Leisureville Page 16

  Across the street in Lake County, the land is still wooded and sparsely populated with older, somewhat ragged homes. I pull into the dirt driveway of one displaying a “For Sale” sign and walk a short way until the packed dirt ends and overgrown scrub grass begins. I meet a man who is leaning over a metal fence, with a yapping Chihuahua dancing about his heels. He’s in his early seventies and wears leisure slacks, old loafers, and a stubbly beard. High-voltage electrical wires buzzing atop steel towers bisect his yard, which is dotted with small orange trees. I’m staggered when he tells me the asking price is $750,000.

  His name is Alan, and he tells me he relocated to the area eighteen years ago to get away from “all the commotion” of his native Orlando. “When I moved in here, there were just two mobile homes and us,” he says. “Now they’re building 34,000 homes across the street. Kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it? And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. So I’m moving.”

  “What do I think of The Villages and all this development?” Alan says. “I think it stinks. They’re building without any regard to the land. I’m no tree hugger, but I hate to see the land raped the way they’re doing it. They’re shipping in all sorts of clay and sand just so they can make the land flat. They’re cutting down trees, and putting in lakes where there weren’t any. There’s only one saving grace about this whole nonsense—it’ll be gorgeous when it’s done.”

  The Villages brushes off the complaints of locals like Alan. “Everybody complains about change,” Gary Lester responds when asked about local opposition. “I’m still upset with the American League for adopting the designated hitter rule.”

  My curiosity once again gets the best of me when I drive past a sign for a county park and something called the Spark Level Baptist Church. I turn down a potholed road with run-down trailer homes lining one side and an empty pasture on the other. The road ends at the church and an overgrown park with a few scattered picnic tables at the edge of some piney scrub. According to local historians, this neighborhood was founded by escaped slaves and is one of the earliest settlements in the region. At the time, the area was a swampy forest located far away from prying eyes. A state map from 1837 labels it “Negro Town.” Born in poverty, the small African-American settlement remains basically destitute. The trailers are badly rusted and the yards generally consist of packed dirt littered with discarded furniture, car parts, and empty gas cans.

  I knock on the door of the trailer closest to the church. An older woman opens the door but doesn’t invite me inside. I ask her about the sprawling development next door. “What we going to do ’bout it?” she says, in a breathy drawl. “I been here fifty-five years. They covered up our fishing lake. I heard one day they gonna come and offer us. But I ain’t seen nobody. Guess they just going to put a big wall around us.”

  She recommends that I speak with a neighbor named L.T. and his wife, Ruby-Mae, so I walk a few hundred yards to their cinder block home, step onto the sagging porch, and knock on the door. An elderly man cautiously opens it a crack. I explain my visit, but he remains ill at ease. “I’m kind of busy right now,” he says guardedly, his eyes not quite meeting mine. Try as I might to put him at ease, my visit is clearly making him uncomfortable. The Klu Klux Klan once held considerable sway over this area, occupying several local positions of power, including the sheriff’s office. A few local white residents tell me they recall signs reading “No Niggers Allowed” displayed inside private businesses as recently as a few decades ago.

  I walk back to the church to fetch my car, but notice a path leading off to the side. The path narrows until it is just wide enough for two sets of sandy tire tracks. I walk along it, listening to the clicking, chirping and buzzing of birds and insects in the long motionless grasses. Oak trees draped in gray Spanish moss line the way on either side of me. The sun is strong enough to heat the hair on my head, and given the clinging humidity, the shade provides little relief, and the mosquitoes and sand gnats are even worse beneath the high canopies. I come across a brick home that looks abandoned. Outside, a mutt sits in a shaded gully beside a plywood doghouse tilting to one side. He looks at me, rolls on his back in the dirt, and goes back to sleep. Across from the driveway in the scrub are the meager remains of a one-room schoolhouse.

