Why America’s oldest metro is the fastest growing place for young children
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As one of the world’s largest retirement communities, The Villages in central Florida is known for its longest-running, middle-aged golf courses in the United States and its golf cart parades that often support the Republican candidate during the campaign.
What is not known about it is the children.
Yet the area that is home to The Villages has become the fastest growing municipality for young children in the US over the past decade.
The number of children aged 14 and under has increased this decade by 18.4% in the Wildwood-The Villages municipality. A big reason is that the working-age population increased by 19.1%, making it the fastest-growing metro area in the US for that decade, according to demographics released this summer by the US Census Bureau.
“Someone has to provide services to that growing number of retirees and many of these workers will be young adults with children living in the region,” said Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida. in Gainesville.
Those workers include lawn care providers, plumbers, electricians, financial advisors, nurses, construction workers, real estate agents, roofers and physical therapists for a retirement community that has grown from a remote rural area to one of the fastest growing areas in the area. US since the 1990s.
The Wildwood-The Villages municipality had more than 151,500 residents last year, most of them retired, up from 130,000 residents in 2020.
Due to the population increase in the area, raising children has its challenges.
Morgan Philion, 31, has to drive to a neighborhood in central Florida for an obstetrician’s visit or take her two-year-old son to a pediatric dentist because there is no appointment available locally. If they want to visit a children’s museum, they travel 80 miles (128 kilometers) southwest along Interstate 75 to Tampa.
“Story time” at the local community library has become a resource for Philion and other young families in the Wildwood-The Villages metro area.
“It’s really hard to find things to do, and this is one job they give kids,” said Philion.
On weekdays, library staff including Anita Stevenson lead anywhere from a dozen to a dozen preschoolers through songs about reading, shooting bubbles on a hand-held device and telling stories with topics like “Shwi Nomtekhala Ubanana” and “Rooster Mark’s Tit!” It’s crazy!”
“There are a lot of new families moving in,” Stevenson said, pointing to the newly constructed buildings down the street.
Eldresah St. Fleurant, 28, her husband and two young daughters were among those families who moved into houses near the library after having difficulty finding a home, as many communities in the area were only aimed at people 55 and older.
“It’s good and bad,” said St. Fleurant about raising children in the area.
On the one hand, break-neck growth offers plenty of job opportunities and new store openings, but the region also lacks family-friendly facilities like an emergency childcare center. The library’s “Storytime” is different.
“If you don’t come to something like this, you won’t find young families roaming around here,” he said.
Sarah Feeney’s 3-year-old son wears hearing aids. He said it has been a “nightmare” to find an audiologist who sees children in the Wildwood-The Villages area since all medical services are “targeted at the older generation.” Now drive 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) along the Florida Turnpike to Orlando for those appointments. They also struggled to find a church with youth programs.
Despite all that, the 40-year-old has enjoyed living in Wildwood since less than a year ago from St. Petersburg, Florida.
“It’s not too crowded. It’s stress-free and manageable,” said Feeney, who also has a five-month-old son.
No one under the age of 19 can live in The Villages, and at least one family member must be 55 or older. Because of the age limit, the growth of young families has been in other small communities just outside The Villages, such as Wildwood and Oxford.
Recognizing the growing youth population, The Villages recently opened Middleton, a well-planned residential community adjacent to a retirement community aimed at workers and their families.
For older residents of The Villages like 60-year-old Chris Stanley, the influx of families is a breath of fresh air, but he worries about the growing lack of affordable housing and overcrowded schools. The school district has 13 schools for its 9,400 students. The high-quality Village Charter School is specifically designed for working class children.
“We are here until we stab. We are frogs,” Stanley joked. “We have built this huge infrastructure here and we need people to run it. If we don’t have young people here with children who can live here, who can pay for kindergarten and housing, we have a big problem here.”
Wildwood-The Villages’ median age last year was 68, the oldest in the nation, but it has dropped from 68.4 at the start of the decade due to the influx of young people. Meanwhile, the median age in the US rose this decade from 38.5 to 39.1.
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% in the rest of the U.S. But it’s growing, up from 6% a decade earlier.
The growth is very different across the country, as the number of US children aged 14 and under fell by 3.3% over the decade. The largest US metropolitan areas – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – lost a combined 614,000 children as of 2020.
Sumter County Commissioner Andrew Bilardello has been around the area long enough to remember when it had just one traffic light. Back then, in the 1980s, high school graduates joined the military, went to college or moved to Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa in search of jobs.
There are few young people left, Bilardello said, so he’s happy to see growth this decade in children and people still working in a community with America’s oldest citizens.
“We want to keep young people here,” said Bilardello. “That is our future.”
— Mike Schneider, The Associated Press
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