The world’s largest retirement community, home to over 150,000 residents, is located in Central Florida, a forty-five-minute drive northwest of Orlando. Founded in 1989 by H. Gary Morse (together with his father Harold Schwartz), The Villages was developed as an age-qualified “Active-Adult Community” for residents aged fifty-five and older on the original footprint of the Orange Blossom Gardens mobile home park. The Villages can be considered as a site of novel socio-spatial experiments directed toward the social group identified in the second half of the twentieth century by gerontologist Bernice Neugarten as the “young-old,” and by social historian Peter Laslett as the “third age.”1
Neugarten’s and Laslett’s work challenged decline-based models of aging by framing a relatively new, post-1950s life-phase and social group of older adults who were healthier, more active, and more socially and economically engaged than previous generations. In doing so, they differentiated the young-old from the frailty and dependency associated with the “Fourth Age,” while also framing this group as released from the responsibilities of adulthood (labor, childcare) and from the developmental regimes of childhood (education, socialization). Their work described—and in some ways helped produce—a cultural shift in which later life became newly associated with autonomy, mobility, consumption, and self-realization.2
As a relatively unprecedented social group with a lack of established protocols, the young-old is a demographic site of experimentation. New forms of young-old subjectivity have emerged, for example, in the guise of leisure-oriented identities or in biotechnical arrangements sustained and optimized through prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, and medical interventions. As an experimental social formation, the young-old have also developed forms of social collectivity extending beyond the normative structures of the nuclear family, the workplace, or traditional institutions. Similarly, the young-old has become associated with the development of a range of novel spatial formats at various scales—of which The Villages is an emblematic example.
Conceptualized by its founders as a “Disneyworld for active retirees,” The Villages realizes a master-planned age-segregated urbanism at an unprecedented scale.3 Its exclusion of other age- and social-groups supports a curated social atmosphere of “youthfulness,” premised paradoxically on the selective exclusion of youth and the control of intergenerational encounter. The community is composed of gated “Villages,” which represent the constitutive building block of the settlement. As a form of lifestyle-product urbanism extending beyond housing provision, The Villages performs and markets itself as an immersive spatial infrastructure of hyperactive leisure and sociality, drawing on the spatial and atmospheric logics of the entertainment-industrial complex.
The Villages as a whole functions as a themed and temporally programmed environment of “downtowns” supporting retail, dining and entertainment, recreational complexes with pools and activity rooms, extensive recreational landscapes and golf courses, as well as novel urban infrastructures such as golf-cart roadways and medical-commercial strip-corridors. The Villages is also notable for its novel and economically lucrative forms of private governance, in which the developer maintains unusually concentrated political power. Economically, this control is reinforced through dominant ownership of retail, commercial, and media assets; and politically, through curated public narratives and the placement of loyal representatives in county-level governance structures.
In its exploration of alternate scripts for later life, The Villages can be interpreted as an emancipatory experiment: a testing ground for new spatial formats and life-course arrangements that challenge decline-based assumptions about old age. It enables forms of hyper-sociality, activity, and self-invention in an environment tailored to the needs of its singular demographic group. More broadly, however, The Villages can be read as a lens onto a wider constellation of contemporary urban problematics: socio-spatial segregation, spatial securitization, neoliberal urbanization practices, consolidated private governance, and environmental degradation. In its most intensified form, The Villages resembles a form of realized science fiction. Quantitatively, or in terms of life extension, it aligns with what Fredric Jameson identifies as the “longevity” subgenre, situated within the frame of “longevity as class struggle” and its attendant themes of inequality and exclusion.4 Qualitatively, it recalls the expatriate retirement enclave of Estrella de Mar in J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights (1996), with its polished veneer of utopian idyll masking a darker inverted underside.5
I last reflected on The Villages ten years ago.6 The critiques articulated then concerning the intergenerational fragmentation produced by large-scale age homophily, and the normative force embedded in the socio-spatial scripting of “active aging,” can be further informed by recent theoretical work. Elizabeth Freeman’s critique of chrononormativity and Simon(e) van Saarloos’s anti-ageist refusal of linear life-course expectations, for example, both illuminate how environments like The Villages naturalize particular ideals of aging by sorting bodies according to presumed stages of development.7 Their perspectives draw attention to the ways such settings obscure dependency, vulnerability, and alternative trajectories of later life. This suggests that The Villages appears not only as a community organized around the ideals of active, autonomous aging, but as a spatial apparatus that amplifies normative demands through the social construct of age—privileging those who can perform the sanctioned vitality of the young-old while marginalizing other ways of aging that diverge from these expectations.
