Geritopia

Just finished yet another book that gives me that Our Future Is Soooo Fucked feeling, Andrew Blechman's Leisureville, a more in-depth look into America's planned retirement communities than, surprisingly, anyone has yet undertaken. These places are hardly new; Ben Schleifer developed the first ironically named Youngtown in 1954 by simply buying an old dude ranch, gussying up the barracks and transforming them to a community center, parking mobile homes on lots and paving the roads to them. Add water, sewer and power, price the units low enough that people could pay for a lot with their meager Social Security allotment and pensions, and open for business. Youngtown's initial open house caused a traffic jam three hours long when ten times the ten thousand expected to turnout jammed the narrow county road north of Phoenix, then just a sleepy burg itself.

What Schleifer started has been copied again and again; but now certain copies have metastasized into engines of social change, ( sadly probably not for the better. )

X-Posted to talk_politics.