Sun City
Sun City and Del Webb
Del Webb’s path-breaking retirement community, Sun City (AZ), twenty miles outside of Phoenix opened in January 1, 1960. By no means the first retirement city in America, Sun City captured our attention and was the first major retirement community dedicated entirely to retirees. Residents could live out their lives apart from the non-elderly. By 1980 its population reached 40,500 (38,000 in 2010), and Webb had started yet another retirement city (Sun City West) next door.
As an example of private entrepreneurial and planned community city-building, Sun City was also a financial success (Findlay 160). At face value Sun City could be considered as an example of generational cohort mobility, and a new type of suburb built as a planned community by a private developer, which it most certainly was. For us it is also provides an early insight into the dynamics that would propel Bishop’s Big Sort.
Bishop believes the Big Sort started after 1965, gathering momentum after 1980 and taking off during the 1990’s (Bishop 129-30, 133). Bishop focuses on younger cohorts, so elderly/retirement-prone cohorts did not attract much attention from him. Sun City and Webb are never mentioned. Indeed, he saw older Americans clustering “in the least dynamic (economically and technologically, at least) cities …producing the fewest patents”. Bishops’ Big Sort had more to do with Richard Florida’s young generational creative classes than older has-beens playing shuffle ball and golf. This history employs a much more inclusive definition of the Big Sort.
Sun City and its developer were offshoots from Phoenix postwar development. Phoenix migrants tended to be younger than the national average, despite area recruitment programs which consistently targeted the retirement demographic. Elderly and near-elderly were usually less mobile before 1960 –about half the national rate of 15-16%. The elderly “aged in place” or stayed where they were. This meant nursing homes/continuing –care facilities, retirement subdivisions, but most simply stayed in their traditional home—prompting neighborhoods, filled with 65+ residents. In the Phoenix context, planned unit (residential family subdivisions) were commonplace.
One heretofore conventional Phoenix subdivision developer, Del Webb, a co-owner of the New York Yankees, more stumbled into Sun City as more an experiment. Webb had gotten his start building war production housing throughout the West. Indeed, Webb, an early member of the “Donald Trump did he really say that?” Club, when asked what his proudest achievement was cited his building of Japanese internment centers “which moved the Japs out of California. We did it in 90 days back in the war” (Findlay 177), As America aged in the postwar years (in 1950 8.1% were over 65 years of age—by 1980 that had climbed to 11.3%, over 25 million), a new dynamic grouping, relatively affluent, potentially mobile, and growing in number each year. Webb in the middle 1950’s incorporated a subsidiary (DEVCO) to put something together for “age-segregated housing”.
The initial notion was if the new venture was to succeed it had to be of sufficient scale and quality—meaning a commitment of resources and investment—that it captured the imagination of its market. It had to market a dream, a vision and the actual development had to demonstrate to the potential buyer that the dream was real—it existed and could be seen before the home was purchased. In Bishop’s Big Sort terminology, Webb was marketing not just a home-but a lifestyle and that lifestyle had to be in place alongside the home itself. “Sun City provided the elderly with an unprecedented degree of self-sufficiency and segregation by offering [potential purchasers] a complete, predictable and isolated landscape” (Findlay 173) thirteen miles outside of Phoenix. Thoroughly planned to preclude sprawl and speculation, Webb’s approach corresponded closely to that of J.C. Nichol’s 1920 model. One resident owner had to be older than 50 and no resident children under 20.
So before marketing, the golf courses were built, water and infrastructure put in place, commercial strips, recreation centers, motels, and shopping districts in construction—only then did he offer five different models available for purchase. On New Year’s Day, 1960 he opened his models for inspection and purchase. Thousands showed up, a two-mile traffic jam resulted. Two hundred and fifty homes were sold in the first three days, and another one hundred and fifty by the end of the month. By the end of the year, 1300 homes were sold and by the end of 1963 7,500 residents lived in 3,600 houses (Findlay 174).
DEVCO made it easy to buy its homes—and it used promotion, publicity that Findlay describes a relentless advertising campaign. For the first decade, DEVCO targeted working and lower middle class elderly. Homes were not especially expensive. More than anything the advertising campaign marketed Sun City as “a Way of Life”—a DEVCO marketing jingle urged the elderly to “Wake up and live in Sun City. For an active new way of life. Wake up and live in Sun City, Mr. Senior Citizen and Wife. Don’t let retirement get you down. Be happy in Sun City” (Findlay 177). Life at Sun City was the reward for a life of hard work; separate yourself from loneliness, congestion, air pollution, high taxes, “big city problems” and just enjoy yourselves with people like yourself. Sun City was “paradise on a budget”. Sun City attracted the young, healthy elderly, minorities were few and far between, but the white aged who bought loved it.
As the decade wore on, and additional Sun Cities were platted in California, and then adjacent to Sun City, Sun City’s growth tapered off. DEVCO itself didn’t sense where the market demographics and dynamics would take them and their age-segregated concept. Units actually sold tended to be bought by more affluent elderly than originally marketed. They wanted more house and services—if fewer units were going to be sold in the future, they ought to be more expensive and marketed to more affluent. So after 1966 through 1978 more models at different price ranges were offered, a more stylish community was presented for new neighborhoods, larger lots, circular streets, parks, underground wires, waterfalls and a private supper club on a lake. Sun City cohorts were wealthier with each passing year. Sun City’s 1968 population of 11,000, grew to 25,000 in 1972 and 44,000 by 1978—Arizona’s eighth largest city. Early buyers were from Arizona and California, but the upper Midwest soon took over; in 1989 one of five buyers was from Illinois—some thought of it as a Chicago suburb (Findlay 190-5). By 1978, Sun City was built out.
By that time, it was evident to developers across the nation that the unnoticed Big Sort included elderly and near-retirement cohorts. Phoenix in 1983 attracted nearly 100,000 winter “snowbirds”, second homes became popular in places like Vermont, Dutchess County, NY—and Florida, the myths and stereotypes speak for themselves. Places like “Dreamland Village”, Golden Hills, Leisure Village, and Carefree abounded in Arizona and California especially—all planned, age-segregated communities. Many a city subdivision also followed the Sun City model in miniature. Webb moved onto other concepts, and built them in cities from coast to coast—including age-segregated communities for young, single adults, and for young families (Findlay 195-213).
Bishop may have conceived the Big Sort as a generational movement of “creatives” mostly to selected large cities, but by 1980 developers across the nation were building planned communities and subdivisions for households of similar lifestyles and economics. American city-building had ventured into new territory, and economic developers had a new targeted population recruitment strategy to diversify the community, pay its bills—and grow. New suburban policy systems emerged, policy systems less concerned with job creation, than lifestyle and people-attraction, with an economic base based on personal services, retail, housing-centered services, and entertainment now sprinkled the metro landscape.
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SUN City
Ron W. Coan 