Leisureville (19 page)

Adding to Sun City's woes, Kelsey tells me, is the community's declining volunteerism. Sun City calls itself the “city of volunteers,” and since its inception, the community has relied heavily on its residents to perform many basic municipal functions. When I imagine a city of volunteers, I picture large numbers of citizens performing charitable work, perhaps for the needy. In Sun City, the motto has a slightly different meaning.

Although a good number of residents volunteer in local schools and hospitals, the majority volunteer inside their own community because the free labor saves residents tax dollars. The Sheriff's Posse, a neighborhood watch of sorts; and the much-celebrated PRIDES, who landscape medians and keep other public areas tidy, in effect serve as a police and public works department.

“Volunteerism is the backbone of our community,” Kelsey says. “Without volunteers we have a big problem—and volunteerism is dropping. Boomers aren't as interested in it. They'd rather write a check.”

Also keeping taxes artificially low is Sun City's dependence on Maricopa County for just about everything it needs—social services, planning and zoning, health inspections, and more. Some might
argue that county government is not designed to handle the everyday issues of a de facto municipality with tens of thousands of residents. As Maricopa County continues to grow at a staggering rate (it is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country), Sun City must compete for the county's attention. But Kelsey scoffs at talk of incorporation, calling it “just another layer of bureaucracy.” He tells me that this lack of bureaucracy helps keep Sun City “vibrant.”

Although Kelsey compares the HOA to a city council, it is by its very nature a reactive organization with very limited powers (let alone voluntary membership), and thus seemingly ill suited to charting the community's future. When I ask him what sort of long-range plans the HOA has for Sun City, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “If something breaks, we fix it.”

“What if volunteerism continues to decline?” I ask. “Then what?”

“Damned if I know,” Kelsey responds.

According to Kelsey, the HOA's most important task is protecting residents from neighbors who violate neighborhood deed restrictions, such as by keeping messy yards and using nonconforming paint colors. The organization's four part-time employees spend their time investigating these complaints, the biggest of which is the discovery of underage children. And it is here that Kelsey chooses to focus much of his energy.

“It happens all the time,” Kelsey says of contraband children. “And it's a public relations nightmare no matter how we handle it. Why? Because to a lot of people it just feels intrinsically wrong on a gut level to exclude children. But Sun City is not supposed to be a stopover place for kids in hard times. That's a violation of the rules. Everyone who moves here has read the rules and signed them. If their circumstances change—well, I'm sorry, but it's time to move on. Sun City is about lifestyle—and children are not included.”

“Why live without kids?” I ask.

“Why not?” Kelsey responds. “Kids can be rude and noisy. What's so wrong with being in your sixties, having raised your kids, worked hard, and now wanting to live without children? It's a lifestyle choice. So what if we live in a bubble? It's our right. We pay our taxes. We vote.” He points to the Bill of Rights on the wall. “There's nothing in the United States Constitution that says you have to have kids living next to you. I live like this because I can.

“Look, I understand diversity. But I don't want it shoved down my throat. Why can't someone be allowed to be comfortable when being comfortable to them means living in, say, an all-white community? Don't get me wrong; I'm a people person. I have friends of all persuasions. But I don't want to live in a community with children. I love my grandkids. I just don't want to be
forced
to live with them. People should be free to pick who they want for neighbors. Things weren't so great in this country when we were all forced to live together. And if there's something wrong with the way we live, then how come they're building Sun Cities all over the country?

“You know, people say we're selfish. Well, let me tell you something. Down the street there's a medical research facility. They have one of the largest brain tissue banks in the world. One day they'll discover a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Where do you think they get all that brain tissue? Sun City residents donated it. That's right—we volunteer our bodies and our brains. If you die, they can have your brain out within two hours. Ask
those
people what they think of us.”

Over lunch, I meet a woman from Sun City Grand whose husband teaches in a neighboring school district. She says the children are wild, disrespectful, and impossible to discipline.

I ask her if she thinks the area's age segregation has anything to do with it. Surely the children sense Sun City's antipathy toward them. Could it be that, by their actions, Sun Citians are exacerbating the generational divide, encouraging exactly the sort of behavior they fear?

“I don't know,” she tells me bluntly. “I hadn't thought of it that way. But I can tell you that things were different at my husband's last job. He taught on an Indian reservation. It was a traditional community, with elders. If a child misbehaved, my husband only needed to report the child to his elders and the trouble stopped.

“Come to think of it, my grandmother lived with me when I was growing up and she taught me a lot. But things were different back then. Everything revolved around family. People are so scattered now. Even cousins are like a foreign concept. The kids here don't really have elders, and their parents usually work long hours.”

After lunch, I drive to the two-story doughnut-shape Lakeview Recreation Center, Sun City's most iconic and kitschy building, for an interview with another quasi-governmental group, the Recreation Centers of Sun City, Inc. (RCSC), whose elected board of residents governs Sun City's many amenities.

After completing the community, Webb handed these amenities to Sun City residents by creating this nonprofit organization, thereby freeing himself from a giant burden: 340,000 square feet of indoor recreation space, 122 holes of golf, and thirty miles of paved golf cart paths that all required maintenance. In the process, Webb created a laudable and fair-minded method for turning over recreational facilities and responsibilities to his residents.

Inside the RCSC offices, Norm Dickson, a retired schoolteacher who serves on the board, greets me. Although he is in his seventies, this athletic midwesterner represents the new progressive face of Sun City—people who are working hard to ensure that the community has a future.

The generational warfare that plagued Sun City's dealings with its youthful neighbors has turned inward, with older Sun Citians now at odds with younger Sun Citians. Aside from retirement, the two groups don't have much in common. And as the average life expectancy increases, the RCSC is finding the generation gap all the more difficult to bridge.