  I walk up a short rise and gaze at hundreds of partially finished homes. The air is punctuated with the pop-pop-pop of nail guns. In front of me is a metal cattle gate. I climb over it and continue down the rutted dirt path, now surrounded by homes on either side. The neck of land ends in a shady cul-de-sac dotted with a mixture of new and very old headstones. I am in the old “Negro Town” cemetery.

  The Villages naturally has little interest in building homes overlooking a cemetery, let alone a cemetery for poor black people. It doesn’t fit into the marketing plan. But the cemetery can’t be bought, and even if it could, disturbing it would be illegal. What’s the developer supposed to do when faced with such an obstacle? Surround it with a park and celebrate the site’s historical value? Mythologize it as Billy Bowlegs’s final resting place?

  I climb over a fence and then a man-made earthen berm to see how Morse is addressing this awkward peninsula of land jutting into his housing inventory. I emerge in a parking lot beside a new recreation center. None of the homes are quite finished, but newspaper vending machines carrying today’s Daily Sun stand at the ready beside a mail kiosk. A green-and-white sign welcomes visitors to The Village of Caroline. The cemetery, hidden on three sides by a dense row of bushes planted on steep mounds of earth, is nowhere to be seen. I know it’s right in front of me, but I can’t make it out.

  With little or no connection to the land outside the gates, burial poses a problem for Villagers, many of whom have, in any case, little interest in being interred locally. Some military veterans opt for burial at a regional cemetery, but for the most part, the dead and dying are sent home by airplane. Few personal statements are more powerful than where one decides to be buried, and Villagers express a clear preference for the soil of the communities they left behind.

  Gated planned communities often have about as much in common with the local area and population as a Club Med resort—it doesn’t really matter where they’re located as long as the weather is nice. For example, a consortium of Japanese investors is seeking to build an age-segregated community in New Mexico for Japanese citizens. They may not speak English, but such concerns pale in comparison with the benefits of warm winters and the yen’s favorable exchange rate. As my former neighbor Dave Anderson tells me, he has always hated Florida—and still does. But as far as he is concerned The Villages isn’t really in Florida: “It just happens to be located there.”

  Back in my car, I head toward the sleepy town of Lady Lake in the northwestern corner of Lake County to meet with the town manager. Lady Lake owes its existence to the railroad, which passed through the town beginning in 1884. The town was incorporated in 1925 but remained a rural farming community for much of its existence. During Prohibition, the swampier and nearly impenetrable portions of the county became popular with bootleggers. The Ma Barker gang hid out nearby until they were discovered by the FBI and killed in a dramatic shootout.

  As late as the 1960s, Lady Lake was just a bump in the road with a population of 335. The town couldn’t afford to buy its one policeman a car, so he enforced the speed limit on foot with a whistle, and when necessary, hitchhiked to chase down a speeder. Until The Villages came along, the town’s only claim to fame was “Cathedral Arch”—a quiet street gracefully lined with giant oaks that once appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

  The area became popular in the 1970s with retirees of modest means searching for sun, good fishing, and low taxes. Land was cheap and zoning nonexistent. Much of Harold Schwartz’s old Orange Blossom Gardens is inside Lady Lake’s municipal boundaries. Three of the town’s five council members are now Villagers, giving The Villages much the same stranglehold on the municipality as it has on Sumter County.

&nbs
p; But although many Villagers tell me that they moved here to escape suburban sprawl, much of it has been re-created in the outskirts of Lady Lake, with all its attendant aggravations such as congestion and crime.

  The urge to build on the surrounding pastureland is too strong for the Morse family, as well as other developers, to pass up. There’s good money to be made erecting big box stores and housing developments—and that’s what’s happening. Driving into and out of the Lady Lake area of The Villages is becoming a real chore. Sadly, The Villages and local highway engineers are seemingly of one mind: they keep widening the roads, which then attract yet more cars.

