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peristaltorJust 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, with the owner of one such community engaging in practices that help him reap ever greater profits at the expense of the society surrounding him.
Blechman first learned of The Villages, a Florida senior living development outside Orlando, when his Massachusetts neighbors went to visit friends . . . and never returned. Dave and Betsy loved the lifestyle so much they bought a house in a couple of days and put their northern one up for sale. The sheer rapidity of life-long residents, pillars of their community for decades, pulling up stakes after a single visit intrigued the author so much that he got in contact with them and spent a few weeks visiting and looking into the phenomenon of retirement living, specifically of retirement themed living.
As the name implies, The Villages have homes built around theme villages. It's a bit complicated:
The sheer size of The Villages needs to be understood. When the father-and-son team first started bulldozing the land in the 1960s, the flat Florida fields were home mostly to watermelon farms and cows. Today, surviving and reclusive son Harold "Gary" Morse has built quite the empire, still in the process of expansion:
The community is large enough to support its own newspaper, radio and cable television outlets. For the purposes of this LJ rant, I'll focus on these aspects of Village life. In an entertaining interview with James Howard Kunstler, Blechman noted that one cannot really get away from the coverage The Villages provides its residents. Take a golf cart drive away from the house, for example, and you are likely to hear WVLG as you travel . . . even if you have no radio in the cart. At key intersections, the radio is piped through speakers hidden in fake rocks and certain dual-purpose streetlights. Blechman found himself slowing down at night near some of these and catching up on the news highlights at night.
I've ranted before on the effect of holding media editorial power in too few hands, or in hands that hold priorities other than social well-being as vested interests. The Villages exemplifies what goes wrong when this happens.
Blechman reports that The Villages radio and cable TV news tends to come from conservative sources; the Fox News feed that many small stations echo. Their paper, the "unabashedly conservative" Daily Sun,, follows suit:
The reason it has such penetration might be obvious; it only costs a quarter. In a community filled with folks living on their savings and other fixed incomes, Blechman noted that one can live rather well on a fraction of the prices charged in the "real" world.
It's time for me to head off the objections I have no doubt will be raised at this point. No, I do not feel it is wrong for people to opt to live with others their own age. As Blechman quotes a representative from another development, who herself quoted from focus group research, "A certain market segment doesn't want to deal with kids. . . . People say they feel 'younger' or 'ageless' when they are surrounded by people their own age." (Ibid, p. 181.) To deny people this right to live as they choose would be extreme and, to me, unacceptable.
Nor do I feel the owners of media need (under current law) to conform to certain journalistic standards when it comes to reporting the news. If an owner wants to invest in television, radio and newspaper, I have to concede that the owner has the right to print and have the yapping heads say what he or she wants.
Furthermore, business owners must conduct business. If the business owner can use a bit of (though I hate the term, it works in this case) synergy to move the business along its plan more smoothly, so be it. No law says Rupert Murdoch can't have one of his flunkies interview him on Fox to push the latest News Corp venture. Fine.
I get a bit, well, outraged, though, when dissenting voices cannot be heard through any dominant media's megaphone of control. The Villages is a perfect case in point, as I hope the examples below illustrate.
A reporter himself, Blechman got a chance to interview two reporters for the Daily Sun about their regular beats and procedures. For anyone who has worked in a newspaper, the following stories from Mark and Kim should seem a bit odd:
Two reporters, just trying to do a good job, are blocked by their editors. Nothing new here, except for, as Kim notes, the scale. It gets worse, though:
That's right, folks, the paper of record doesn't keep records.
And when the owner, Mr. Morse, wants to flex his muscle, his media enterprise proves surprisingly effective. This was done a few years back to take advantage of The Villagers' sheer numbers:
Blechman saw first-hand what happens to candidates that challenge Morse's plans to expand. One such is Republican county commissioner Jim Roberts, who was running for re-election as Blechman was researching his book. One obstacle for a traditional politician: "No candidate can win without securing a majority of votes inside The Villages. But because The Villages' deed restrictions forbid door-to-door solicitation (unless a resident is personally introducing a candidate to friends and neighbors), candidates must generally rely on Morse's own monopolistic media to deliver their message."