Segregations and Securitizations
White Power!8
—The Villages resident attending a 2020 Trump golf cart rally at The Villages
As a “55+ Active-Adult” community, the population of The Villages has expanded from just over 100,000 inhabitants in the early 2010s to over 150,000 in the mid-2020s—extending its position as the world’s largest retirement community by a significant margin. Sumter County, one of the main counties constituting The Villages, has the oldest median age in the United States, of 68.4 years.9 The Villages is not only segregated by age, but also by race and economic status. In 2023, The Villages was 95.7 percent White, 1.2 percent Asian, 0.7 percent Black/African American, and 0.9 percent mixed race and Hispanic.10 This extends the script already developed in “active-adult” retirement communities such as Sun City in the 1960s, which according to Marco D’Eramo, functioned as “a double utopia: the proprietarian utopia of the private town on one hand; the self-segregating utopia of the retirement community on the other—a threefold order of wealth, race, and age. A utopia of clean streets free of the clamor of cackling kids, where it never rains.”11 Van Saarloos might suggest that The Villages exemplifies how ageism can be inverted: a specific, affluent, white version of later life becomes the norm against which other ages—and other ways of ageing—are rendered out of time and out of place.12
Prior to its association with algorithmic “filter bubbles,” the concept of homophily first emerged in urban sociology to describe how people spatially cluster with others of similar class, race, or lifestyle, and helped explain how cities consolidate sameness and reproduce social boundaries.13 More recently, the term has been used to describe how digital platforms encourage ideological clustering and narrow the terms of public discourse. As Cass Sunstein argues, this risks creating epistemic enclaves in which consensus is manufactured through repetition and dissent is excluded, producing “safe spaces” not for marginalized identities but for exclusionary or extreme views.14 While Sunstein wrote about this in relation to the digital enclosure of online communities, these patterns are also increasingly spatially prevalent.
During the lead-up to the 2020 American election, President Donald Trump retweeted (and later deleted) a local news video showing a Trump-supporting Villages resident chanting “White Power!” from a golf cart in The Villages’ Spanish Springs Town Square. This points to the sense of safety in expressing ideologically exclusionary or extreme views within the homophilic socio-spatial enclosure of the physical public space of The Villages.15 Here, The Villages’ demographic homogeneity and isolation supports an increasing extremism—a “safe space” to say that which might have otherwise been unsayable. This climate of ideological safety is supported in part by the material practices that have structured who may enter, or who it appears can enter—as well as who is cast as an outsider.
I know [those] people don’t belong here.16
—The Villages resident on outsiders using pools within The Villages
The gated “village” is the basic unit of securitization at The Villages, one that has multiplied over the past decade from around fifty villages in the early 2010s to more than eighty today. The Villages deploys a multi-layered approach to security including gatehouses, resident and visitor identification procedures, community watch programs, and surveillance technology, including license-plate recognition at gate entry points. However, ambiguity around the condition of security and its “gatedness” has intensified in recent years. This is based on the increasing awareness that all streets behind the gates are legally accessible to the public and have also been maintained with public county funds. Recent debate within the community has addressed the costs associated with staffing the gates and the cost and inconvenience of replacing broken gate arms driven over by distracted drivers, in contrast to those still supporting their social function and symbolic performance of security and exclusivity.17
Drawing on Freeman’s critique of chrononormativity—the societal expectations of normative life phases—the gates at The Villages can be understood as regulating not only who enters but when in its life-course a body is allowed to be visibly present.18 Although the legal fifty-five-and-older restriction is enforced at the moment of purchase or lease, rather than daily at the gatehouse, they symbolically and practically enforce a kind of temporal hygiene. They ensure that the visibility of bodies is aligned with the community’s idealized life-course narrative of autonomy and perpetual activity in the third age, while filtering out (or relegating to hidden zones) those whose temporalities—marked by dependency, disability, or late-life decline—disrupt this fiction. In this sense, the gates function as a chronobiopolitical filter that excludes, or makes invisible bodies which betray the “wrong” time of life (too frail, too dependent, too close to death), sustaining the appearance of an endlessly youthful young-old enclave.