  I visit with the town manager, Bill Vance, a young, clean-cut professional, who is dressed in khaki slacks and a crisp white shirt. We meet at the Lady Lake town hall, a squat cement structure physically isolated from any other town landmark or neighborhood. When I ask him how he intends to manage the town’s explosive growth, he hands me a snappy booklet titled “Commercial Design Guidelines,” nods confidently, and invites me to peruse it during our interview.

  After several years as a municipal reporter covering sprawling disasters across the country, I have a decent idea of what the booklet might contain: rules for managing sprawl, such as feeble landscaping requirements and gussied-up veneers for strip malls. One page displays a photo of a giant supermarket, considered a success story because it has “three or more roof planes per primary facade.” I’d seen the same monotonous so-called “managed” development ruin towns from Connecticut to Iowa to southern California. It’s one of the reasons I live in rural New England, where strip malls are not necessarily greeted with open arms.

  “We want responsible growth,” Vance tells me. “The Villages has raised the bar for all of us.”

  “What about designing for people, not cars?” I ask. “What about sidewalks?”

  He points to plans he has for a sidewalk alongside the town’s six-lane highway, where no sensible human would dare to tread. Two days earlier, a young woman tried; she was killed—nearly sliced in two—by a speeding Lexus. The driver thought she had hit a dog.

  “Would you walk on these sidewalks?” I ask.

  Vance hesitates. “No. I guess not.”

  For years, Lady Lake sat on the sidelines and watched The Villages get bigger and bigger. Vance’s basic strategy is to help this once sleepy town finally capitalize on The Villages’ growth. “You’ve got tens of thousands of folks here with nothing but time on their hands and money in their pockets,” he explains.

  Living in a bubble takes a leap of imagination, but try as they might to insulate themselves from the real world, Villagers cannot survive without it. Every utopia has its soft underbelly; even the Biosphere 2 space-age terrarium project eventually needed oxygen pumped in. The Villages’ weak spot is employees. Villagers need shops, restaurants, and supermarkets, and these businesses need to be staffed by human beings.

  “We can provide both,” Vance tells me. “But we’ll need more schools. A lot of seniors don’t want to pay for schools, but they want to go out for dinner and shop in local stores. Well, you need employees to staff those jobs, and schools for their kids. The same goes for the white-collar professionals. They’re not going to relocate here if there aren’t good schools for their children. It’s all interrelated. If you want a nice community, you need nice schools. And that takes everyone chipping in.”

  On my way out, I ask Vance for something I can’t seem to find: a map of the region. “There isn’t one,” he says. “Until recently, this wasn’t a ‘region.’”

  On my way out of Lady Lake, I come across a group of preteens playing in the street with their younger siblings. They’re dressed in jeans and shorts. The boys wear T-shirts, the girls wear tank tops, and most are barefoot. The oldest is named Tania, and she is nominally in charge. When I ask her what she thinks of The Villages next door, she pauses and looks at her debris-strewn dirt yard. “I wish I lived over there, too,” she tells me. “It’s so clean. And they have nice restaurants and stores. I bet the old folks are really happy there.” Her friends giggle at the improbable sight of her being interviewed.

  A dark-haired kid named Jimmy stops riding his knobby-tired dirt bike in circles when he hears us talking about The Villages. His hair is long and straight, and he pushes it out of his eyes when he speaks with me. His toddler brother, Billy, also approaches and starts playing with his belly button. Pretty soon, all the kids are gathered in a circle around me, bouncing rubber balls or carrying dolls.

  “I don’t like The Villages,” Jimmy says. “It’s a shame such a nice place is only for older people.” The kids all watch him intently. “You have to act different there, or they yell at you.” Several of the children nod their heads in agreement. Jimmy tells me that he was once dragged out of the movie theater for throwing popcorn at another boy who pissed him off. “My mom had to pick me up and she wasn’t too happy.”

