Senior community Villages in Florida is a hot new area for raising kids

The Wildwood-Villages area of Florida was the fastest growing metro area in the U.S. in the past year. Image via AP.

As one of the world’s largest retirement communities, The Villages in central Florida is known for its endless golf courses, having the oldest median age in the United States and its traffic-stopping golf-cart parades usually supporting a Republican candidate during campaign season.

What it’s not known for is kids.

Yet the area that is home to The Villages has become the fastest-growing metro for young children in the U.S. this decade.

The number of children age 14 and younger has grown this decade by 18.4% in the Wildwood-The Villages metro area. The big reason is the working-age population has risen by 19.1%, making it also the fastest-growing metro area in the U.S. for that age group this decade, according to population estimates released this summer by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Someone has to provide services to that growing population of retirees and many of these workers will be young adults with children who live in the county,” said Stefan Rayer, population program director at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Those workers include lawn care providers, plumbers, electricians, financial advisers, nurses, construction workers, real estate agents, roofers and physical therapists for a retirement community that has grown from a remote and rural enclave to one of the fastest-growing places in the U.S. since the 1990s.

The Wildwood-The Villages metro area had more than 151,500 residents last year, most of whom are retirees, up from 130,000 residents in 2020.

Morgan Philion, 31, has to drive to a neighboring central Florida county for obstetrician visits or to take her 2-year-old son to a pediatric dentist since there aren’t any appointments available locally. When they want to visit a children’s museum, they drive 80 miles (128 kilometers) southwest along Interstate 75 to Tampa.

“Storytime” at the local public library has become a lifeline for Philion and other young families in the Wildwood-The Villages metro area.

“It’s really hard finding things to do, and this is the one activity they offer kids,” Philion said.

During weekdays, librarians including Anita Stevenson lead anywhere from a dozen to two dozen preschoolers in songs about reading, shooting bubbles from a handheld device and telling stories with titles like “Betty Goes Bananas” and “Cock-a-Doodle Quack! Quack!”

“There are a lot of new families moving in,” said Stevenson, pointing toward recently built apartment buildings down the street.

Eldresah St. Fleurant, 28, her husband and two young daughters were among those families who moved into the apartments by the library after having difficulty finding a home, since many communities in the area were geared only toward people age 55 and older.

“It’s good and it’s bad,” St. Fleurant said about raising children in the area.

On the one hand, the break-neck growth offers countless job opportunities and new store openings, but the county also lacks family-friendly facilities like an urgent care center for children. The library’s “Storytime” is an exception.

“If you don’t come to something like this, you’re not going to find young families cruising around here,” she said.

Sarah Feeney’s 3-year-old son wears hearing aids. She said it was “a nightmare” finding an audiologist who sees children in the Wildwood-The Villages area since all the medical services “are geared toward the older generation.” Now drive 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) along the Florida Turnpike to Orlando for those appointments. They also struggled to find a church with youth programming.

Despite all that, the 40-year-old has enjoyed living in Wildwood since moving less than a year ago from St. Petersburg, Florida.

“It’s less crowded. It’s less stressful and it’s more manageable,” said Feeney, who also has a 5-month-old boy.

No one younger than age 19 can live in The Villages, and at least one member of the household must be 55 or older. Because of the age restriction, the growth of young families has been in some small communities just outside The Villages, like Wildwood and Oxford.

Recognizing the youth surge, The Villages recently opened Middleton, a master-planned residential development adjacent to the retirement community geared toward employees and their families.

For older residents of The Villages like 60-year-old Chris Stanley, the influx of families is a breath of fresh air, but she worries about the growing lack of affordable housing and overcrowded schools. The school district has 13 schools for its 9,400 students. The highly rated Villages Charter School is limited primarily to the children of employees.

“We are here until we croak. We’re frogs,” Stanley joked. “We built this enormous infrastructure here and we need people to run it. If we don’t have young people here with children who are able to afford living here, and can pay for daycare and housing, we have a real problem here.”

The Wildwood-The Villages’ median age last year was 68, the nation’s oldest, but it has declined from 68.4 at the start of the decade because of the youth infusion. Meanwhile, the median age in the U.S. crept up this decade from 38.5 to 39.1.

Children still represent a small percentage of the county’s population — 7.2% of Sumter County’s population last year — compared to more than 21% for the entire U.S. But it’s growing, up from 6% a decade earlier.

The growth starkly contrasts what’s going on nationwide, as the number of U.S. children age 14 and under declined by 3.3% this decade. The largest U.S. metro areas — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — have lost a combined 614,000 children since 2020.

Sumter County Commissioner Andrew Bilardello has been around the area long enough to remember when it just had a single traffic light. Back then, in the 1980s, students graduating from high school either joined the military, went away to college or moved within the state to Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa for jobs.

Few young people stayed, Bilardello said, so he is happy to see the growth this decade in children and working-age people in a community with America’s oldest residents.

“We want to keep young people here,” Bilardello said. “That is our future.”

___

Republished with permission of the Associated Press.