Urbanization and Degradation
… a 72-year-old political prisoner.19
—News headline referring to The Villages resident Oren Miller
The Villages’ script of private governance and the developer’s control over the “democratic” processes within the community has intensified over the years. This includes the developer’s increasing ownership and control of local media (newspaper, radio and TV stations) covering local political discourse, and the “stacking” of developer-friendly members on county political bodies through positive media coverage of allies within that media space.20
Over the last decade, however, growing resistance from residents has emerged, particularly following a substantial property tax increase of 25 percent that was introduced by the developer of The Villages in 2019. The website Villages-News, which was founded in 2013 as an independent news outlet to offer more balanced coverage of events and developments at The Villages, became a key site of residents’ resistance and coverage of residents who stood against developer-friendly political commissioners in Sumter County.
Villages residents Craig Estep, Oren Miller, and Gary Search successfully ran for Sumter County Commissioner in 2019 under the moniker “EMS” in protest against the property tax increase. Representing residents’ financial interests over the continued growth plans of the developer, they opposed the tax increase, which was introduced to subsidize infrastructure for further urban expansion. Instead, they argued that the developer, rather than residents, should bear these costs. But after being elected, as they began repealing the tax, the developer brought what The Intercept described as the “full force of the state’s Republican Party apparatus … to bear”:
The local GOP representative, a highly paid employee of The Villages, introduced legislation at the state level to block the repeal and got it passed; the local GOP prosecutor, a Ron DeSantis ally, launched an investigation into the commissioners for trivial procedural allegations; and DeSantis himself ultimately removed Miller and one of his fellow commissioners from office.21
In 2022, Miller was convicted during an investigation into potential procedural violations. The trial judge ordered Miller to be taken into custody immediately following the verdict, resulting in his incarceration for approximately seventy-five days, followed by probation and community service.22 The legitimacy of the conviction was brought into question when an appellate court unanimously overturned the ruling in 2023 after determining that Miller’s statements, which formed the basis of his perjury charge, had been misinterpreted and taken out of context, and also noting that he had attempted to clarify his testimony. Critics of the case—including legal observers and community members—argue that the prosecution was politically motivated, given Miller’s opposition to development interests within The Villages.23
An extended interpretation of the conflict suggests that it relates not only to tax policy but to normative expectations about who qualifies as a “proper” older resident. Within The Villages, individuals such as Miller are affirmed only insofar as they conform to the anticipated role of the compliant, politically deferential elder: a grateful beneficiary of continual growth. When they challenge the developmental script that links urban expansion to collective wellbeing, they are recast as aberrant or unruly seniors.
In line with van Saarloos’s critique, age functions as a technology of compliance: a regulatory mechanism that sorts residents according to their willingness to inhabit the sanctioned model of later-life citizenship, one defined by passivity, deference, and gratitude.24 Such regimes of age expectations operate not only through care or protection but through subtle forms of coercion that discipline bodies into “proper” temporal conduct. The punitive treatment of Miller—dramatically staged through local media headlines and accompanied by front-page portraits in handcuffs and prison uniform—illustrates how age can be mobilized both as a moralizing tool and a public instrument of discipline.
