Regional
(2010-05-10)
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GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
Baby boomer retirement is a very big business. The days of rocking chairs and knitting have been replaced by planned communities that cater to a persons every need, with golf carts on every corner. It's a lifestyle that recently opened the eyes of KUNC commentator Laura Bridgwater.
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A lot has changed in retirement since Jerry Seinfeld's fictional television parents moved into a condo in Boca a decade ago.
I know. Our family witnessed these developments on a recent visit to Sun City Hilton Head, a resort-style neighborhood of 8,000 ranch homes in South Carolina. Or, as Sun City's real estate web site describes it, "an active adult community for people 55 and better."
I knew my in-laws had moved into a retirement village, but I didn't grasp how big the colony was until we pulled up to the gatehouse. When the guard gave us directions, she used recreational facilities as landmarks.
As she said, "Go past 13 golf courses, 21 Olympic-sized swimming pools, 39 tennis courts, and turn left at the 43rd baseball field. If you hit the Superdome, you've gone too far."
Okay. I exaggerate. There wasn't a football stadium.
But I'm not kidding when I say that the place was hopping like a university campus after a national championship game.
There was so much activity that I suspected that the lone person we witnessed sitting on a park bench was the local Viagra peddler. I wondered if that drug was good for sports outside of the bedroom, too.
My mother-in-law had a better explanation for the frantic pace. As she said, most of her neighbors are in the best shape they've ever been in. She knows because she is one of them. She's obsessed with pickle ball, a growing racquet sport that's a mash up of badminton, tennis, table tennis, and ping pong.
Not to be left on the sidelines, my father-in-law explained how the hummingbird gardeners were rumbling with the butterfly gardeners about which club was going to spread the 20 tons of pine mulch they'd had delivered.
I know there's a reality TV show itching to be discovered behind these gated walls. Seinfeld dropped the pickle ball with his new show The Marriage Ref. There's a gold mine in The Retirement Ref.
In any event, we didn't have a chance to play sports on this trip, but I'm glad we visited because until you see aging baseball players silhouetted against the low country sunset in their tight white uniforms, and hear them cheering loudly--"Hey, batter, batter! My 40l (k) is better than your 401(k)" - you don't realize how much fun these boomers are having. We were on our Spring Break and we found Retirees Gone Wild.
This was not my grandparent's retirement.
Furthermore, is this going to be my retirement as well? Did the 78.2 million baby boomers give birth to enough Generation Xers to inherit these retirement communities? Or are these developments and their myriad of sporting arenas doomed to be demolished like Detroit and its Tiger Stadium? Or will Xers inherit ghost towns?
These are valid questions because there are a lot of retirement communities across the country and they aren't just in the Sun Belt anymore. After Del Webb built the first Sun City in Arizona in 1960, his company went on to build 50 more similar communities in 20 states, including Anthem Ranch in Broomfield, Colorado.
I want to take a drive down there. If I can get past the gatehouse, I want to see if Anthem Ranch is buzzing, too. I want to see if the political satirist and journalist P.J. O'Rourke was right when he quipped "Remember the battle between the generation's twenty-some years ago well, our parents won. They're out there living the American dream on some damned golf course, and we're stuck with the jobs and the haircuts."
My husband and I have a while before retirement, and we've been debating about how to fund our golden years. After this Spring Break, I think we should buy stock in pickle ball. Like the popular blog and book Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions, I want to know, what other stuff do older white people like?
Active adult communities are definitely on the list.
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