THE VILLAGES, Fla. (AP) — As one of the world’s largest retirement communities, The Villages in Central Florida is known for its endless golf courses, the oldest median age in the United States and its traffic-stopping golf cart parades. supporting a Republican candidate during the campaign season.
What it is not known for is the children.
Yet the home of The Villages has become the fastest-growing children’s metro station in the United States this decade.
The number of children 14 and under has increased by 18.4% this decade in the Wildwood-The Villages metro area. The biggest reason is that the working-age population has grown by 19.1%, also making it the fastest-growing U.S. metro area for that age group this decade, according to population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau this summer.
“Someone has to provide services to this growing senior citizen population, and many of those workers are young adults with children who live in the county,” said Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the University of Florida’s Center for Economic and Business Research. in Gainesville.
Such workers include lawn care providers, plumbers, electricians, financial advisors, nurses, construction workers, real estate agents, roofers and physical therapists in a retirement community that has grown from a remote rural area to one of the fastest growing places in the region. in the United States since the 1990s.
The Wildwood-The Villages metro area had more than 151,500 residents last year, most of whom are senior citizens, compared to 130,000 residents in 2020.
Due to the population structure of the region, raising children is challenging.
Morgan Philion, 31, has to drive to a neighboring Central Florida county for obstetrician appointments or take her 2-year-old son to a pediatric dentist because there are no available appointments locally. When they want to visit the children’s museum, they drive 80 miles (128 kilometers) southwest on 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 to find something to do, and this is the only activity they offer the kids,” Philion said.
On weekdays, librarians, including Anita Stevenson, lead a dozen to two dozen preschoolers in reading songs, shooting bubbles from a handheld device and telling stories called “Betty Goes Bananas” and “Cock-a-Doodle Quack! Quack!”
“There are a lot of new families moving in,” said Stevenson, pointing to newly built apartment buildings along the street.
Eldresah St. Fleurant, 28, her husband and two young daughters were among the families who moved into the apartments next to the library when they struggled to find a home because many communities in the area were geared only to those 55 and older.
“It’s good and it’s bad,” St. Fleurant said of raising children in the area.
On the one hand, the explosive growth offers countless job opportunities and new stores, but the county also lacks family-friendly facilities, such as an urgent care center for children. The library’s “Storytime” is an exception.
“If you’re not going to do something like this, you’re not going to find young families cruising here,” he said.
Sarah Feeney’s 3-year-old son uses hearing aids. He said it was a “nightmare” to find an audiologist to see children in the Wildwood-The Villages area because all the medical services “are geared toward the older generation.” Now drive 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) down the Florida Turnpike to Orlando for these meetings. They also had difficulty finding a church that had a youth program.
Despite all this, the 40-year-old has enjoyed living in Wildwood since moving from St. Petersburg, Florida, less than a year ago.
“It’s less crowded. It’s less stressful and it’s more manageable,” said Feeney, who also has a 5-month-old son.
No one under the age of 19 may live in the villages, and at least one family member must be 55 or older. Because of the age restriction, the growth of young families has been outside the villages in some small villages, such as Wildwood and Oxford.
Recognizing the rise of youth, The Villages recently opened Middleton, a planned residential development next to a retirement community aimed at workers and their families.
For older residents of The Villages, like 60-year-old Chris Stanley, the family stream is a breath of fresh air, but he worries about a growing shortage of affordable housing and overcrowding in schools. The school district has 13 schools for 9,400 students. The highly rated Villages Charter School is restricted primarily to the children of employees.
“We’re here until we scream. We’re frogs,” Stanley joked. “We built this huge infrastructure here and we need people to run it. If we don’t have young kids here who can afford to live here and pay for daycare and housing, we have a real problem.”
Wildwood-The Villages had a median age of 68 last year, the oldest in the nation, but is down from 68.4 at the start of the decade due to an infusion of youth. At the same time, the median age in the US rose from 38.5 to 39.1 this decade.
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 U.S. as a whole. But it is increasing, from 6% a decade ago.
The growth is in stark contrast to what’s happening nationally, as the number of US children aged 14 and under fell 3.3 percent this decade. The largest US metro areas – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – have lost a combined 614,000 children since 2020.
Sumter County Commissioner Andrew Bilardello has been in the area long enough to remember when there was only one traffic light. Back then, in the 1980s, high school graduates either joined the military, went to college, or moved in-state to Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tampa for work.
Few young people stayed, Bilardello said, so he’s glad to see this decade’s growth in a community of children and working-age residents who have some of America’s oldest residents.
“We want to keep the young people here,” Bilardello said. “It’s our future.”
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