When you consider how the baby boom has affected America, it’s impossible not to contemplate its natural conclusion.

There was a sudden, unexpected surge in births—and within a decade, diaper services went from a novelty to the equivalent in 2021 dollars of a nearly half‑billion‑dollar industry. Cities rushed to build more schools. Then a bit later America had millions of teenagers, so businesses and industries reorganized around them.

Over and over, age‑dependent systems struggled to accommodate the encroaching boomers. To use a boom‑appropriate analogy, America has been a nation of Lucille Balls scrambling to handle the conveyor belt of chocolates. And now, more than 75 years into the boom, you might be able to predict which systems will be overrun.

Harold Schwartz made just such a prediction back in the early 1980s.

Schwartz had been selling tracts of Florida real estate by mail until the practice was banned in 1968. After a brief foray into mobile‑home parks, Schwartz brought in his son Gary Morse, an advertising executive from Chicago, to overhaul the sales strategy. Morse shifted the focus to houses, including offering prospective retirees a half‑hour “video tape tour” of the concept by mail. The pitch went from shoddy to showbiz.

The eventual result was the Villages, a series of interconnected housing developments—the “villages” themselves—marketed as an all‑inclusive lifestyle that redirected retirement from senior community centers to senior‑ centered communities. Year after year over the past decade, the Villages landed among the fastest growing regions in the United States. In 2010, the Census Bureau estimated that about 86,000 people lived in the area. By 2020, the population neared 130,000. More than 7 in 10 of those residents are aged 55 or over, the largely inflexible minimum age required to own a home in one of the villages. Most of the Villages is contained within Sumter County, where, in 2003, 21.3 percent of its population were baby boomers. In 2019, 42.8 percent were, the third‑highest percentage of any county in the United States. The Villages grew so fast that, in the past two censuses, it helped Florida’s center of population stop moving toward Miami and start moving back toward Sumter County.

When I visited the Villages in May 2021, a board listing new residents, broken out by state, had dozens of names. Those were the people who had moved in in less than a week. Ryan Erisman, a writer focused on Florida’s retirement communities, estimated that 2,000 homes are sold in the Villages a year. Other estimates have that figure in a matter of months.

The developments, often distinguished with vaguely elegant or Spanish‑ish names, line two major thoroughfares. The homes themselves are generally small ranch houses that differ little from one to the next. It’s simple to get lost within or between the developments because of the similarity from one street to the next and because everything’s shifted off‑kilter by dozens of golf courses.

The villages serve the Villages like a congregation singing in a church: a lot of shaky individual performances that fuses into something with a bit more energy and appeal. People come not for the homes but the amenities— and for the community within and between the developments.

There’s an insistence to that community; the Villages cannot be an easy place for an introvert. The ubiquitous golf carts often have the names of the passengers emblazoned in script on their hoods, man in the driver’s seat, woman on the passenger side: Dennis and Sally; John and Beth. Signs outside of houses often offer the same information. There’s no excuse for not knowing your neighbor in the Villages.

While homes are often subjected to strict constraints on displays and decorations, there are clearly no rules for the golf carts. What Myspace was to the expressiveness of young millennials, these golf carts are for their parents and grandparents. They range from standard Yamaha models to custom‑built jobs that look like actual automobiles. The machines are littered with political stickers and mentions of families and countless expressions of support for various sports teams, with the Big Ten clearly overrepresented. In 2019, The New York Times wrote a feature about the golf carts themselves, reporting that some residents spent north of $20,000 for customized rides.

I rented a golf cart during my visit, paying $25 for a day of puttering around. It was mid‑May, so already fairly hot. Presumably due to the combination of age and weather, there weren’t many people out. On the main cart thoroughfares, golfers would whiz past my speed‑regulated rental, prompting me to offer repeated apologetic waves. There are wide‑open gates at the entrances to the various villages, policed by local residents who nod everyone through. Most residential streets that morning were empty, treeless under a cloudless blue sky. Driveways were occasionally ornate and, to a house, clean, but nearly every house was shut up tight. People were watching, though; one woman with whom I spoke as she was watering plants assured me that she would receive multiple calls after I left to inquire about who I was and why I was there.