And how were Roberts' efforts to spread positive news of his campaign?
Even within a climate-controlled retirement paradise, bad things are bound to happen. During Blechman's visit, the very concern Jim Roberts voiced — excessive water usage draining the aquifers faster than nature can replenish the supply — became a reality, opening a sinkhole. At first, Blechman only saw the street was closed and digging equipment working on the site. Try as he might, though, getting information on the hole was difficult.
People who live in an area susceptible to sinkholes when too much water is drawn from them are given no official information that the very problem exists, and the official news outlet shuts down the one county candidate concerned about the problem, all because the developer has no time to deal with realities like sinkholes when there's profit to be made selling more homes . . . homes that need water and by definition make the future sinkhole problem all the more acute.
An earlier quote from Kim the reporter might prove prophetic. "I keep waiting for everything to just unravel." (p. 112.)
For those of you who don't live in rural Florida and may see no reason why this cancerous lump of humanity might be an issue, consider that Florida, as the mainstream media never ceases to remind us, is one of those darned "swing states," big enough to hold enough electoral votes to sway the outcome of a presidential election. It happened in 2000.
With that in mind, I wonder if Mr. Morse's plan is larger than running a successful business. After all, "Public records indicate that Morse, his family, and his associates have donated more than $1 million to the Republican Party, including at least $100,000 to President Bush's two campaigns, thus earning Morse the status of 'pioneer.' . . . ." (Ibid, p. 109.) With such close connections to the party, it isn't much of a stretch for some of the very skilled party strategists to mention the efficacy of a closed media empire on swaying elections and policy decisions in general. The Villages has, according to Blechman, already become the dominant political force in two of the three counties in which is resides; maybe that was the point all along?
Ah, but anyone can voice conspiratorial thoughts. They are comforting, for they give the theorist the illusion that a select few of our population are responsible for all the ills of the world. The reality, unlike the happily selective coverage of WVLG and the Daily Sun, is both simpler and more insidious. No one is in charge. It's chaos all the way down.
The emergent phenomenon of organization, though, does follow some general guidelines. Generally speaking, isolating a population with no representative government (oh, didn't I mention that The Villages has no elected officials, and is instead wholly controlled by Morse's company?) and feeding them bullshit in the form of media pablum very seldom ends well. To make decisions we must be informed. When we are not, bad things happen. The bigger the deceptions and delusions, the bigger the fallout from the perpetuated ignorance.
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talk_politics.
What Schleifer started has been copied again and again; but now certain copies have metastasized into engines of social change, with the owner of one such community engaging in practices that help him reap ever greater profits at the expense of the society surrounding him.
Blechman first learned of The Villages, a Florida senior living development outside Orlando, when his Massachusetts neighbors went to visit friends . . . and never returned. Dave and Betsy loved the lifestyle so much they bought a house in a couple of days and put their northern one up for sale. The sheer rapidity of life-long residents, pillars of their community for decades, pulling up stakes after a single visit intrigued the author so much that he got in contact with them and spent a few weeks visiting and looking into the phenomenon of retirement living, specifically of retirement themed living.
As the name implies, The Villages have homes built around theme villages. It's a bit complicated:
From a planning perspective, The Villages' saving grace is in fact its downtowns. Although few residents live within walking distance, the downtowns provide an environment where people can stroll and mingle effortlessly. Most planned communities lack this pleasant design feature.
But there's no hiding the fact that these aren't real downtowns—they are "themed" by entertainment specialists and are owned almost exclusively by a single family that leases out space for businesses. Calling them downtowns is just as disingenuous as . . . using the term "Villages" or "hometown."
An authentic community is more than a collection of buildings designed to look old, like makeup applied to a young actor's face. Real towns are defined by a complex and multilayered web of interactions between businesses, residents, and civic institutions—little of which Spanish Springs or Sumpter Landing possesses. Instead, Villagers have settled for a Hollywood facsimile that could one day be sold en masse to another investor.
(Andrew D. Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008, pp. 58-59.)