I thought it was thunder.25
—The Villages resident referring to the sound of sinkholes forming around his property
Concerns over developer-driven governance and developer-controlled media coverage curtailing local democratic processes are also evident in the treatment of The Villages’ environmental vulnerabilities. Despite efforts to foster protected wetland areas and other environmental initiatives, The Villages has been criticized by environmentalists, journalists, and residents alike for the environmental impact of its expansive urban development practices: from surface-soil stripping across thousands of hectares of green-field development to extensive groundwater consumption.26 The impact of these development practices has been linked by critics to the increasing frequency of reported sinkholes in The Villages.27 In 2017 alone, Villages-News documented at least thirty-two sinkholes.
Sinkholes are not limited solely to The Villages. Geologically, Florida exists on a bedrock of porous limestone, which dissolves easily in partially acidic rainwater, forming a karst landscape characterized by underground cavities. When these cavities become too large to support the overlying materials, the ground can collapse, resulting in a sinkhole. Water dynamics play a central role in triggering such events. Prolonged drought conditions can lower the water table, removing the hydraulic support for subsurface voids. Conversely, heavy rainfall—such as that which follows hurricanes—can saturate the soil and infiltrate cavities, increasing pressure and contributing to collapses, especially when a drought is followed by intense rainfall.
Climatic factors alone, however, do not fully explain the rising frequency of sinkholes in The Villages, especially during years with otherwise normal weather patterns.28 Construction processes frequently remove stabilizing soil layers, increase surface load, redirect water flow, and disrupt subsurface hydrology. Among these activities, the large-scale extraction of groundwater for lawn and golf course irrigation stands out for its impact on the aquifer system.29
The Daily Sun, the main local newspaper owned by the community’s developer, reported only one of the thirty-two documented sinkhole incidents in 2017, stating that the cavity was “later determined not likely” to be a sinkhole.30 A former employee of The Daily Sun has claimed that editorial staff were instructed not to report “the numerous sinkholes that open up because of all the water being pumped from the aquifer to keep lawns and golf courses green.”31 The Villages residents have been evacuated from homes affected by, or neighboring, sinkholes, with some residents permanently abandoning homes while drawn-out insurance negotiations take place.32
Age as Social Construct
First it was sex on the square and then it was sex on the electric box.33
—News headline about acts of public indecency at The Villages
The Villages both reinforces and subverts the social-construct of age. On the one hand, it reinforces it with the spatial segregation of people over fifty-five and the construction of not only housing, but fully immersive spatial environments conceived of and marketed as lifestyle products for this age group.34 This is decipherable in The Villages’ socio-spatial programming based on age-related assumptions of physical capacities, like the predominance of smaller pickleball courts rather than tennis courts, the prevalence of golf landscapes, and an abundance of sedentary clubs dedicated to bingo, bridge, and book reading.
On the other hand, the planning and design logic of The Villages works to challenge the social construct of age through age-segregation. By concentrating one age group, it is largely void of relative age difference. This selective elimination of youth has paradoxically constructed a social environment of youthfulness. These activity landscapes and the social-milieu of The Villages align to broader “active-adult” scripts in which, Stephen Katz argues, older adults are increasingly targeted by anti-aging, wellness, and beauty industries, which encourage them to remain sexually active, physically fit, and aesthetically youthful.35
Considerable effort has also been made in the design of The Villages to transport residents to the space-time conditions of an idealized small American “hometown” of their youth, one originally built in the late-1800s or early-1900s. This is carried out not only in the spatial environment’s architectural expression (including, for example, historical plaques retelling fake histories of buildings or public spaces), but also in its programming, like 1950s-style diners, nightly free live music played in town squares, or presentations of The Villages Cheerleaders.36
