From Sun Cities to the Villages: A History of Active Adult, Age-Restricted Communities by Judith Ann Trolander (review)

In 1965 the New Yorker published a 40-page feature on Sun City, Arizona, a newly designed community attracting women and men who wanted to trade jobs and snow shovels for pursuits that suited their zest for life as they entered their later years. Roughly a decade later the 21,000 units in that retirement community exceeded the number of dwellings (17,000) in Levittown, New York. Sun City was the largest U.S. city constructed by a single company.

Surprisingly, observes Judith Ann Trolander, a respected social welfare historian, the story of active adult, age-restricted communities like Sun City has been overlooked by gerontologists and historians alike.¹ Scholars have paid far more attention to chronicling "new towns," public-private partnerships with distinctive racial and class-based dynamics. Places such as Columbia, Maryland (between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.) or The Woodlands (outside Houston, Texas) were planned communities that welcomed all generations and made room for commerce, industry, and greenbelts.

From Sun Cities to the Villages fills a critical gap in the literature on ways that age-restricted, active adult communities were conceived, gained acceptance, and replicated themselves as an important post-World War II residential option. Trolander offers fascinating accounts about older Americans' responses to housing choices, recreational facilities, and restrictions on grandchildren's visitation rights in Sun City and other age-restricted communities—many of which defied builders' and marketers' expectations. Her book offers salient connections among gerontology, social history, urban planning, geographic mobility, and advertising, among other topics.

Professor Trolander begins her narrative with precursors to age-restricted communities for active retirees: health resorts in the South; winter homes that rich Yankees built in Florida; and the boarding houses, hotels, rental homes, and trailer parks in which "tin can tourists" resided for several months of the year. Despite volatility in real estate and occasional land scams, entrepreneurs had mastered by the 1960s winning approaches to appeal to segments of the nation's older population. They were able to entice a hitherto untapped market of elders, who were wealthier and healthier than previous cohorts of senior citizens, to book rooms in "retirement" hotels and to rent condos.

A community in Youngstown, Arizona, which opened in 1954, was the first to set a minimum age requirement (65) and to ban children as permanent residents. But Trolander accords in From Sun Cities to the Villages a chapter each to Del Webb and Ross Cortese, the two prime movers of active adult, age-segregated communities. Webb's "Sun City Concept" became the prototype for postwar age-restricted communities. Spread on a large tract of land, it attracted middle-class retirees eager to pursue an active lifestyle around the golf course and clubhouse. Sites in Cortese's "Leisure World Concept" originally were more compact, emphasizing walled and gated sites than Sun City. Cortese anticipated the need for affordable medical care as residents grew older —though he acceded to the desire that assisted living facilities be built outside the gates.

Over time differences between the approaches to senior citizen community building envisioned by Webb and Cortese narrowed, as age-restricted communities for active adults proliferated and standardized. "Generally, the more affluent the development, the less likely it was to be age-restricted, even if the developer was marketing it primarily to retirees" (167-168). By the 1970s, most communities lowered minimum age requirements, stipulating only that at least one home occupant had to be forty; not until the passage of the Fair Housing Act (1988) was the legality of these age-segregated options resolved. While age-restricted communities clearly had found a profitable niche, Gray Panther Maggie Kuhn and feminist Betty Friedan derided places like Sun City as "adult playpens."

Marketing strategies changed over time. Developers tried to turn silver into gold as the U.S. population aged. They tried to lure Boomers...