The sheer size of The Villages needs to be understood. When the father-and-son team first started bulldozing the land in the 1960s, the flat Florida fields were home mostly to watermelon farms and cows. Today, surviving and reclusive son Harold "Gary" Morse has built quite the empire, still in the process of expansion:
According to industry experts, The Villages was the top-selling planned community in America in 2005, for the third straight year. In that year alone, The Villages sold 4,263 new homes, or nearly one every two hours, and pulled in gross revenues of more than $1 billion. The Villages has sold more homes each year than the last for ten straight years. One industry consultant told me, "Even the military doesn't build houses that fast. This is a retirement community on steroids."
There are nearly 75,000 people living in The Villages in about 38,000 homes, and that number is expected to grow rapidly as the development finishes its build-out—an industry term for the point when a project is complete—in the very near future. The villages will then encompass over 20,000 acres in an area of roughly thirty-three square miles, and house 110,000 residents. Manhattan, by comparison, is twenty-four square miles in area.
(Ibid, p. 39.)
The community is large enough to support its own newspaper, radio and cable television outlets. For the purposes of this LJ rant, I'll focus on these aspects of Village life. In an entertaining interview with James Howard Kunstler, Blechman noted that one cannot really get away from the coverage The Villages provides its residents. Take a golf cart drive away from the house, for example, and you are likely to hear WVLG as you travel . . . even if you have no radio in the cart. At key intersections, the radio is piped through speakers hidden in fake rocks and certain dual-purpose streetlights. Blechman found himself slowing down at night near some of these and catching up on the news highlights at night.
I've ranted before on the effect of holding media editorial power in too few hands, or in hands that hold priorities other than social well-being as vested interests. The Villages exemplifies what goes wrong when this happens.
Blechman reports that The Villages radio and cable TV news tends to come from conservative sources; the Fox News feed that many small stations echo. Their paper, the "unabashedly conservative" Daily Sun,, follows suit:
The Daily Sun won't run "Doonesbury," but it does print a slew of conservative columnists, including Oliver North and Ann Coulter. Although most of the local news is unusually sunny, one gets the distinct impression that just enough bad news (drugs, crime, juveniles misbehaving) is sprinkled on top to make one feel relieved to live inside the gates. . . .
The paper has a ninety percent penetration rate, something unheard of in the real world, and has thus cornered the advertising market, including the highly profitable classifieds. Morse's paper has another unique advantage: few residents appear to have an interest in other local newspapers or in the hard news they provide about surrounding communities. I spoke with a number of Villagers who even believed that deed restrictions prohibited home delivery of other papers. They were mistaken, but competing papers are hard to find. By comparison, the Daily Sun's vending machines are everywhere, even though most residents opt for home delivery: the newspaper lands in thousands of driveways every morning.
(ibid, p. 110.)
The reason it has such penetration might be obvious; it only costs a quarter. In a community filled with folks living on their savings and other fixed incomes, Blechman noted that one can live rather well on a fraction of the prices charged in the "real" world.
It's time for me to head off the objections I have no doubt will be raised at this point. No, I do not feel it is wrong for people to opt to live with others their own age. As Blechman quotes a representative from another development, who herself quoted from focus group research, "A certain market segment doesn't want to deal with kids. . . . People say they feel 'younger' or 'ageless' when they are surrounded by people their own age." (Ibid, p. 181.) To deny people this right to live as they choose would be extreme and, to me, unacceptable.
Nor do I feel the owners of media need (under current law) to conform to certain journalistic standards when it comes to reporting the news. If an owner wants to invest in television, radio and newspaper, I have to concede that the owner has the right to print and have the yapping heads say what he or she wants.
Furthermore, business owners must conduct business. If the business owner can use a bit of (though I hate the term, it works in this case) synergy to move the business along its plan more smoothly, so be it. No law says Rupert Murdoch can't have one of his flunkies interview him on Fox to push the latest News Corp venture. Fine.
I get a bit, well, outraged, though, when dissenting voices cannot be heard through any dominant media's megaphone of control. The Villages is a perfect case in point, as I hope the examples below illustrate.
