Call Alex Jones - Child-Haters (i.e. Life-Haters) on the Loose

In which the Baby Boomers, facing retirement, encounter the dilemma posed by the Gang of Four in "Natural's Not In It": "The problem of leisure/ What to do for pleasure"

Way We Live Now

Childproof

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Published: August 13, 2006

There are places in America where most of the newly built housing cannot be occupied by families with children. These families won’t be living, for instance, in the 242-acre tract planned for Kissimmee, Fla., of which a city administrator boasted, “The beauty of that is: No impact on schools.” Such communities are, in real estate parlance, “age qualified.”

The mighty fortress of anti-discrimination law and custom has an exception when it comes to satisfying the wishes of older people. And builders, residents and local governments are exploiting it. Gated communities, condo complexes and plain old suburban neighborhoods can, provided they meet certain criteria, legally bar children under 18 as residents — or even, in some cases, as visitors. According to Big Builder magazine, such communities are the hottest trend in the residential housing market. There are already thousands of age-qualified “lifestyle communities,” and their growth is accelerating.

Children should not be roaming unattended around nursing homes, of course, and there are some good reasons to minimize youthful disruption in assisted-living and continuing-care settings. But the age segregation of old folks’ homes is supposed to be a concession to medical necessity, not a perquisite that can be marketed to perfectly healthy people annoyed by the din of kickball. When Congress amended the Fair Housing Act in 1988, it forbade discriminating against families with children (though it exempted developments for people 62 and older). In the case of communities for people 55 and older, the law required that the developments have “significant facilities and services specifically designed to meet the physical or social needs of older persons.”

The lobbyist who wrote that language earned his money. There is no obvious line between “needs” and tastes. Some developers took “older persons” to mean the middle-aged and “significant facilities” to mean golf. It was a bait-and-switch, exploiting compassion for the old to advance the consumer preferences of people in their prime. In 1995, after judges blocked such housing on civil rights grounds, Congress stepped in to clarify the criteria for keeping a residential complex child-free. It waived the requirement for “significant facilities,” and the remaining strictures are very lax: 80 percent of households must have a person 55 or older, and the development must be billed as a “senior community” or a “retirement community” or some such straightforward phrase. This last requirement is almost universally flouted. Developers prefer to say “active adult community.”

Whatever you call such places, local governments have a strong short-term incentive to see them built. They bring in people’s life savings for a district’s builders, banks, stores and municipal coffers, with no corresponding need for increased school spending. Florida has a “pay as you grow” law, which in theory ensures that as a community’s population grows, its spending on schools grows as well. In practice, it often means that projects are approved to the extent they can be rendered kidproof.

It is tempting to link the popularity of active-adult housing to the bigots, contrarians and attention-seekers of the “child free” movement, who rant quotably on their Web sites about the favoritism accorded to “breeders.” But few people in age-restricted communities give vent to any such feelings. “I love children,” one fairly typical homeowner in Delray Villas, Fla., told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “But when you get to be a certain age, you want to be in a community where people around you are the same age you are.”

“I just want to be with people like me” is the argument made in favor of every kind of segregation. It was not an unreasonable-sounding argument even when it was being made by Alabamans and Boy Scouts and club men. But it wasn’t a winning argument either. What explains our sudden readiness to make moral exceptions when children are the ones excluded?

In part, this is the final chapter in the story of the baby boom. The 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 used their clout in the market and in the electorate to twist all of society’s institutions into the shape of their needs at each given stage of life — freedom in the 60’s and 70’s, money in the 80’s and 90’s. From here on out, their priority will be leisure. Therefore everyone else’s priority will be leisure, too.

Leisure needn’t mean avoiding other people’s children, but in our era it tends to. Longer life spans and smaller families have already attenuated the consideration we pay to children. According to David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who direct a marriage research program based at Rutgers University, young adulthood and retirement, which used to be short and transitional periods, are now life stages in their own right. In 1960, half of all households had a child under 18; today, a third do. So the landscape of communities, Popenoe and Whitehead argue, “is changing to fit the lifestyle of the non-child-rearing population.”

There is a limit to how much they can change. Municipalities that use “age qualified” housing as a quick fix are budgeting for their new residents either to live forever or to be replaced by similarly unencumbered aging people once they depart. But since the boomers will be followed by a generation half as numerous, that can’t happen. Someone will be left holding a hot potato. Unless communities are willing to see these places wither into half-occupied ghost towns (and there goes your “active lifestyle”), some will eventually be converted to other purposes. They may even be opened up to children, non-cost-effective though they may be

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing writer for the magazine.