Why Everyone Is Moving to The Villages, Florida

In 1959, pastureland in central Florida sold for $150 an acre. Today that same ground holds The Villages — the largest retirement community in the United States, home to more than 150,000 people, generating $5.5 billion in annual GDP. This is the story of how a Chicago ad man named Harold Schwartz and his son Gary Morse turned a failing mobile home park into a privately owned city spanning three counties, with 54 golf courses, 85,000 golf carts, and a fabricated small-town history installed on brass plaques across three purpose-built town squares. It is a story about mail-order land sales and federal law, about tax-exempt bonds and community development districts, about a napkin sketch that became Spanish Springs Town Square, and about a family that kept ownership of nearly everything — the newspaper, the bank, the hospital, the insurance company, the restaurants, the commercial real estate — while the residents themselves financed the roads and bridges through their property tax bills. It is also a story about why four hundred Americans a month sell their homes in the Midwest and move to a place where the history is invented, the democracy is nominal, and the ice cream shop has a plaque honoring a fisherman who never lived. Sources Amanda M. Brian, "The Faux History of The Villages, Florida," Southern Cultures, Vol. 20, Issue 4, Winter 2014 Aimee Picchi, "Florida's The Villages was the fastest-growing US metro area from 2010–2020, Census says," CNN, August 12, 2021 Michael Van Sickler, "Gary Morse, the Villages developer and GOP mega donor, dies at age 77," Tampa Bay Times, October 30, 2014 Andrew Blechman, Inside the Bubble: The Villages — An American Utopia (insidethebubble.net), ongoing research since 2008 "IRS Ends Eight-Year Audit of Florida's Villages Without Penalty," Bloomberg, August 10, 2016 Zachary Crockett, "How one Florida retirement home became ground zero for self-driving cars," The Hustle, October 2024