I’M KIND OF hating how much I love it,” my wife Lindsey says to me on a Thursday evening stroll through Market Square in Lake Sumter Landing at The Villages.
I’m a fully fledged Florida Man now, having moved my family from Los Angeles to Jacksonville in October 2021. So, naturally, I invited the love of my life to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary by driving 2.5 hours deep into rural central Florida to visit “America’s top-selling master-planned community for active adults” for 14 years straight, according to the RCLCO Real Estate Consulting ranking touted in The Villages’ promotional materials.
We’re almost 20 years too young to purchase most of the homes here, since federal law requires 80 percent of home purchases in a qualified retirement community be occupied by someone 55 or older. Local districts can and do set that threshold even higher.
But we’re not here to house shop. We’re here to celebrate our marriage and figure out why The Villages is not just Florida’s fastest-growing senior community but also America’s fastestgrowing metro. Between 2010 and 2020, its population grew by 39 percent, from about 93,000 to 130,000, beating out Austin, Texas, for the top-growing metropolitan area of the decade.
Lindsey and I prepared for the journey by watching Some Kind of Heaven, a haunting 2020 documentary produced by Darren Aronofsky () and directed by Floridian Lance Oppenheim. The film profiles several oddball Villagers, like Reggie Kincer, a 75-year-old retiree from Nashville who copes with the surreal isolation of Villages life by practicing tai chi meditation and consuming lots of mind-altering drugs while his wife Anne attempts to keep him grounded in reality. A lonely widow begins dating a golf cart salesman who, as head of the local Parrothead club, is more interested in chugging margaritas and dancing with other singles than in a serious relationship. An octogenarian California nomad who lives in a van frequents The Villages’ pools to pick up wealthy widows and secure a comfortable retirement.