Whether this is as effective as the space-time immersions of psychologist Ellen Langer’s “Counterclockwise” studies is unclear. In 1979, Langer conducted a five-day experiment on “reminiscing” with a group of sixteen men, all in their late seventies or early eighties. Langer and her team transformed an old monastery to recreate the year 1959, complete with vintage magazines, music, and films. The participants were split into two groups. The control group was asked to recall and talk about their lives as they were in 1959, while the experimental group was instructed to fully immerse themselves in the past, behaving and speaking as though it were actually 1959.37 Langer’s study found that participants in the experimental group showed significant physical and cognitive improvements after the retreat, including better joint flexibility, reduced signs of arthritis, improved coordination, posture, and gait. On cognitive tests, 63 percent improved their scores, compared to 44 percent in the control group. Unbiased observers also judged all experimental group participants to appear younger by week’s end compared to the control group.38
The active youthification of seniors in The Villages has contributed to the community becoming an emblem of the sexually active senior. Since 2006 there have been news reports of an explosion of sexually transmitted infections in the community, an image that has been further amplified by the characterization of “Mr. Midnight,” the promiscuous Viagra-using Villages bachelor in his mid-sixties, and later by incidents of sexual activity in public spaces (albeit some conducted by Villages residents slightly under the age of fifty-five).39
While the claim of rampant STIs in the community has been statistically challenged, the moniker of “STD capital of the US” has been more challenging to displace.40
Katz suggests that what appears to be empowerment for older adults (e.g., “sexy at seventy”) often masks new forms of ageism, where the value of seniors is measured by their ability to conform to youthful norms.41 As a social construct, the figure of the “sexy senior” is not just a spontaneous expression of older adults’ desires, but is deeply rooted in capitalist and cultural forces. It reflects a shift from aging as decline to aging as opportunity, but that opportunity is unequally distributed and often coercive. As suggested by an AI image used to announce the opening of the Hooters restaurant chain at The Villages, the “sexy senior” functions as a disciplinary ideal, promoting a very specific (often youthful, white, middle-class) model of aging.42 Here, consumerism, medicine, and media redefine aging not just as a biological process, but as a moral and aesthetic obligation.
Functional Post-Age-Segregation
I am confused. Is Middleton part of The Villages? They say it is for families with children in the charter school. But they can drive golf carts everywhere. Are they allow[ed] to use all of the pools in “The Villages”? If so, why has The Villages given these children and young families amenities for which we residents are paying?43
—Letter to the editor of Villages-news.com from Villages resident
While many recent developments in The Villages represent the intensification of its structural principles, one shift suggests a different direction: “all-age communities.” Oxford Oaks was the first all-age development of approximately 500 homes built between 2014 and 2020, located outside the northwestern edge of The Villages. Middleton by The Villages is a considerably larger “all-age community” of around 8,000 homes developed from 2021 outside the western perimeter of the development.44 This shift arose from a straightforward functional necessity. Although many retired Villages residents returned to the workforce—for either social engagement or supplementary income—their participation proved insufficient to meet the community’s labor needs. As a result, the move toward “all-age communities” marked the point at which The Villages reached a demographic limit: its age-segregated population could no longer supply the workforce required to sustain its extensive retail, commercial, medical, construction, and amenity infrastructures. This shortfall is compounded by the community’s distance from larger surrounding urban labor markets.
The emergence of Oxford Oaks and Middleton by The Villages has prompted anxieties amongst Villages’ residents about the arrival of “outsiders,” who are defined both spatially and in terms of their age. The two new neighborhoods have also provoked confusion from prospective residents. Clarifications from local real estate agents confirm that “anyone” can live in these all-age developments, but access to the local charter schools (which were founded and are run by the developer; they are the only schools within a substantial distance) is only for children of employees of The Villages. As a result, these all-age communities occupy an ambivalent position, outside of, next to, and a part of The Villages; both “open to all” and functioning as semi-exclusionary company towns.
On their own terms, Oxford Oaks and Middleton by The Villages can be interpreted as an extension of the developer’s framework of social-spatial engineering into broader life phases and forms of production: from retirement cities for “seniors” to adjacent company towns for their workers. The emergence of “all-age communities” next to The Villages exposes the operational fiction of age segregation itself. These districts appear inclusive, yet function primarily to externalize the labor and care that the young-old utopia depends on. Instead of disrupting the norms of ageless vitality, younger residents help preserve them. From van Saarloos’s viewpoint, these new developments would reveal the redeployment of age as a more diffuse technology of sorting and containment.
