Over the Horizon Line | Column By Hal Rothman

Retirement Boom Means Social Upkeep Bust

By Hal Rothman, 4-10-06

Real estate and retirement in the West will certainly become intertwined and even synonymous in the very near future, but the relationship has its drawbacks. The new "wilderburbs," as the historian Lincoln Bramwell calls them, will surely gray at a faster rate than the population at large. They offer everything the retiree of the future could want: beautiful vistas, trails to walk or mountain bike, small-town, idyllic living and plenty of enticements for the children to bring their grandkids for a visit.

What they don't have is a clear way to pay for the upkeep of services, to keep the streets clear and the water running, to protect the population with police and fire services and to pick up the garbage. Designed as something less than full-service communities, they lack the tax base and sometimes, the critical mass of population to pay for services. Here will be the most difficult intersection of desire and reality: transfer-payment retirees in communities in which their stake is short term.

Retirees fit the model of what my old friend Myles Rademan, Park City’s “prophet of boom,” calls CAVIES - citizens against virtually everything. CAVIES have an even greater impact than NIMBYs, the “not in my backyard” folks. They consistently vote down social services expenditures, even when they stand to benefit from them.

In places where these people have come to retire and do not have deep ties, their desire to take their rewards so far exceeds any feelings they have about the future of the community that they bend the wobbly steel structure that holds such communities together.

In their new homes, retirees are trenchant opponents of taxation in any form. They vote against everything, schools, roads, police and fire protection, and even libraries – of which senior citizens are the most frequent users. In Henderson, Nevada, a bedroom community outside Las Vegas in 2000, a library bond issue that added $39 a year per $100,000 of real estate valuation when the average home was valued at $150,000 and would have built ten new libraries in a community that was roughly 40% senior was voted down by a 62 to 38% margin. Senior precincts voted overwhelmingly against having libraries closer to their homes. They preferred to drive, many easily spending the $39 that they would have been taxed in gasoline.

With such behavior, retirees present a dilemma. They take more out of the system than they put in, and like everyone else, they don't rush forward to offer more than their share. Even more, their heavy weight in communities and their consistent presence at the polls sit down on the rest of the community, preventing other constituencies from achieving their ends. To frustrated families with children or civic-minded individuals, the interests of retirees seem parochial and self-centered.

Retirees provided an economic boost to the communities they enter, but it comes at a cost. Job creation is a certainty, but the nature of the jobs is often in question. Retirees require an entire range of services, only a few of which require high levels of skill.

When workers come, some tend to stay. Retirement communities become havens for unskilled workers, landscape gardeners and yard men, gurney-pushers and orderlies, and restaurant workers and street cleaners. These people bring their families to the same communities, and put down roots. That work force is of course at least partially immigrant, often not fluent in English. Communities that embrace retirees can expect a lot of low-wage labor and that means growing populations of people who earn low wages and often need social services. This leads to a need for more revenue to provide more services, exactly what retirees vote down at the polls, time and again.

The people who wind up footing the bill are-no surprise-those in their working years, between the ages of 18 and 65. Increasingly, they are the sandwich generation, caught between aging parents and the children they are raising. Communities depend on their labor, and indeed their civic involvement, to make a place home.

Trapped between two different kinds of open mouths, children and seniors, the latter always loudly asserting that they have earned a pass on financial obligations to the community, the sandwich generation already views seniors with the disdain of a society that would readily eat its old. Both seniors and the young drain the public till. The only place to get more resources is the working population. The seniors are too well organized and the young do not earn enough.

Regressive tax structure throughout the West and the demands of vocal constituencies who don't pay their way complicate local decision making. All the economic benefit in the world from retirement won't diminish this conflict.

In the communities of the future, large numbers of children and large numbers of retirees will become common. For anyone in their working years, this is a disastrous formula, the dreaded peak-valley-peak demographic curve. Unfortunately, the valley is in the middle, filled with people in their prime years of work who pay most of a society’s bills. As this cohort makes up a smaller percentage of the American work force, we risk the stagnation that has already encompassed Japan and is turning Europe into a Muslim continent.

Japan did not cease its economic growth because of a lack of ingenuity. Instead, it was weighed down by its low birth rate and increasing life spans, both dilemmas that we offset with immigrant labor, legal and sin papeles, “without papers,” as such workers refer to themselves.

The contours of this future are already apparent in the Las Vegas Valley, but it offers a hardly pleasant vision of the future. In 2005, 25% of the more than 1.8m in greater Las Vegas were retired; another 25% were Latino. Needless to say, the two groups barely overlapped.

Most of the retirees walking the trails of the neighborhoods in the morning, going to coffee shops, attending movies, gambling in casinos, and babysitting their grandkids are white. A growing percentage of younger workers, especially unskilled workers, were not. More and more, the faces of the workforce were becoming brown, yellow, and black. In the palette of colors, this future looked uncomfortable, one color served, many more serving.

It may be that the future of this country is older, more affluent white people who experienced opportunity in their working lives served by younger, less affluent nonwhites with a smaller chance to achieve the standard of living of the people they care for. Throughout the nation, as the primary beneficiaries of the stock market run-up of the 1990s and the surge in federal spending since 2000 gray, they will increasingly depend on nonwhites to provide their care. In situations where the care-providers see no future, perceive a grind of poorly paid and unappreciated service for cranky old people, another kind of tear at the fabric of social civility is certain.

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