've been there and done that. That's not to say that there aren't insecure people, just that there tend to be a lot more people with a mature sense of identity on the balance.
If trimming hedges, conforming to someone else's ideal of hedge-height, is not your cup of tea, then why would you want to waste your golden years playing the angry old man (or woman) in the first place? Life is too short, especially at that juncture, to be wasted on rule-rage.
> What would happen if you ignored them? As long as you aren't renting, you can't be kicked out
For all the horror stories you hear about HOAs, there are thousands of them that are not overbearing and do serve the general interest of the community without irritating the homeowners.
Dont believe the fear mongering on the internet, most HOAs arent terribly bad (you only hear the horror stories). As long as you dont paint your house a crazy color or park a massive RV in the driveway they will not be too much of a bother. If anything they are usually just doing things to protect the community or make it more desirable, its just sometimes they screw a few residents over for the better of the community.
How does stopping someone parking their vehicle on their private property or painting their own house any colour they choose "protecting the community?"
You say that "HOAs aren't as terrible [as the internet would have you believe]" but based on what you said next I'm starting to wonder if they in fact are, but your standards for what they should be allowed to do are far too lax.
The only things I'd want a HOA to do is deal with noise violations, illegal parking, and maybe issues from a property which directly impact people living either side (e.g. smells, health issues -- like trash piling up, noise, etc).
>The only things I'd want a HOA to do is deal with noise violations, illegal parking, and maybe issues from a property which directly impact people living either side (e.g. smells, health issues -- like trash piling up, noise, etc).
In my experience this is what kind of issues the HOA dealt with when I lived in a town home and a condo community (2 separate places). For example, where my parents live they have much more restrictions but now that the community is over a decade old they are relaxing some restrictions.
There are ways around this, buy your own property and build a house on it then join the closest tennis/pool membership you can find, most older neighborhoods allow outside residents to join.
To each his own my friend. HOAs are allowed to do this because the residents support it and often times encourage the practices. If this is a major problem dont move into an HOA neighborhood plain and simple. I dont live in one right now and my grass is very high :-). If someone has a problem with that they can see my middle finger.
I have to agree. That's a completely unnecessary and arbitrary restriction on personal freedom.
>The only things I'd want a HOA to do is deal with noise violations, illegal parking, and maybe issues from a property which directly impact people living either side (e.g. smells, health issues -- like trash piling up, noise, etc).
Exactly - I'd be fine with this kind of thing, but they need/should have some kind of legal restriction to that level.
Have you ever lived in an apartment that had rules? Its the same concept. No one is forcing anyone to move into these communities there is plenty of land to build your own house.
Yeah, don't make noise after 11pm. Not some completely arbitrary standards on how stuff must look.
You can form an opinion on something with available facts. First hand experience can help one form or inform their opinion, but lack of that doesn't discount anything.
If you want to play that card then the majority of people's opinions on most common discussion topics is invalid (e.g. sexism, homophobia, racism, etc). If you're a white male then just don't talk about this stuff because, according to your logic, without first hand experience their opinion is invalid.
Slavery, sexism, homophobia, gay etc. those are not choices. Living in an HOA is a choice that you or I have to make. If you dont like them dont live in them, why would you want to destroy something you have a choice about. Others like these places, if they didnt there wouldnt be HOAs.
As you well know, I did not.
I was making light of your asserting that you cannot have an opinion on a topic unless you experience it first hand. Slavery, murder, racism, sexism, etc are all areas where this kind of thinking is flawed.
> Living in an HOA is a choice that you or I have to make.
Nonsense. There are cities where HOAs make up almost all of the "nice" areas. Is it a choice when there is no viable alternative? Also HOAs always expand but then never go away, so in the future your choice will naturally shrink more and more.
> Others like these places, if they didnt there wouldnt be HOAs.
Maybe others didn't have a choice either?
I left a comment about this, but the misery is on its way in the form of an unmanageable wave of long term medical care that local services can't keep up with. Putting hundreds of thousands of elderly citizens in an area without sufficient medical or social services is a recipe for some really sub-par end-of-life care that I don't think many of these folks really understand
For my parents, when they were very mobile and active it was a blast. Today both of them are in poor health with very little mobility. They live in a place far away from any amenities or in any commutable distance to the city, so all my siblings live far away. The community is designed like standard exurb suburban vomit - no sidewalks, houses spaced apart too far, the community clubhouse is miles from anything.
When there is a health emergency they're often left on their own. There are a lot of health emergencies. My dad now needs more or less 24/7 care. They have a nurse that comes by 3 days a week, the nurse staffing in the area is completely overwhelmed and the nurses they send are really unqualified to do much of anything and never show up half the time.
The area they live in was previously mostly rural and the local hospital is unequipped for anything my dad needs, or any qualified doctors so they drive 30 minutes to the next hospital away.
Long story short the real problem is what they hinted to - most of the retirees in this places are in their late 60's early 70's still. When they all hit 80 something what happens? The services in the area where these things spring up aren't even remotely equipped to handle the volume of long term medical care needed to keep these folks afloat. They're going to suffer and families are going to scramble to deal with it en masse
Anyway, whenever you see the claim "fastest growing" you should just go ahead and substitute "small" and then the whole phenomenon makes way more sense. There was a period where Bryan/College Station, Texas, was the fastest growing metropolitan area in America. That didn't make it a nice place.
As long as there's a basic level of legal protection from state/federal law, having municipal-level government handled by a hybrid of company (as vendor/owner) and residents would be interesting.
It's also something people have looked at for outside the US -- e.g. the "Free Cities" projects, and various free trade zones around the world.