While many of the fundamental, dystopian problematics of The Villages are neither resolved nor substantially challenged by this partial dissolution of age-segregation, it nevertheless represents a tentative step toward imagining socio-spatial arrangements that leak beyond the strict logics of age-based separation. If read optimistically, the introduction of mixed-age districts might offer a modest foundation for future transformations within The Villages itself: away from the social homogeneity, exclusion, and social, political, and environmental forms exploitation and control that have long characterized the development. Yet, seen alongside dynamics of segregation, securitization, urbanization, and degradation, this shift may only gesture toward mixture while maintaining the underlying structures of dependence, hierarchy, and age-based stratification. Still, as one of the most concentrated experimental homophilic sites of the social construct of age, The Villages represent a productive site to rethink the socio-spatial ethics of age. This is not because it is already moving beyond age segregation, but because its new formations reveal the limits, tensions, and contradictions of such attempts, foregrounding their potential for future forms of contamination.
Bernice L. Neugarten, “Age Groups in American Society and the Rise of the Young-Old,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 415, no. 1 (1974): 187–198. Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989; U.S. ed. 1991).
See for example: Stephen Katz, Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, Cultures of Ageing: Self, Citizen and the Body (Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall, 2000); and Martin Kohli, “Generational Changes and the Third Age,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, ed. Malcolm J. Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
H. Gary Morse, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow!,” The Villages Daily Sun, 2007.
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 328–44. Jameson identifies the “longevity” subgenre of science fiction—stories where certain characters live far longer or even indefinitely—as a striking allegory for class struggle. In these narratives, access to life-extending technologies is typically reserved for the elite, while the rest remain mortal, vulnerable, and expendable. For Jameson, this dramatizes a future in which even time and survival are commodified, with the power to live becoming the deepest expression of inequality. Aging itself is refigured as a site of class conflict, where the capacity to persist into the future is unevenly distributed. Rather than universal human experiences, life and death are reimagined as products of systemic privilege. In this way, Jameson sees longevity not just as a sci-fi curiosity, but as a political metaphor that exposes how capitalism might extend its reach into biology, turning the control over life’s duration into the most profound form of domination.
J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1996).
Deane Simpson, Young-Old: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015).
Simon(e) van Saarloos, Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (Vancouver: Emily Carr University Press, 2023). Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
“Villager screams ‘White Power’at Trump Golf Cart Rally in The Villages, Florida,” posted June 15, 2020, by Villages-News.com, YouTube, 1:23, ➝.
“Sumter County,” Data Commons, ➝.
“The Villages, FL,” Data USA, ➝.
Marco D’Eramo, “Bunkering in Paradise (or, Do Oldsters Dream of Electric Golf Carts?),” in Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, ed. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (New York: The New Press, 2007), 187–88.
Van Saarloos, Against Ageism.
For a concise account of the spatial–urban genealogy of homophily, see Laura Kurgan et al., “Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm,” e-flux Architecture, October 2019, ➝.
Yochai Benkler et al., Networked Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford university Press, 2018).
“Tempers Boil Over as Democrats Square Off With Trump Supporters at Golf Cart Rally,” Villages-News.com, June 14, 2020, ➝; “Villager screams ‘White Power’ at Trump Golf Cart Rally in The Villages, Florida.”
“Villagers Paying Higher Amenity Fees and Seeing More Outsiders Having Fun,” Villages-News.com, March 29, 2025, ➝.
“Residents Divided Sharply on Value of Gates in The Villages,” Villages-News.com, February 21, 2021, ➝.
Freeman, Time Binds.
Ryan Grim, “The Villages Vendetta: How A Grassroots Revolt in the Iconic Retirement Community Ended With a 72-Year-Old Political Prisoner,” The Intercept, February 5, 2023, ➝.
