Tomorrowville

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The real experts on what the retirement of the future will look like may be the people who build retirement communities. The builders of age-restricted communities have studied the demographers’ predictions and surveyed the market to try to develop communities that will appeal to boomer retirees. Del Webb, a subsidiary of Pulte Homes, is the nation’s largest builder of active adult communities, including the popular Sun City developments. In 2005, Del Webb conducted a survey of boomers; those findings will help guide the design of retirement communities of the future. And at least one of those futuristic age-restricted communities is in the Sacramento region.

IT'S DEL WEBB'S WORLD...

The Club in Roseville is part of the larger Pulte master-planned community called WestPark, which is designed as a multigenerational development that includes small “villages” of starter homes, move-up homes, executive mansions and the age-restricted community called The Club. Part of The Club’s appeal, says Donna O’Connell, Pulte’s VP of marketing for Sacramento and Reno, is that its residents can live in a community where people of all ages live. That’s consistent with research that says a large number of boomers want to retire near their families.

According to the Del Webb survey, about 50 percent of boomers will buy a new home in retirement, and half of those buyers want to be within three hours of family and friends. That explains why at least a quarter of the people who moved to Del Webb communities in the Sacramento region in recent years are from the Bay Area. Many of them have followed their children, who grew up in the Bay Area but settled in Sacramento where they could buy a less-expensive home.

Many of the residents of The Club and Del Webb’s new Elk Grove development called Glenbrooke hail from the very cities where the projects are built. Some 36 percent of the residents of The Club lived in Roseville and decided to stay in the community — in part because their kids are there. In Glenbrooke, 40 percent lived in Elk Grove and another 32 percent lived in the greater Sacramento area, making a whopping 72 percent composed of people who stayed in the Sacramento area but bought a new home.

“Most people used to choose to retire to a destination,” says O’Connell. “Now, a lot of people want to retire in place. They want to retire where services are available to them. Where they raised their families. Where they have their social network.”

O’Connell says the survey shows that Sacramento is a very appealing place for boomers to retire because it has the amenities they want: local universities and opportunities to volunteer in nonprofits and political groups, as well as concerts, ballets and other local activities.

“It’s not about retiring; it’s about the next phase of life,” O’Connell says the research has found. “They are looking to go back to school, do consulting work in their former professions, volunteer.”

The new boomer retirementality also has pushed Pulte to alter the design of the active communities. Boomers say they want a sense of community and neighborliness in the developments. So Pulte made the communities much smaller than previous age-restricted communities. The Sun City in Roseville that opened more than a decade ago has 6,000 homes. The Club and Glenbrooke have about 600 respectively.

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