The network of neighborhoods is anchored by three manufactured town centers. The first and northernmost is Spanish Springs, built across the highway from Schwartz’s first big development in the area. It resembles what a southern border town would look like if nearly everyone was white. (As 97 percent of Villages residents are.) Farther south is Lake Sumter Landing, focused on the eponymous lake and its canal, which extends south for a few hundred feet, complete with locks, and then turns into a stream that runs for a few hundred more feet before ending. At the southern end of the complex— as of this writing—is the unappealingly named Brownwood Paddock Square. Built in 2012, its theme is cattle ranching; the road leading to the square from the outside world includes cattle guards for livestock that never walked the decade‑old streets. Nonetheless, Paddock Square is probably the most authentic downtown area if only because there are actual cattle ranches on the outskirts of the Villages.

This is the most important thing to understand about the Villages. Spanish Springs was built in 1994, by the same company that designed the nearby Universal Studios theme park. Speaking to the Sun-Sentinel in 1994, Morse celebrated that they had “the luxury of doing this backward,” creating the downtown after the suburbs already existed. In each town center, plaques describe the history of significant buildings with the aim of making the town seem more cohesive—but of course it isn’t, so the presented history has simply been invented from thin air.

People commonly refer to the Villages as “Disney World for adults,” an analogy that likely stems in part from its proximity to the amusement park. But here, too, reality is submerged in fantasy. There are never‑used trolley tracks embedded in sidewalks and faded paint on buildings suggesting what they “used” to be. It’s a lot more charming to imagine that a building was the Acme Taxidermy and Trophy shop than it is to recognize that it was built in the past few decades to be what it is now: a comfortable footwear emporium. It’s nice to think that the row of buildings lining one street used to house early settlers of Central Florida instead of having been stood up to house a string of financial firms and mortgage companies. It’s more fun to think that the region’s history was a mesh of idiosyncratic characters and wacky happenings than to remember that less than 40 years before Spanish Springs was constructed, a Black man in the nearby town of Wildwood was arrested for talking to a white woman in a grocery store before being kidnapped from the jail and beaten nearly to death.

“We decided to bring the baby boomers to a home that they were familiar with when they were young,” Richard Schwartz, son of Howard, explains in the film Some Kind of Heaven, a look at the Villages and its residents. (Richard speaks while standing in a fountain next to a statue of his father.) But there was no hometown with an entirely noncontroversial history, much less any that, like the Villages now, were primarily centered on letting older people grab a cocktail and manage their assets. So the Villages pretends it’s about something else.

The idyllic consistency in the Villages is maintained through the control of the holding company that owns it. The Villages has its own daily newspaper, its own cable channel, and its own radio station—all managed through the company. That means that a rash of sinkholes alarming residents went mostly unreported by the newspaper, save one located near a busy street that the paper claimed without explanation was likely not a sinkhole. (“You won’t read anything negative about the Villages at all,” Erisman said of The Villages Daily Sun.)

The radio station, WVLG, is piped into the downtowns, offering a steady stream of boomer‑friendly oldies mixed in with a bit of syndicated Fox News Radio programming. It’s probably useful to have a locally centered station since the complex isn’t really near much except the small town of Lady Lake; even Orlando is an hour away. Interaction with the outside world is possible in the way that extravehicular activity is possible in space: with some preparation and a recognition that something unusual was underway.

The Villages is a bubble, one created specifically to make boomers in particular feel comfortable and happy. Relatedly, it is a densely conservative area both socially and politically, something that would be hard to avoid in a place specifically predicated on rejecting the modern world in favor of a place “familiar to boomers when they were young,” as Schwartz had it. America was already made great again at the Villages, if you will, which is likely why Donald Trump was received warmly during stops there in both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. As president in 2019 (and with an eye toward reelection), he visited the complex to sign an executive order focused on Medicare. He told the audience then that he’d thought about moving to the Villages but “got stuck at Mar‑a‑Lago.”

No one in the complex’s administrative offices (located in one of those pseudo‑historic houses) was interested in talking to me about how the Villages was positioning itself for the future, and the residents with whom I spoke understandably didn’t know any details.

Erisman’s been tracking it, though. He explained that, even when I was there and although no one mentioned it, there was a fourth town square, Sawgrass Grove, nearing completion past the southern boundary of the existing complex. This was unexpected to those who’d been reading the tea leaves; the plan for years had been to stop after Brownwood. But the Villages kept pressing, with company officials explaining that they expected the size of the complex to double with the next two decades or so.

If so, the population would hit a quarter million. The size of Winston‑ Salem, North Carolina.

