Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005270317
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Jules Loh Associated Press
DATELINE: SUN CITY, ARIZ. LENGTH: Long
Never mind that the Pioneers' home is on the desert. To them the song is a psalm and they sing it with the unabashed gusto of the saved, especially the line that celebrates Sun City as "the place next to heaven's own door."
Not many Pioneers left now. Only 200 or so remain of the original 2,500 who risked their life savings in 1960 on what was then a largely untried venture in America.
Back then, the idea of an exclusively age-segregated retirement community - no young adults, no toys in the yards, no school buses - seemed to most gerontologists and social thinkers and to a great majority of the elderly themselves to be a sadly unnatural, unhealthy and unfulfilling way for people to live out their years. Critics called them "elephant graveyards" and predicted they would have no future.
But here sits Sun City, at the ripe old age of 30.
Its inhabitants, out on its 18 golf courses, seem in robust health, and adequately fulfilled at its 10 recreation centers, libraries, shopping centers, and at the Southwest's largest concert hall (which provides 45 parking spaces for the handicapped). If Sun City is a manufactured rather than a "natural" community, the residents don't seem to mind. Nor can its success as a chosen way of retirement, despite the conventional wisdom of three decades, be denied.
What began as a smattering of modest homes built on an 8,600-acre cotton field northwest of Phoenix is today, together with its sister community next door, Sun City West, the nation's largest single residential development, covering 23 square miles.
It has become a model for 85 or more imitators across the land. Its very name, conjuring up a glittering Camelot where the inhabitants never really grow old, has become a generic term for the concept of what its builder, Del E. Webb, christened "active adult retirement." Sun City was the first of a kind.
And if you care to step behind its surrounding wall, wander through its 300 miles of streets, which look as if they have just been laundered, knock on 35,000 doors and ask 65,000 residents representing all 50 states and 53 foreign countries what they think of the place, you will be hard put to find a single one who disagrees with the sentiment in the Song of the Pioneers.
"A few might," says Steve Hornacek, a retired grocer from Connecticut who has lived here practically from the start, "but some people wouldn't even be happy in heaven."
Demographic charts show that during the next decade the nation's largest population growth will come from the 50-65 age group, 7 million people. After that, when the first baby boomers reach 65 in 2011 and for the next 20 years, the elderly will number 75 million.
If those figures cause politicians and gerontoligsts to tremble they also cause Sun City's developers to salivate. Though Sun City answers the needs of only a miniscule segment of the retirement market, plenty of retirees to fill it seems assured. Two more Sun Cities have already opened, in Tucson and Las Vegas, and a third is planned in Southern California.
Sun City, teetering at the brink of middle age, is one place to look for answers to some of the questions bedeviling a nation growing steadily older.
There is no doubt Sun Citians are content, but what about their neighbors outside the walls? And what happens inside the walls when the "young elderly" become the "old elderly" in a large community aging together? Right now in America those 85 and older are increasing more than three times as fast as the population as a whole. What happens when a spouse dies, leaving a mate alone among the equally frail?
"When you think of all the research that says older people don't want to move from their homes and don't want to live in age-segregated communities," says Katie Sloan, "Sun City becomes something of a phenomenon."
Sloan is the housing specialist for the American Association of Retired Persons. She says the AARP's latest survey, taken last winter and just released, shows that 86 percent of those on the verge of retirement don't even want to leave their own homes much less move to a new one out of state, and that only a handful, 12 percent, would prefer an age-segregated neighborhood - even fewer if it's very far away.
`Older people seem to have a heartfelt urge to stay in place," she says. "Home represents a form of independence and security. Moving away signifies giving up some of that. Those attracted to a Sun City are pretty much a rarity."
Who are these rare birds, then, ready to flee the nest at their advanced age, and what are they looking for?
What they're looking for, apparently, and finding in Sun City, is precisely what Sloan says keeps the majority home. Questioned at random, Sun Citians list a sense of independence and security among the most valued assets of their new way of life.
And, yes, they are a special breed.
"They are more affluent than the average, better educated, outgoing, the sort of people who get along well with others, make friends easily, have done some traveling, are healthy and athletic," says Robert Bechtel, a psychologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies housing for the elderly.
"That's a generalization, of course, but what you find at Sun City are a great number of elderly yuppies."
Deborah Sullivan, a sociologist at Arizona State University at Tempe, specializes in problems and patterns of the aging and uses nearby Sun City as a research lab. She has discovered there something else that might explain in part why some are less reluctant than others to leave home for a new place in the sun.
"I found that 36 percent of the people aged 77 to 81 in Sun City were childless compared to 19 percent in the nation as a whole," she said.
"That age group's childbearing years were during the Depression and World War II, so their productivity was low to begin with. Still, nearly twice the national average represents quite a piling up of childless people in Sun City."
No children, of course, is the way of life in Sun City. A reporter could find no Sun Citian who admitted to missing the daily presence of children. Most, on the contrary, said they fully supported the rules that prohibit home ownership by anyone younger than 55 and ban visits for more than 90 days by anyone younger than 18.