“We're basically a big country club and our job at the RCSC is to make everyone happy at the lowest fee possible,” Norm tells me. “But that's like changing a wheel on a moving car. We have residents here in their mid-fifties and others that are over 100. There are folks who have lived here for thirty years and others who arrived yesterday. The older folks don't want their fees raised, because they hardly use the facilities anymore. But the new younger retirees want all the bells and whistles, and they're willing to pay for it.”

Norm and his fellow board members are in the process of overhauling the community's recreation centers, in the hope that updated facilities will encourage the gentrification of Sun City. To pay for these projects, the RCSC charges new residents a onetime impact fee of a few thousand dollars when they purchase a home. Even though the snazzy renovations don't cost veteran residents a penny, the several-thousand-strong Sun City Taxpayers Association has filed several lawsuits against the RCSC and has circulated a petition to recall the board's president.

“Believe it or not, a lot of the older folks are upset because these projects increase the value of their properties,” Norm says. “They aren't looking to sell their homes and, frankly, they don't care much about their heirs, either. What they care about is protesting anything that might lead to an increase in their taxes.”

Because residents of Sun City don't pay municipal or school district taxes, the tax rate is actually quite low. Norm tells me that he was paying $5,000 a year in property taxes in Michigan before moving to Sun City a decade ago. He now pays about $750. “When I got my first tax bill,” he says, “it was so low that I thought it was a monthly payment.”

Given Sun City's aging demographics, the turnover of houses is relatively high. The consistent turnover is evidence that newer residents are still buying into the community. Norm intends to keep it that way, because the alternative is unthinkable.

“Communities either grow, stagnate, or decay. In order to remain a viable community, we must attract newcomers. When a community can't fill vacant houses, neighborhoods begin to deteriorate and things start to spiral downward until there are too few people to afford maintaining what's left.

“We need to be proactive. If we don't fix up our community, we won't attract new people and we won't fill vacancies—not with fifty-year-old facilities. There are simply too many competing communities out there. We need to give people a reason to continue choosing us. But convincing older residents of this hasn't been easy.”

The results of these internecine battles—stagnation and decay—are already visible. Some of Sun City's apartment houses and condo complexes are run by miniature homeowner associations that don't have the money—or are unwilling to spend the money—to perform cosmetic repairs, let alone major renovations. “What happens when these units can no longer attract new occupants, and the association fees are spread across fewer and fewer residents?” Norm asks. “Then what?”

I ask Norm if these generational wars will ever end. “I don't know,” he says with a sigh. “As far as I'm concerned we have a moral obligation to contribute to the future of those who come after us. But some of our older residents forget that they were once young.”

After half a century of age segregation, Sun City's future remains anything but certain. One wonders if it will someday simply cease to exist, the unforgiving desert reclaiming it like the ancient Hohokum settlements before it.

By comparison, a decade of desegregation has breathed new life into Youngtown. Once the poor cousin across the street, the tiny municipality is seemingly filled with optimism and opportunity.

Mark Fooks, Youngtown's first and only town manager, promotes this hopeful image. The town has a total landmass of just one
and a half square miles, so its worst drawback is its postage-stamp size. Municipalities in rapidly sprawling areas tend to compete with one another much as businesses do: the yardstick of growth measures success. For Youngtown to remain competitive, it will have to grow. Otherwise its revenue sources will be forever limited—a situation that in municipal (and business) terms, has a smell of death about it.

How will landlocked Youngtown grow? Youngtown is heavily dependent on its “sales team” to bring home the bacon. Aside from managing Youngtown's day-to-day affairs, Fooks's job includes attracting businesses to the town so he can continue to portray Youngtown as a “player” in the local municipal scene. He hopes to transform the resulting cachet into a mandate for annexing the aging behemoth next door. “The only real problem is what to call the new town,” Fooks says, with evident satisfaction. “Do we call it Youngcity, Suntown, or what?”

Although the young mayor may be the face of the new Youngtown, Fooks is the architect. I met with him at his modest office in Youngtown's ramshackle town hall. A large man with a confident smile who is fast approaching retirement, Fooks gives the impression that planning for Youngtown's future is as easy as baking chocolate-chip cookies with store-bought dough.

Conversely, Fooks sees Sun City's days as numbered. “These folks have lived in a bubble for years, and they'll tell you, ‘Please don't burst our bubble—that's why we came here.' It's only a matter of time before they're annexed. The only question is which neighboring municipality gets the honors.

“They
could
incorporate,” he continues. “But why go through all the trouble of building a new town hall, establishing a police force, and creating a public works department when they can just join us? We'd turn into a city of 42,000 overnight. With state revenue sharing for municipalities at $230 a head, $8 million would float down to us without us lifting a finger. Increasing our size opens us
up to all sorts of money. Just think of the additional $3 million in sales tax we would get from local businesses. And we'd qualify for federal monies as well. That's a heck of a budget to play golf with.”

Because it is unincorporated—a city in name only—Sun City cannot charge a municipal sales tax; nor is it eligible for state and federal monies. Youngtown already receives these sorts of payments, but on a smaller scale.

Fooks tells me that even if volunteerism weren't waning, Sun City's problems are too big for volunteers to handle. “God bless volunteers, but you can't run a city with a bunch of amateurs. They don't have the training to administer a city with its buildings, streets, golf courses, parks, streetlights, water, and sewers. Do you have any idea what it takes to manage a golf course, let alone a sewage treatment plant? You don't turn a golf course over to somebody whose sole qualification is that they like to play golf. That's why most local governments are run by trained professionals.”