What’s more, Erisman explained, they were planning on building out more housing for people younger than 55. There was already some tsking from those I spoke with about the younger crowd moving into Brownwood, a function of its being newer and therefore more likely to have homes available for those just hitting retirement age. But the need for workers also means a need for building capacity for the people cashing paychecks as part of the Villages micro‑economy.

“I do think that they’ll always keep—whether it’s six town squares or five or seven—I think they’ll always keep pace with the growth,” Erisman explained. Meaning more houses for more retirees and more amenities for those houses and more staff for those amenities.

And the market for senior housing keeps ballooning. With more than 10,000 people a day turning 65 in 2020, this is not a bad bet for an investment. Other developers of housing for seniors are salivating. “We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,” Beth Mace, the chief economist for the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC) explained to me with pleasant frankness.

In the context of that industry, boomers are still relatively young. Senior housing typically kicks in at 82, Mace said; the first boomers won’t get there until 2028. A boomer who turned 56 in 2020 was as close to her thirtieth birthday—last century—as her eighty‑second. But even before reaching that point, boomers still play a significant role in the industry—they are guiding where their parents spend money.

“What we’ve found,” Mace explained, “is the baby boomers influence their parents and where their parents live and what type of housing and care options the parents have.” Boomers now generally have parents in that 82‑and‑up age group and may recognize needs that their parents ignore or overlook. But they influence in other ways, like spurring their parents to move to particular communities where they can be near their grandkids.

Even before the boom arrives, Mace said that the senior housing market had been expanding at a rate of 2.5 percent per year over the preceding 10 years. But she expected that it would be revamped once boomers began needing some level of care.

“I think it’s true that the baby boomers are quite different than the generations that have been in seniors’ housing,” she predicted. “The baby boomers are looking more for purpose and meaning in life. They want a third act. They had a career, maybe they had children and now they’re ready to do something new. And so I think that’s going to shift the types of services and the types of real estate physical structures of what we’re talking about for housing.”

Imagine a household where a younger person pays less rent in exchange for doing more chores and housework. Imagine what Mace described as “Golden Girls” housing, a shared space for several older people akin to the 1980s sitcom. Or imagine entire neighborhoods, what she called a “naturally occurring retirement community” that’s skewed older and self‑supportive, an informal Villages.

One advantage of these alternative scenarios is that they can be less expensive. While boomers hold a lot of wealth, the size and diversity of the generation means an enormous number of people who have too much income to be eligible for government programs but too little to afford private‑sector assistance. Research conducted by NORC in 2019 and funded by NIC found that by 2029, half of those aged 75 and over would fall into that gap. Seven in 10 of the members of that age group at that point will be boomers.

Polling data reflect this. In the early 2000s, the boomers ranged in age from about 40 to 60 and about 2 in 5 thought they could retire before they turned 65, according to data from Gallup. Fifteen years later, when they ranged in age from about 50 to 75—and after the recession of the late aughts—half thought they wouldn’t be able to retire at the traditional retirement age. That was twice the figure recorded previously. Some of this was probably a function of overconfidence when they were younger but part was certainly a function of simply not having the expected resources.

The specific instabilities woven through the generation are an important part of the story. But it is the case that, as the boomers get older, the country is again warping to accommodate them.

We see this in jobs data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks employment by industry, including those jobs in what it clumsily refers to as “continuing care retirement communities and assisted living facilities for the elderly.” Between May 2002 and May 2020—the months in which these data are calculated—the number of people working in the United States overall increased by 6 percent. The number of people working in retirement care increased by 75 percent, jumping from about 537,000 to 941,000. In 2002, 42 out of every 10,000 people working in the United States worked within that broad employment category. By 2020, that had increased to 68 out of every 10,000 workers.

As you might expect, much of that work is being done by members of younger generations. This points to another looming problem hidden within the retirement boom.

“Today there are seven adult children for every senior,” Mace explained. “An adult child here is the forty‑five‑ to sixty‑four‑year‑old relative to those over eighty. By 2030, that shrinks to four to one. And by 2050, it shrinks to three to one.”

In every conversation I had about the baby boom, death was an undercurrent. That was particularly the case when speaking with residents in the Villages: that the house across the street was up for sale after a death, that the man with whom I was speaking had lost his wife the prior year. That’s part of the community, too, that broadly shared understanding. Those most committed to the Villages call themselves frogs, as Erisman’s website explains, because they’re there until they croak. The immortality of youth bonds; so does the proximity of death.

From AFTERMATH by Philip Bump, to be published on January 24, 2023 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2023 by Philip Bump.

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