How Florida Got So Weird | Wendover Productions

This is not a town. It may look like a town, it may act like a town, but it is not one. This is The Villages—a massive, sprawling, privately-owned, privately-operated retirement community in Florida that easily ranks as the world's largest.

Driving from one corner to another would take some half-hour, and in that time one would pass the suburban-style homes of over 130,000 people—all of whom, with rare exception, born before 1967. Despite the entirely manufactured nature of the area, the 2020 census revealed that it

was the fastest-growing metro area in the US over the preceding decade, as it somehow managed to manicure some sort of charm for some sort of person. The village is centered by a town, or call it a grandiose strip mall, known as Lake Sumter Landing.

Although it sits about as inland as one can get in the Sunshine States, it's themed after a quaint seaside town, and even has plaques plaster throughout, conveying the history of the buildings—each entirely fictional, written to bolster the collective, Disney World-esque suspension of disbelief that starts the second one loses sight of

the sprawling parking lots that surround. But once in the square, fanciful, incongruous buildings house a plethora of chain restaurants—Johnny Rockets, Starbucks, Panera Bread, Hagen-Dazs—flanking around the central square where each night, five till nine, 365 days a year, some form of live entertainment takes place.

Beyond the bounds of Lake Sumter Landing and its parking lots, 71,000 suburban-style homes are punctuated by 53 golf courses and over 100 recreation centers boasting pools, pickleball courts, gyms, and other facilities that host a deluge of daily clubs and activities. The Bone Builders Exercise Class, the Women's Parkinson's Caregiver Support Group, the

Villages Lightsaber Club, the Long Island Couples Club, the Northwest Ohio Club, the Cleveland and Northeast Ohio Club, the Texas Social Club, the options stack up and up. And these state-related clubs paint a fairly consistent picture of the places that Village's residents come from. Overwhelmingly, these are middle-class Americans from middle America,

looking to upgrade their quality of life with warm weather, low cost of living, and a lack of state income tax. Despite having no restrictions on who can move in aside from an age minimum of 55, the Villages undoubtedly attracts a particular type of person. 68.8% of its residents voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 2020, and according to the same year's census, 98% of

residents are white. But that's just the Villages. Three and a half hours to the south, Cape Coral perhaps serves as a Villages for a younger generation. It, too, is predominantly white, predominantly conservative, predominantly midwestern, but more mixed in age. In place of the core superlative status as the world's largest retirement community, Cape Coral postures as the

city with the world's largest system of navigable canals. Over 400 miles or 650 kilometers worth, each painstakingly dredged to grant nearly every lot that valuable waterfront status and, through a zigzagging path, boat access to the ocean. But it was not as ingenious a plan as it first may seem. In fact, little planning at all went into the development of Cape Coral.

The story is more of its developers making an overzealous land purchase than figuring it out as they went along. Selling lots to primarily distant buyers, they didn't really need to focus on the details.

Few services or amenities existed at the start, and still today, these are few and far between. Certain areas are a full 15-minute drive away from their nearest supermarket. With few businesses to generate sales tax revenue, the local government's commercial tax base is abnormally low, and with a predominantly conservative, anti-tax voter base, the city

has often struggled to find the funding for critical infrastructure projects. Water, both too much and too little of it, has long been the peninsula's most persistent problem. In the early days, there was essentially zero plan for how to get freshwater to residents.

Developers just told buyers they could just build a well on their lot to tap into the groundwater below, but there wasn't enough of it, and there was even less after the development of the area disrupted the aquifer's natural recharge process. Eventually the burgeoning local government recognized the issue and started building

a central supply system, but it too was relying on the same inadequate underground aquifer, digging deeper and deeper as the water table dropped further and further. Eventually the city invested in a reverse osmosis plant to turn increasingly marginal groundwater potable and a reclamation system to stretch that supply further, but continued

underinvestment has meant that, despite being located in one of the rainiest regions of America, Cape Coral regularly encounters water shortages that spur legally enforced watering restrictions, and quality issues that have pushed water-safe to drink up to one of the top Google autocomplete suggestions when one types is Cape Coral. But still, growth prevails. Where else can

you get a sunny, waterfront lot with an ocean-access dock for less than $50,000? But there's still an entirely different class of transplant beyond the retirees and the middle-class Midwesterners. Exactly opposite Cape Coral, three hours away on the Atlantic coast, sits Palm Beach—a natural, 18-mile, 29-kilometer-long barrier island physically separated from the mainland

but connected to it by four short bridges. The island is centered around the massive, storied Breakers Resort, and narrows and narrows until it reaches just one mega-mansion in width. Those homes sell for inconceivable amounts—$47 million, $110 million, $46 million, $43 million—but

their owners likely only spend just six months and one day in them to attain coveted Florida resident status and the lack of state income tax it conveys. Palm Beach, as a phenomenon, essentially exists only between Thanksgiving and Easter, which