When Sun Citians found the rules difficult to enforce they petitioned the county zoning board, successfully, to give them the force of law. Only 3 percent refused to sign the petition.
"We buy a lifestyle as well as a home," said one. Another agreed, but said he was certain many who signed felt pressure from their neighbors to do so.
The average Sun City home among variously priced models goes for $135,000. Eight out of 10 newcomers, equity-rich from their previous home sale, pay cash. Nearly every household has a late-model car, or two. The second car is often a golf cart equipped with headlights and other requirements for street driving - to the supermarket and hairdresser as often as the golf course.
Phoenix residents see Sun City's upper middle class affluence as an obvious boon: A total net worth within those walls of $8 billion, bank deposits of $4 billion, state and county taxes of $32 million yearly.
Even so, many in Phoenix and other towns in this valley hold unvarnished resentment toward Sun City and all it represents.
"They have it made out there behind their walls and don't give one tiny damn about the rest of the world," said Howard Grimes of nearby Glendale, who is 69 and retired. "I wouldn't care if they all moved away tomorrow."
The reasons are obvious. During one 12-year period Sun Citians united to vote down 17 of 19 school bond issues until neighboring towns, whose youngsters were on double and triple shifts for lack of schools, found a legal way to allow Sun City to get out and form its own district. They voted against a county transportation project, a beautification project, and fought for nine years to avoid property taxes on their golf courses, swimming pools and clubhouses, valued at $12 million, until they lost the battle last year in the state supreme court.
Resentment has grown so deep that last fall the Del Webb Corp. mounted a $250,000 advertising campaign called "Sun City Cares" to change the image by stressing the work of Sun City's network of volunteers, which is prodigious, and nearby schools a major beneficiary.
Clearly Sun City represents a potent political force. Eighty percent of its voters are registered Republicans (as opposed to 50 percent in the state as a whole, including Sun City) but it would be a mistake to take their votes for granted.
Eight years ago one of their own residents, president of a local Republican club, ran for county supervisor and lost, narrowly. His opponent was a 34-year-old lawyer, a Democrat, a female. Four years later the winner, Carole Carpenter, won re-election with 70 percent of the vote.
Carpenter, for her part, feels Sun City's locally tarnished reputation is somewhat of a bum rap. She says she sees no great concern by others in the county for nursing homes and long-term care for the elderly in a state that has no Medicaid program. "It's a two-way street," she said.
Sun City's developers themselves shoved aside those predictable and essential needs for years - ironically, as part of a way to rescue itself from foundering.
About five years after it opened, Sun City's house sales fell to the point that Webb (who died in 1974) believed his venture would fail as so many had before, notably in Florida. He figured, as had many in Florida, that his house prices, then about $9,000, were too high and decided to solve the problem by adding an adjoining trailer park, a routine Florida solution.
He polled his residents and discovered many would leave if he did that, so he went the other way. He opened a new section of more expensive homes. Sales went up. The secret, he discovered, was a feeling of exclusivity.
"Retirement is an unfamiliar change for everybody," said Deborah Sullivan, the Arizona State sociologist. "A vacation away from home is not, especially for the financially well fixed." What Sun City became, then, and remains today in its promotion, is that familiar playland for those who can afford it, a resort.
Nursing homes just didn't fit the picture. They were as welcome as a skunk at a picnic. Eventually, though, Sun Citians aging in place became older, frailer. Now their average age is 73, with three-quarters of them over 75.
Eventually the residents themselves demanded long-term care, opening a floodgate for entrepreneurs. Today more than 25 services for varying degrees of care cluster around Sun City, nine of them inside the walls along with a 350-bed not-for-profit hospital. A corps of 1,300 volunteers provides services for patients and families. About 250 doctors and dentists opened offices nearby.
Availability of geriatric care became a lure rather than a turn-off, and so did a wider selection of more elaborate houses with each new Sun City addition. "For sale" signs tend to remain longer on homes in the original section where the young-old are less willing to move in among the old-old and the homes there are less commodious.
Along with Sun City's evolution into a "resort" grew an increased awareness of status in a community that began as rather classless. Two private country clubs appeared, and a private dinner club overlooking a man-made lake. The Sun City directory lists, along with address and phone number, the owner's former occupation.
According to some long-time residents, an earlier gaiety, as among vacationers, is less evident now. Like any other community, disputes among residents are not uncommon as both they and their city age together. A continuing dispute, over whether or not to incorporate (so far "not" has prevailed in three elections) has caused lasting enmities. One meeting became so heated two old timers stepped behind the hall to duke it out.
In general, though, tranquility prevails in Camelot. Perhaps after the next 30 years Sun City's critics and champions will find the answer to the final question, the one that troubles Sun Citians the least.
That is, whether the forces that shaped their place on heaven's doorstep also work for the benefit of all of society.
by CNB