  I picture Jimmy’s mom dropping off her cargo of youngsters at the town square. I can hardly imagine a more incongruous picture: retirees strolling about in their fantasyland suddenly invaded by a station wagon full of someone else’s rambunctious children.

  “I’m always getting in trouble for trying to skateboard there,” Jimmy says. “The old people ask us to stop or they get the police to stop us. I haven’t seen a sign that says ‘No Skateboarding,’ but they take your skateboard away anyway. I’ve had three of them confiscated. I’m getting a new skateboard, but I’m never going back there. The old people are always following us around like we were criminals.”

  Tania interrupts. “I don’t want to live in a trailer anymore,” she says. “It’s too small for all of us, and I hate it. I want to live in a big house with fresh sod on the lawn—just like the old people.”

  A muscle car with rap music pulsating out of its sunroof pulls up with two men inside. It’s Jimmy’s dad and a friend. Jimmy’s father is carrying a brown bag with what appears to be a liquor bottle inside. The children sense that he’s not in a particularly good mood and quickly disperse.

  Later that evening, I meet with Jim Roberts, a Sumter County commissioner whose views often differ dramatically from those of the county supervisor, Brad Arnold. Roberts, a high school civics teacher for more than two decades, is a tall gangly man with rubbery limbs and facial features. He meets with me at the county’s satellite offices in The Villages.

  He is in the middle of a reelection campaign, one made nearly impossible by The Villages’ lock on elections. He has the overwhelming support of his district in the south end of the county, but he must now win the support of the entire county. Making matters worse, the Morse family is using its media machine to support his opponent.

  We sit at a conference table. Roberts’s sagging shoulders and the deep bags under his eyes betray his exhaustion. He pauses and then closes his eyes, contemplating where to begin. He starts with the gated roads that the county inexplicably agreed to maintain—by a vote of three to two, after the developer helped get a third commissioner who was friendly to The Villages elected to the board. Roberts shows me prior contracts plainly stating that The Villages would be responsible for maintaining its own roads.

  Since the county is now stuck with maintaining the roads, they are technically open to the public, whether or not The Villages is gated. And therein lies one of bigger challenges to The Villages’ marketing: how to promote a sense of gated security when, for the most part, it doesn’t really exist. The Villages may look like a gated community, but most of the gates are actually little more than props. The guards (some of whom are semiretired Villagers) can ask questions, but they can’t deny access.

  Roberts finds the charade distasteful. “Why should any county resident have to push a button and pass through a security gate to drive down a county road?” Then again, who in Robert’s district would even want to drive around in a closed subdivision? To further discourage such a possibility, many gates display an unsubtle “Welcome Home” sign.

  But some loc
als have no choice. A carpenter who builds homes in The Villages told me about an incident when a Villager accidentally rammed his car. When he stopped to check the damage, she told him he didn’t belong in The Villages and shouldn’t be driving on “her” roads.

  I find it increasingly difficult to take the role-playing that accompanies the community’s simulated security seriously, particularly when I am returning to the Andersons’ house after a rowdy evening at Katie Belle’s. One night, when asked by intercom about my intentions, I said, “To pillage and plunder.” The distracted guard gave me a cheerful “Okey-doke!” and opened the gates from a remote location.

  Roberts tells me it’s neither the development itself nor its residents that trouble him. As a pro-business Republican, he has always considered himself a strong supporter of The Villages. “It’s a quality development which brings us lots of jobs,” he says. “For a cash-strapped county, a retirement community makes for an awfully attractive industry. I knew the developer was getting rich, but I was OK with that because I thought we were getting a utopia with all the advantages and none of the expenses.”

  But Roberts grew wary when The Villages lobbied commissioners in Bushnell to approve, all at once, plans for 30,000 more homes. It concerned him that the massive expansion had too little of the sort of commercial development that keeps county coffers afloat through tax revenues. Retirees may use fewer county services than younger residents, but they still use some. Otherwise, Villagers wouldn’t need their own sheriff’s substation and county annex.