Despite rumors to the contrary, they say they didn’t decide to form their own city because they are old.
The residents of what was until a few months ago the private community of Leisure World, Calif., 50 miles south of Los Angeles, decided to incorporate because of an airport. The fact that they are residents of a private, seniors-only community and would therefore become the first gated seniors-only city in the country was beside the point.
The rallying point for cityhood emerged as a plan to transform a nearby Marine Corps air base into a commercial airport, which Leisure World residents feared would greatly increase the noise pollution faced by their quiet community. They were also worried about being gobbled up by the nearby city of Aliso Viejo.
It’s the kind of issue that drives people to incorporate. But in this case, the citizens’ legitimate concerns about the airport expansion and desire for greater political involvement got lost amid discussions of senior power and elitism.
Despite the controversy outside the community, the citizens of what is now known as Laguna Woods voted in March to incorporate, creating a three-square-mile city of 18,000 residents with an average age of 77.
So the city now has a mayor, a city council and a budget in the works for the next year. What it doesn’t have is what troubles some critics: No schools, no parks, no children. Critics have suggested that the residents are interested in isolating themselves from the rest of society and its ills — a charge that city supporters like Mayor Jim Thorpe deny.
The city, which is the only one in the United States where residents younger than 55 are prohibited unless they are married to those who meet the age requirement, faces an uncertain legal future. At the same time, it offers a laboratory to examine important social and cultural issues that will increasingly affect the American population as it ages.
Bert Hack, a retired lawyer who has led his community’s fight against the airport for the last five years, said the people of Leisure World began to consider cityhood about two years ago when they decided that local politicians were not on their side.
Almost all of the city’s housing units are inside the gated enclave of Leisure World, a retirement community that enforces the age limit through deed restrictions and private corporate rules.
State and federal housing laws ban discrimination based on race, religion, sex and national origin. However, these same laws allow age-restricted communities like Leisure World when they are in an unincorporated part of the county. This means that although age restrictions were clearly legal before incorporation, they may or may not be legal now.
But no such community has ever taken the next step to become its own city, which is where legal problems may face the city because all incorporated California cities must file a document that describes how the city intends to provide housing for all types of residents.
Laguna Woods joins three other gated cities in the roll call of among California’s 471 municipalities. The other three have no similar age restrictions.
The newly installed city council, however, argues that the city is not in violation of any state laws, insisting that the exclusive nature of Leisure World’s housing restrictions, contained in the by-laws of the three corporations that own most of the complex and in deeds covering the remaining homes, is beyond the city’s control. The city won’t discriminate on the basis of age or anything else, according to council member Bert Hack.
“If we ever had additional units, they would not be restricted,” he said. “But I don’t see that as being an issue because there is no undeveloped land within the city.”
City council members also say that they can easily comply with other state rules, such as the requirement that all council and other public meetings must be open to all members of the public.
The brouhaha over incorporation and the legal issues it raises have disguised the fact that there are actually two separate sets of questions that supporters and detractors as well as neutral observers have asked about Leisure World.
The questions about incorporation into cityhood are the simplest to answer. Council member Ann Snider sums up the reasons that most of those who supported cityhood voted for incorporation.
“When people ask me why I was in support of incorporation, I have two answers to give them. The first one has to do with County Board of Supervisors. A few years back, we had a pretty spectacular bankruptcy here in Orange County. Broke all sorts of records. And you do know who was responsible for that — the board.
“Here in Leisure World, we were in one of the very few remaining unincorporated parts of the county, which meant that we were in the handful of people directly under the control of the board of supervisors. Now, let me ask you: Would you want to be governed by the institution responsible for one of the worst acts of recent fiscal bungling? My answer was no. We wanted to have control over our future, and the only way to get that was to incorporate. And then we didn’t want to be under the take-off area of a new commercial airport. It seemed pretty clear to me.”
Although the issues were clear-cut for Snider, in fact cityhood was approved by a margin of only 342 votes out of 10,000 cast — with a voter turnout rate of almost 70 percent. Most of those on the dissenting side worried about the financial complexities and demands of incorporation and feared more bureaucracy would bring more taxes.
Setting aside the issue of incorporation, the question of why the residents of Leisure World moved to a seniors-only community are more complicated to answer, partly because they came to Leisure World for different reasons.
The three reasons most cited for coming to Leisure World, according to Kirk Watilo, the director of community and government relations for the managing company that serves Leisure World, are “climate — definitely and consistently No. 1; security; and the quality of the facilities we offer.
“We do fairly careful surveying of people when they come here, and they are pretty consistent in what they tell us,” Watilo said. “They are certainly interested in a place with weather as beautiful as this. They are also very concerned about safety issues. This community has some of the lowest crime rates in the county, and that’s because we have walls, barbed wire, roving patrols, gated entrances and, well, to put it delicately, an intruder who is not a senior citizen would pretty much stand out right away.
“But people don’t just come here because they want to feel safe. This is not a population that intends to lock itself away and fade quietly into death. People are interested in having a secure community so that they can get out and do things, which is why they appreciate the facilities here so much.”
Council member Snider, who at 73 has lived in Leisure World for 11 years, said she was attracted to the community by the range of activities.
“I think that when you get to be about 50 years old, you start concentrating on your retirement, and a great many seniors spend a lot of time on the financial aspects of retirement — on wondering, `What will I be able to afford?’ and obviously that’s a very important thing to do.
“But for many people, after a while the issue of finances becomes overwhelming, and that shouldn’t be the case. You have to consider the other aspects of your life as well, the social aspects — and that’s what gets taken care of at a place like this,” Snider said.
Sociologist Linda Waite, director of the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, said that while senior communities tend to stand out from the rest of society, in fact they are not so unusual compared to other neighborhoods.
“We don’t usually think about our society as being segregated by age, but in fact in many ways it is. You might look at a retirement community and ask yourself, `Why would old people want to segregate themselves?’ But it’s no different from what you see in the suburbs, where you have neighborhoods almost entirely composed of young families with children.
“And young families move to the suburbs for the same reasons that older people move to retirement communities — these communities have the services they need. People with children want good, safe schools, which is what the suburbs provide. Older people want good public transportation, other people around at home during the day, safe streets, opportunities for community involvement — and that’s what retirement communities provide.”
Regina Burres, a research fellow at the Center on Aging, said that seniors who move to retirement communities — who constitute a minority all of American senior citizens — are similar to their generational peers, although they may in general be slightly better off financially.
“Not only can they afford to move, but they can afford to pay for services that poorer seniors may have to rely on families or neighbors to provide. And they can afford to do things like fly their grandchildren in to see them, so they don’t mind moving away from where they were living when they were still in the work force.”
The incorporation campaign has sparked interest among those who see Leisure World as a harbinger of things to come as city populations grow older with the rising tide of aging Baby Boomers.
“Leisure World may help the rest of the country get a glimpse into the future,” said Thorpe, 63, who believes that the incorporation of Leisure World has implications for other parts of the country because of the fact that seniors are in general politically active.
Thorpe said he thinks that seniors — whether they live in segregated communities or not — will play an increasingly important role in American political life.
“Seniors have the time to get involved, they have the skills built up over a lifetime, they have a lifetime of personal connections to draw on. And it may also be that at a time in their lives when society sees them as becoming less useful, they want to show exactly how much a difference they can make by becoming involved,” Thorpe said.
