THE DEATH OF THE VILLAGES…

PLASTICVILLE-USA

THE DEATH OF THE VILLAGES…

In the 1980’s and 90’s there was a very popular radio format called “The Music Of Your Life”. Actually “The Music Of Your Life” is a trademarked entity originally designed by a former record company executive named Al Ham. The format was essentially a big-band, 50’s crooners radio format that was designed to reach the children of the great depression and World War-2. A number of competitors sprang up also offering the same sort of package to local radio stations, and in many ways “The Music Of Your Life” essentially became the generic name of the format no matter who sold the various packages, much like “Coke” has become the byword for any sort of cola product.

While the format was extremely popular with the 50+ age group of that time, it was a great big ZERO in the eyes of the major advertisers. While a savvy station manager could make some decent money off his local advertising market, the big-money “national buys” were never going to happen.

For years major advertisers have..and still do..write off ANYBODY over the magic cut-off age of 49. The day you hit the big 5-0 you no longer matter to any major company or advertising agency. They’ll accept your money, you’re welcome to shop in their stores, but they collectively don’t give a tinker’s damn about you and your desires at any level.

“The Music Of Your Life” was found to have the most loyal listeners of any radio format. Listeners were said to have “broken dial syndrome” which means they NEVER change the radio channel.

There was also a saying in the radio business that “The Music Of Your Life” was the only radio format where you could read the morning paper’s obituary section and find out how many listeners you lost that day. And that of course was the problem..there were no new people coming along to replace the listeners who were dying off.

There is a certain amount of truth to this when it comes to assessing the overall health of TV. If you read the obits in the Daily Sun you can find out how many resale homes are about to go on the market.

Recently, and not exactly surprisingly, the Morse Organization announced that they had once again pulled a couple more empty tracts of land out of the corporate asses where 300-500 new homes would be built in the near future.

It was only months ago that they were saying that the Fruitland Park land development would be “the VERY last” development that The Villages, Inc. would be building on. And then..SURPRISE!..Here comes the announcement that 2 more tracts had been “found” and that the Morse organization would be building new homes on them.

These new parcels of land, which Villages, Inc. says “have been in their possession for some time” are in the northern area of TV, one of the earliest sites for building.

This area falls in Marion County. TV covers sections of Marion, Lake and Sumter counties. The largest of TV developments are in Sumter County who literally sold its collective soul to the Morse family in return for what they thought would be a windfall of tax revenue. The tax revenue did indeed come, but what came with it, was the big, heavy controlling hand of the Morses, and all of the obnoxious Villagers. In a way it is sort of like getting involved with the Mafia. Once you let them in, they OWN you.

The other two counties..Marion and Lake never exactly fell under the spell of Harry and Gary and they tend to cast a wary eye upon them. Allegedly after the original developments were done in Marion and Lake counties there was sort of a pledge made by the Morse organization that they would “Never Again” do any building in either county. It wasn’t until 2014 where Villages, Inc. cast an eye on Lake County as they sought to build in Fruitland Park. Because Fruitland Park is an incorporated town, TV would be dealing with the city fathers of Fruitland Park instead of having to deal directly with Lake County who doesn’t see TV as some sort of heavenly savior. I also suspect that TV thought they could pressure and bulldoze the small community of Fruitland Park where they wouldn’t be able to pull the old razzle-dazzle with Lake County officials.

Recently the town of Lady Lake, which is the controlling government in the Spanish Springs area of TV, has shown some spine when it has come to getting the township to approve various things that TV must seek code and Commission approval for. Lady Lake mayor Ruth Kussard has been voting “NO” on a number of Villages requests. While she has been outvoted virtually every time, Mrs. Kussard feels that she needs to speak for everyone in Lady Lake and not just be a rubber stamp for TV. In a sense, this is something new for the people up at Morse HQ.

The recently announced development in the Mulberry section of TV will now require the developer to dance with the powers that be in Marion County, and apparently their past experience with Marion County tended to remind Morse & Co. just who was boss. The county did not just automatically bend over and grab their ankles like the county fathers did in Sumter County. So this might make for an interesting experience.

All of these announcements have that collection of Villagers who..for whatever idiotic reason..think that TV should somehow extend all the way to the Orlando city line just jumping for joy. More! More!! MORE!!! They cry. Others wonder just how big the place needs to get. In many ways TV is already sort of unwieldy because of its unbridled growth.

In a very unusually thoughtful comment on Bitch Of The Villages, a resident asked the question about “how big is too big, and what happens when people stop coming”? He also went on to say that within the next 10 years or so TV could lose 10-15% of its population merely by attrition. Of course the true believers of the Church Of The Villages set upon this guy like a bum on a baloney sandwich. He didn’t know what he was talking about. He was full of crap. Where did he get such numbers? But the truth..which always tends to evade TV faithful..is..he’s right.

In the latter part of his book “Leisureville” Andrew Blechman spends some serious time talking about what comes next. He points out that once we get beyond the Baby Boomers, the next generations are already saying that retirement living in a place like TV or one of the various Del Webb communities is about as attractive to them as eating a plate of worms. Blechman goes on to describe how a number of building companies such as Del Webb along with various county, city and state planners are all considering the question of how will these upcoming generations want to spend their retirement? There are also some serious questions about whether or not these generations will even be able to afford a retirement lifestyle.

The vast majority of residents in TV or other such retirement communities can essentially afford to live this lifestyle because of the defined-benefit pension. A majority of people from the so-called “Greatest Generation” and their close cousins from the Korean war era were the first..and possibly..the last people to be able to count on a steady retirement income being directly paid by companies, government entities and union funds. You worked your 40 years, got your gold watch and then retired into a guaranteed pension for the rest of your life.

Workers in the system today are finding those days are long gone. Even major companies such as IBM no longer offer defined-benefit pensions and only 6.7% of the private sector workforce is covered by union agreements that provide for lifetime pensions. Many legacy companies especially the airlines and steel manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy and have been able to shed their pension responsibilities through the bankruptcy courts.

While vast numbers of people who work in the public sector still have gold-plated defined-benefit pension programs, those programs too, are also coming under scrutiny, as state after state is being forced to admit that they haven’t got the cabbage to pay for what they’ve already bought in terms of retirement payments, and have absolutely no idea how they are going to pay for future retirees.

Today most companies that offer any sort of retirement option do it through the 401-K program that places the onus on the employee to carefully save for their retirement, with the company adding in some money when their accounts have become vested. That’s a long, long way from working 40 years at US Steel and then walking out and receiving anywhere from 40-75% of your retirement day pay for the rest of your life.

Many of the good paying jobs that used to exist whereby people were able to afford their retirement no longer exist in this country. So the idea of affording TV mythical “lifestyle” is starting to become little more than a pipe dream.

So the poser of the question about how big is too big..is asking a fair question. Even though he’s being kicked around by the true believers, this guy is the wise one. He’s asking the right questions. And the day is likely to come when first one house on a block stays empty, and then another and then another. Sure..there will always be some who will be able to afford “the lifestyle”, but it’s going to be less and less and those days are not that far off. Good question fella!!