A little less extreme are some of the privately planned cities in Southern California, like Irvine or Mission Viejo. These are generally affluent "commuter cities" whose governments aren't necessarily privately run, but whose majority landholders (and de facto bosses) tend to be the original developers.
I'd say the jury is still out on how successful these projects have been.[1] The SoCal privately planned communities have done pretty well for themselves, but they've benefitted tremendously from the expansion of the city, services, and infrastructure around and between them. It would seem much harder to make an isolated, self-sustaining community work.
[1] As cities, that is. As corporations, they've done phenomenally well for their developers. The developer of Irvine is worth about $14 billion, which puts him in the running for richest man in Southern California.
Both are the brain child of Donald Bren (who happens to have donated a large sum to UC Irvine and the CS school is now named after him )
Zot.
With a company-run town, however, you have a serious problem. What happens when things go wrong? One solution, of course, is that the local authority takes over, and this has happened a lot in many countries on a smaller scale, with privately managed housing estates and so on taken on by the local authority, but this really isn't a great solution; it's expensive for the local authority and an essential subsidy to the company, and couldn't be permitted on a very large scale.
In particular, you'd expect a company run town to be a disaster waiting to happen in the case where a property bubble collapses.
Of course, there are other problems; unless you're very careful, and regulate heavily, you'll end up with uncompetitive local supermarkets, and so on, for instance. And at a certain level of regulation, you're just using a private company to perform a government function, with the government telling it how to do it; this is almost never cost-effective.
They've allowed Detroit to just gradually erase from existence. It is being abandoned. They're demolishing parts of it that are decaying. In many parts of Detroit they can't pay police or teachers; they can't support fire fighters or other basic services.
This place is an anomaly nothing more nothing less.
The article mentions some demographic peculiarities, but the main point they seem to miss, is if every generation is poorer than the last as a national economic policy, and they're not leaving money on the table with this one, then who is going to live there in the future? I surely will not be able to afford it by the time I retire, at present trends.
If you build something thats not sustainable on the assumption it'll be sustainable, thats not going to work well.
http://www.thevillages.com/HomeFinder/Results/detail/L15.510...
The average person could probably cover the mortgage payment with their social security check.
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
my family is in the top 10th income percentile. My wife and I make about the same, so I plugged my half that into
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/quickcalc/
and ended up with about $1500/month. So 90% of the population will have less than us, or less than me, anyway.
Some mortgage calculators for the $157K house estimate $1012/month for that house leaving not too much for food, electricity, repairs, hobbies, "life". Medical care...
If a dude in the top 10% income bracket can't really afford to live in the cheapest house in the entire village its getting kind of elite not "average person".
(admittedly I'd have other sources of income than SS, which is probably going bankrupt before I retire anyway, and I'd probably have my wife to double the income... unless she got sick (or I got sick) in which case its pretty much financial death penalty declare bankruptcy and start over... Of course I could have a roommate, or several of them, assuming the HOA allows it)
My mom is on SS and that house would cost more than her check...
The average SS benefit check for a retired worker is 1,298.40. A spouse would add another 652.57. And they'd have medicare, and hopefully some savings for a down payment.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/2014...
That was the lowest priced house available though, so who knows what proportion of the community those homes constitute.
Social Security is a (very effective) program designed to prevent senior poverty, not to pay for a high-end lifestyle.
I don't think sustainability was a priority for the Boomers. After all, they grew up and lived in an era of unparalleled prosperity, and are now retiring with the wealth they acquired. And since golf is more fun when played with others, you get retirement towns like the one in this article.
As a national economic policy? In which nation? North Korea?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Village_%28The_Prisoner%29
It sounds like there are many things that can go wrong with this kind of "company town" scenario, like the company being able to overcharge residents for all sorts of goods and services by controlling what businesses can set up shop on the property. Since this complex is the size of Manhattan, it could be difficult for a resident, especially someone with impaired mobility, to go shopping in the "outside world".
Given the changing demographics of the developed world (lower birth rates and longer lives shifting the median age higher) this sort of system is inevitable. It can also be an effective way to keep costs in line. If the 100,000 residents are cared for by hospitals that are not trying to maximize profits (the profits being driven by home sales, services etc) you can get pretty efficient at maintaining a solid quality of life for folks.
I don't share your pessimism about government. Bell isn't a regular occurrence, and most important, it's being dealt with in the courts. Overpriced everything in company towns, on the other hand, is baked into the design. Look no further than your average college campus, where one caterer tends to have negotiated the whole concession. Independents can't even set up if they wanted to and prices do reflect the fact. On my campus we can't even order pizza for a seminar, except through Sodexo. And there's nothing you can do.
Airports is one of my favourite examples, because you're not even able to go elsewhere once you're past the security gates. It's not unusual for a single company to get the concession and then set up franchises of brands that people would normally expect to be separate. E.g. at Oslo Airport every place to buy food in the international departures area from Pizza Hut to the "upscale" champagne bar and lounges is run by the same company.
My grandparents moved to Hot Springs Village in their 60s. Grandpa died this year (after having a major heart attack with EMS more than 45 minutes away...) and they hadn't really discussed what to do with the house, or Grandma now that she's losing her faculties. She certainly can't stay in the house because there's no help for her and she cannot live by herself.
I'm reading this thread because my aunt and uncle moved to the Villages, and it's really split them from the rest of the family. My parents and I disagree with their choice strongly. We intend to stay as mentally and physically active as possible as long as we can; to do this we're going to put ourselves in places where we're around people of varying ages who will open us up to new ideas, that have good medical infrastructure, and we're going to live in places where we aren't dependent on cars.