A reporter himself, Blechman got a chance to interview two reporters for the Daily Sun about their regular beats and procedures. For anyone who has worked in a newspaper, the following stories from Mark and Kim should seem a bit odd:
Both were hired after posting résumés on an Internet job site, and they suspect that their lack of training and experience helped them get a foot in the door. "I didn't even have any clips," Mark explains. "I'm not sure why they hired me."
"Me neither," Kim adds. "I was hired as a crime reporter, but there's no crime. I get the sense they don't really want me covering anything, so I spend a lot of time doing nothing. I see this being a better place to end a career."
"We're not allowed to cover anything even remotely controversial," Mark adds. "I wanted to write about the 1,000-person waiting list for new homes. I thought that was a good thing. But the editor told me I couldn't write about it. He wouldn't even let me call public relations for a quote."
"Look, every newspaper is owned by somebody, and that person usually exerts some editorial control," Kim says. "But this is extreme. The Morse family owns everything and controls everything. It's a true company town."
"All the businesses are linked," Mark says. "I've been told that I can't tend bar at any of the country clubs after work, because then The Villages would have to pay me overtime."
(Ibid, p. 111.)
Two reporters, just trying to do a good job, are blocked by their editors. Nothing new here, except for, as Kim notes, the scale. It gets worse, though:
Mark tells me about an orientation for new employees he recently attended. The other participants were restaurant workers, engineers, personal trainers, real estate agents, and liquor store cashiers. "They wanted to teach us the philosophy of the company, to let us know we don't work for the newspaper so much as for "The Villages itself," Mark says. . . .
"How does the Daily Sun cover bad news?" I ask.
"They don't," Kim responds.
I ask her if she could help me obtain some back issues. "I can't," she says. "We don't keep old newspapers on file. We don't even keep our notes. We are supposed to destroy them after a story is run. taped interviews, too. And every few months somebody from the company goes through our computers and deletes all our files. I think legal counsel suggested it."
Mark has an epiphany. "I should change my résumé to say that I write public relations and marketing materials. I'm really just writing free advertising."
(Ibid, p. 112, I emboldened.)
That's right, folks, the paper of record doesn't keep records.
And when the owner, Mr. Morse, wants to flex his muscle, his media enterprise proves surprisingly effective. This was done a few years back to take advantage of The Villagers' sheer numbers:
[Sumter County Supervisor of Elections Karen Krause says of the county's voting population:] "Five years ago it was about 28,000; now it's about 50,000. The majority of these registered voters are from The Villages. We knew it would happen; but we didn't think it would happen so fast. Used to be we had more cows than people in the county, and just three stoplights."
The trend shows no signs of abating, she says. "We are issuing 550 building permits a month for The Villages. We figure that each new house represents 1.9 voters. And unlike the rest of the county, Villagers are a conservative lot.". . .
Residents of The Villages, along with Morse, quickly flexed their new political muscle by changing the way county officials were elected, advocating a new system of power distribution in the county, ironically titled "One Sumter." County residents used to elect their five representatives by district. Residents in district one, for example, would elect their own representative to the board, but not vote on a commissioner representing another district. But with just two district commissioners to vote for, Morse and the Villagers decided that they'd rather vote on the election of all the commissioners. Naturally, the rest of the county liked the protection the district system afforded them from the surge of new voters in The Villages.
The vote on "One Sumter" in 2004 was extremely close, but with a ninety percent turnout rate (twice the county average), The Villages won, and the era of big-stick diplomacy began. Villagers, with their overwhelming numbers, could now monopolize every county election. And yet many still felt stymied and underrepresented by the districting system. Although Villagers could now vote for all five commissioners, they could still run for only two seats.
To address this slight obstacle, Villagers pushed through a redistricting, which gave them a third seat on the county commission, and thus a lock on electing the county's government for the foreseeable future.
(pp. 145-146.)
Blechman saw first-hand what happens to candidates that challenge Morse's plans to expand. One such is Republican county commissioner Jim Roberts, who was running for re-election as Blechman was researching his book. One obstacle for a traditional politician: "No candidate can win without securing a majority of votes inside The Villages. But because The Villages' deed restrictions forbid door-to-door solicitation (unless a resident is personally introducing a candidate to friends and neighbors), candidates must generally rely on Morse's own monopolistic media to deliver their message."
