America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old

July 1977: A 105-degree afternoon in Phoenix. I’m 17 and making deliveries in an underpowered Chevette with “4-55” air-conditioning (four open windows at 55 miles per hour), so I welcome the long runs to Sun City, when I can let desert air and American Top 40 blast through the car. Arrival, though, always gives me the creeps. The world’s first “active retirement community” is city-size (it would eventually span more than 14 square miles and house more than 40,000 people). The concentric circles of almost-identical tract houses stretch as far as I can see. Signs and bulletin boards announce limitless options for entertainment, shopping, fitness, tennis, golf, shuffleboard—every kind of amenity.

Sun City is a retirement nirvana, a suburban dreamscape for a class of people who, only a generation before, were typically isolated, institutionalized, or crammed into their kids’ overcrowded apartments. But I drive for blocks without seeing anyone jumping rope or playing tag (no children live here). I see no street life, unless you count residents driving golf carts, the preferred form of local transportation. My teenage self wonders: Is this twilight zone my eventual destiny? Is this what it means to be old, to be retired, in America?

In its day, Sun City represented a breakthrough in American life. When it opened, in 1960, thousands of people lined up their cars along Grand Avenue to gawk at the model homes. Del Webb, the visionary developer, understood that the United States was ready to imagine a whole new stage of life—the golden years, as marketers proclaimed them.

A cultural revolution was in full swing. Social Security and private pensions had liberated tens of millions of older Americans from poverty and dependency; modern medicine had given them the health to enjoy what was then a new lifestyle: leisure. In 1965, Medicare ameliorated the old-age fear of medical bankruptcy. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and the Democratic Congress, outbidding each other for the senior vote, increased Social Security by 20 percent and indexed it to keep up with inflation. With these two programs on fiscal autopilot, the entitlement state was born, and the elderly were its prime beneficiaries.