During the Boom, I worked on some Del Webb communities after the brand was purchased by Pulte. There are two major segments to which retirement communities are marketed:
+ 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.
+ 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.