
Fastest-Growing Metro Area in U.S. Has No Crime or Kids - Futurebot
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-27/fastest-growing-metro-area-in-u-s-has-no-crime-or-kids.html
======
nlh
This is probably an insanely pessimistic view, but my first instinct after
reading this is that there's got to be some absolute misery juuuuuuust below
the surface of this place.

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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I've seen HOAs that are both full of petty bureaucrats with unresolved anger
issues, and ones that are out to make the community as widely accommodating as
possible. No way to know without actually going and talking to folks.

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.

~~~
brudgers
The key element is a shared opinion about how other people 'should' behave.
That's what makes golf courses a successful focal point for retirement
communities in a way that say a shared interest in hunting probably can't.

~~~
declan
You're right about a key element being a (broadly defined) set of common
values. But hunting also includes a broadly defined set of common values:
appreciation for the land and conservation, love of marksmanship, support for
2A rights, etc. Which is why, of course, hunting-based mostly-retirement
communities like Brays Island exist:

[http://www.braysisland.org/](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.

~~~
vidarh
> support for 2A rights

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.

~~~
declan
>Maybe that's true, but do you know this or are you speculating?

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](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_obamaquestionaire1newest.html)
[http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html](http://www.politico.com/static/PPM41_obamaquestionaire2.html)
San Francisco tried to ban possession of all handguns:
[http://mccullagh.org/sf/handgun-ban/](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.

------
rwhitman
My parents live in a retirement village, similar much smaller and in
Pennsylvania. I could rant about this forever.

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

------
thrownaway2424
Amusing that this should be on the front page at the same time as the Atlantic
article about Denver's transportation policy. The Villages is basically a
pedestrian's nightmare, without sidewalks or anything worth walking to or
past. It also has no businesses, being completely reliant on the surrounding
area for goods and services and entertainment.

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.

~~~
karlkatzke
I resemble that accusation. (I live in Bryan/College Station, and did not
graduate from TAMU, although I did work there for a few years.) No, really,
B/CS is actually rather a nice place to live. It's continuing to grow pretty
rapidly, the neighbors are nice, there are places to live without HOAs, and
there's more than enough to do that doesn't involve drinking or college
students.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Maybe it's lovely now. Twenty years ago it was a dump, literally ... the TAMU
socialist party newsletter (yes, really!) busted employees from the local
Elf/Atochem factory dumping arsenic into the local reservoirs at midnight.

------
rdl
I'd love more company-designed-and-built towns. There's plenty of land. I'd be
happy to look at a town built by a private company (probably a single-purpose
entity, but imagine if Whole Foods got into this?).

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.

~~~
jonnathanson
One of the most famous planned, corporate-developed communities in recent
memory is Celebration, FL, originally developed by Disney. It's got a very
Stepford feel to it. Almost like living in Main Street, USA in Disneyworld or
Disneyland. Some people dig that, though. It's not unlike the community
mentioned in this article. I wouldn't want to live there, but I can see the
appeal to those who would, and I don't begrudge them their tastes.

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.

~~~
eclipxe
Irvine is definitely not a commuter city. It is the hub of business in Orange
County with many people commuting from other cities and counties into Irvine.
Mission Viejo on the other hand is a commuter city.

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.

------
ThomPete
You can take any well off group and isolate them and think you can extrapolate
all sorts of things out of it.

This place is an anomaly nothing more nothing less.

------
VLM
I thought for certain this was going to be a prison, but it turns out to be
something kind of the same for retired people.

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.

~~~
NoPiece
Here is a house there for $157,900, so it is not like they are being exclusive
by pricing people out.

[http://www.thevillages.com/HomeFinder/Results/detail/L15.510...](http://www.thevillages.com/HomeFinder/Results/detail/L15.5107)

The average person could probably cover the mortgage payment with their social
security check.

~~~
VLM
I donno about that.

According to

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States)

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/](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...

~~~
NoPiece
The median house price in the US (Jan 2014) was $188k, so it doesn't make
sense to say 157k is targeted at the top 10%.

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...](http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/2014-04.html)

~~~
pessimizer
The median house price is not affordable for the median worker. As you say,
though, characterizing someone who can afford the mortgage on a $157K house as
in the top 10% is way off.

That was the _lowest_ priced house available though, so who knows what
proportion of the community those homes constitute.

------
greenyoda
_“You basically have a city of 100,000 people, owned by a company.”_

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".

~~~
ChuckMcM
True of course, but no more or less so than regular "government" of the
people. You need look no further than Bell California, the poster child of how
a few crooks can take over a small town and line their pockets. Unlike Bell,
the Villages actually seems to care what their residents think :-).

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.

~~~
HarryHirsch
_You need look no further than Bell California, the poster child of how a few
crooks can take over a small town and line their pockets._

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.

~~~
vidarh
> where one caterer tends to have negotiated the whole concession

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.

------
epochwolf
Most of my mom's extended family lives in The Villages, I've been there quite
a few times. It's a nice place and my grandparents have few complaints about
how things are run.

~~~
karlkatzke
Have you had discussions with your mom's extended family about what should
happen as they near the end of their lives?

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.

~~~
epochwolf
Many times. My grandmother was a hospice nurse for most of her career.

------
ams6110
The Villages: where baby boomers go to die.

~~~
reactor
And what about you?

~~~
pessimizer
Baby Boomers' parents generally didn't die in weird corporate towns - why
would their children or grandchildren necessarily follow them? Although, if I
squint when I look at planned corporate communities, they do somewhat look
like an extended iOS. This may be the future:)