Simpson, Young-Old, 236–43.
Ryan Grim, “An Exciting Update on Jailed Villages Politician Oren Miller,” The Intercept, November 10, 2023, ➝.
“Convicted Felon Oren Miller Released from Jail,” The Villages Daily Sun, ➝.
Grim, “The Villages Vendetta.” Ryan Grim, “Sham Conviction Overturned for Oren Miller, the Jailed Villages Politician Railroaded by Ron DeSantis,” The Intercept, November 9, 2023, ➝.
Van Saarloos, Against Ageism.
“Several Sinkholes Open Up, Forcing Residents Out of Four Homes,” WOGX, February 18, 2018, ➝.
Lauren Ritchie, “Commentary: Stop Letting Developments Such as The Villages Suck Up Water,” Orlando Sentinel, 30 June 2017, ➝; Chris Bodenner, “The Science Behind Florida’s Sinkhole Epidemic,” Smithsonian magazine, May 24, 2018, ➝; and “Letters to the Editor: The Villages’ Unconstrained Growth Comes at a Price,” Villages-News.com, September 10, 2023, ➝.
Bodenner, “The Science Behind Florida’s Sinkhole Epidemic.”
Bodenner, “The Science Behind Florida’s Sinkhole Epidemic.”
In terms of groundwater usage, The Villages held a permit in 1991 to withdraw 65 million gallons of water annually. By 2017, that number had escalated to 12.4 billion gallons per year. Ritchie, “Commentary: Stop Letting Developments Such as The Villages Suck Up Water.”
Bodenner, “The Science Behind Florida’s Sinkhole Epidemic.”
Craig Pittman, Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016).
Meta Minton, “Villager Abandons Home After Sinkhole Saga Takes Its Toll,” Villages-News.com, July 10, 2025, ➝.
“Villages 101: Villages Couple Served Jail Time for Sexual Romp on Electric Box,” Villages-News.com, October 5, 2019, ➝.
Such a conceptualization of lifestyle follows demographically-informed practices of market segmentation, in which, according to Stephen Katz and Barbara Marshall, companies and instruments “transfigure the life-course into knowable, codable, and legible market trends, segments, and consumer profiles. As a result, aging as a diverse chronological process and age-related problems based on class, race, gender, and locality are obscured or disappear into coterminous market niches based on the vagaries of ‘mature’ consumer behavior.” Stephen Katz and Barbara Marshall, “New Sex for Old: Lifestyle, Consumerism, and the Ethics of Aging Well,” Journal of Aging Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 5.
Stephen Katz, “Busy Bodies: Activity, Aging, and the Management of Everyday Life,” Journal of Aging Studies 14, no. 2 (2000). This neoliberal ideology of self-regulation, in which aging bodies are expected to resist decline and remain desirable, is spatialized in the “strip-hospital,” a commercial-retail typology prevalent in The Villages programmed with medical and body-correction services designed for car and golf-cart access. Simpson, Young-Old, 229–36.
Simpson, Young-Old, 204–19.
Ellen Langer, Counterclockwise (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
Langer, Counterclockwise.
“STDs Running Rampant in Retirement Community: Doctor Blames Viagra, Lack of Sex Education,” WKMG Local 6, May 27, 2006; Andrew Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in a World Without Children (New York: Grove Press, 2009); “Villages 101: Villages Couple Served Jail Time for Sexual Romp on Electric Box.”
“Fact or Myth: Is The Villages the STD Capital of the US?” TopRetirements.com (blog), February 5, 2021, ➝.
Katz, “Busy Bodies.”
Ryan Erisman, “Hooters Breaks Ground in The Villages,” Inside the Bubble (blog), January 31, 2025 (updated), ➝.
“Letters to the Editor: Is Middleton part of The Villages?” Villages-News.com, November 4, 2025, ➝.
Marv Balousek, “Mark Morse: Church on Square to be Renamed in Honor of Sharon Morse,” Villages-News.com, May 14, 2014, ➝; Middleton website, mymiddleton.com.