And how were Roberts' efforts to spread positive news of his campaign?
The Daily Sun seemingly goes to great lengths to keep his picture out of its pages. A recent example was a ceremonial groundbreaking at which Roberts posed with his fellow commissioners.
"Just for fun, I sandwiched myself between my colleagues," Roberts said. "I wanted to see how the Daily Sun would cope with me in the center of the picture. Guess what? they cut the photo in half and displayed it in two pieces. You could just make out the knuckle of my little finger on one side, and my index finger on the other. The few times I'm actually in the paper, they print the same photo where I look like I'm snarling."
More often than not, the only mention of Roberts is as the butt of a political cartoon or the object of an angry editorial describing him as a "big-spending politico trying to kill the golden goose" with his "inexplicable" and "wasteful" voting.
(Ibid, pp. 158-159.)
Even within a climate-controlled retirement paradise, bad things are bound to happen. During Blechman's visit, the very concern Jim Roberts voiced — excessive water usage draining the aquifers faster than nature can replenish the supply — became a reality, opening a sinkhole. At first, Blechman only saw the street was closed and digging equipment working on the site. Try as he might, though, getting information on the hole was difficult.
The lead story in the next day's Daily Sun is decidedly upbeat: "Study Reveals People Living Longer." Farther down the page is a short article addressing the neighborhood calamity. The reporter extensively quotes a utility foreman on the job, who explains in excruciating technical detail how his crew executed the dig to exacting standards consistent with industry regulations.
I read the story two more times, but still can't figure out what happened. Nowhere in the article is it explained how or why the ground collapsed. I recognize the byline; it's by Kim, the reporter I met. . . . I call her cell phone.
"It was a spontaneous sinkhole," Kim tells me flatly. "It had nothing to do with the digging. I tried putting it in the story, but my editor deleted it. When I complained, he told me to stop bulldogging the story. The Villages doesn't want to admit sinkholes exist, because they're related to the aquifer, and that scares them. So, we're not allowed to mention them."
(Ibid, p. 208, sinking emboldenation mine.)
People who live in an area susceptible to sinkholes when too much water is drawn from them are given no official information that the very problem exists, and the official news outlet shuts down the one county candidate concerned about the problem, all because the developer has no time to deal with realities like sinkholes when there's profit to be made selling more homes . . . homes that need water and by definition make the future sinkhole problem all the more acute.
An earlier quote from Kim the reporter might prove prophetic. "I keep waiting for everything to just unravel." (p. 112.)
For those of you who don't live in rural Florida and may see no reason why this cancerous lump of humanity might be an issue, consider that Florida, as the mainstream media never ceases to remind us, is one of those darned "swing states," big enough to hold enough electoral votes to sway the outcome of a presidential election. It happened in 2000.
With that in mind, I wonder if Mr. Morse's plan is larger than running a successful business. After all, "Public records indicate that Morse, his family, and his associates have donated more than $1 million to the Republican Party, including at least $100,000 to President Bush's two campaigns, thus earning Morse the status of 'pioneer.' . . . ." (Ibid, p. 109.) With such close connections to the party, it isn't much of a stretch for some of the very skilled party strategists to mention the efficacy of a closed media empire on swaying elections and policy decisions in general. The Villages has, according to Blechman, already become the dominant political force in two of the three counties in which is resides; maybe that was the point all along?
Ah, but anyone can voice conspiratorial thoughts. They are comforting, for they give the theorist the illusion that a select few of our population are responsible for all the ills of the world. The reality, unlike the happily selective coverage of WVLG and the Daily Sun, is both simpler and more insidious. No one is in charge. It's chaos all the way down.
The emergent phenomenon of organization, though, does follow some general guidelines. Generally speaking, isolating a population with no representative government (oh, didn't I mention that The Villages has no elected officials, and is instead wholly controlled by Morse's company?) and feeding them bullshit in the form of media pablum very seldom ends well. To make decisions we must be informed. When we are not, bad things happen. The bigger the deceptions and delusions, the bigger the fallout from the perpetuated ignorance.
X-Posted to
talk_politics.