ASK ME — I’m a resident!” So say the large-print buttons adorning the lapels of Sun City Georgetown’s
corps of graying greeters, known efficiently as the “Ask Me’s” — sorta like at
Wal-Mart, except these folks are clearly more ambulatory and sentient.
Organized, scheduled, and compensated, they fan out to battle stations
throughout the public reaches of this latest Del Webb site, ready to pass out
fresh-baked cookies, chat up visitors from throughout this mighty land — and
confirm all your preconceived notions of Sun City, however amazing or abhorrent
you may find America’s largest chain of “active adult communities.”
The Ask Me’s are exceptionally nice people, so nice that they’d likely be
embarrassed and flustered and reticent if I came at them in full journalist
drag with a tape recorder. So I went incognito, scoping out Sun City Georgetown
for my aging in-laws. Now, I do actually have aging in-laws who are
contemplating moving to Austin, though my mother in-law has her own
preconceived notions of Sun City — “Io piu tosto me cacciasse l’occhio ma
no abbitase la!” (“I’d rather poke my eye out than live there!”)
But the Ask Me’s are such nice people, and so sold on Del Webb, that I didn’t
share Mama’s sentiments with them, in either English or Italian. In retrospect,
my subterfuge was probably unwarranted — Sam Donaldson and Mike Wallace could
descend on Sun City Georgetown like the Valkyries, and the Ask Me’s would
calmly tout the benefits of the patented-and-trademarked Del Webb lifestyle,
reserved for “mature adults 55 and better.” (Though I did, by my ruse, avoid
being shunted off to Sun City’s retained local public-relations consultants,
who, to put it mildly, do not care for the Chronicle.)
To make sense of what’s going on here, on 5,300 acres of oak stands and cedar
brakes northwest of old Georgetown, ya gotta understand that Del Webb is no
ordinary builder/developer, any more than Wal-Mart is an average chain of
five-and-dimes, or Walt Disney World a typical roadside attraction. Central
Texas has plenty of master-planned subdivisions, with golf courses and water
features and streets named for dead governors, and except for its giantism —
9,300 homes in the master plan — Sun City Georgetown doesn’t seem all that
different from Lakeway or Barton Creek, or even Berry Creek up the road in
Williamson County.
Looking through the lens of the local real-estate market, Sun City doesn’t
seem all that impressive, and it ain’t no bargain. The lowest-end home — “The
Lavaca” — lists for $108,000, for a two-bedroom, 1,121-square-foot bungalow on
a 55 x 110 lot. That’s about what you’d pay for the same-sized house in Central
Austin, let alone a suburban subdivision, though cottages like this are pretty
rare in the ‘burbs. The high end, “The Rio Grande,” approaches 3,000 square
feet, though it still only has two bedrooms, and sits on a 100 x 110 lot, about
a quarter-acre. It lists for nearly $240,000 — for the same price, you can
build a bigger house on a full acre of land in the Fountainwood subdivision,
just across Williams Drive from Sun City Georgetown. In both of these cases,
the lots in question are bare, unfenced, and surrounded at close quarters on
three sides by other homes. A “premium” homesite — i.e., one with trees, a
slope, or unusual depth — costs significantly extra.
You do, of course, get access to the four planned golf courses, rec center,
crafts center, and other “village” amenities (not that you can’t find such
things in Georgetown already, celebrated Main Street Community that it is), but
you pay for them as well, with your mandatory $54-per-month-per-household
membership in the community association, titular owner of the Sun City common
areas, and with on-the-spot user fees. You even pay extra to store your golf
cart or RV, since keeping them at your house is frowned upon. (Camper parking
is actually forbidden by deed restriction.)
But the Ask Me’s, and the 400 or so current residents, and the 1,000 or so
more who have already bought in, and the scores of prospects circulating
through the Sales Pavillion and Model Park, are not comparing Sun City
Georgetown to the subdivisions that pepper Central Texas. More likely, they’re
comparing it to other Sun Cities, of which there are eight scattered throughout
the Sun Belt, and have long ago decided to cast their late-in-life lot with the
Del Webb legacy. What’s being sold — at the rate of three a day in Sun City
Georgetown — are not homes, or even pieces of a community. The Del Webb
Corporation is in the image business.
Delbert Eugene Webb himself has been dead for 22 years, but his legacy lives on. Sort of. The
development of the first Sun City was largely a footnote to a fairly impressive
career in large-scale building and hobnobbing. It’s doubtful that most of y’all
know, or remember, that Del Webb owned the New York Yankees throughout the
DiMaggio/Berra and Mantle/Maris eras, built the current Madison Square Garden,
and along with Howard Hughes was most directly responsible for the
transformation of Las Vegas from mobster snakepit to American cultural
crossroads. Since his death, his company has become one of America’s largest
homebuilders — and by far the largest builder/developer in the Southwest —
and is responsible for several ZIP codes worth of Southern California
suburbia.
All of that is marginal, at this point, to the Sun Cities, which, in case you
just returned from Mars, are wildly successful communities specifically
designed for old people, with beaucoup resort-style amenities and lots of
free-flowing camaraderie. They are like beached cruise ships with larger
bedrooms and golf courses — and, of course, extensive deed restrictions (don’t
you dare hang your laundry out to dry in full view of the street). When Webb
passed away, there were only two Sun Cities, both in Arizona; the latter-day
Sun City empire now stretches beyond the Grand Canyon State to Las Vegas, Palm
Springs, the Sierra Nevada foothills northeast of Sacramento, Hilton Head
Island in South Carolina, and now the Hill Country. Another massive
development, Sun City Grand — expected to be the size of Round Rock — is
sprouting outside Phoenix, near the inappropriately named town of Surprise.
So, truth be told, Del Webb the man had little to do with what the Sun Cities
have become today. Yet his personal legacy is carefully detailed by fairly
tasteful, but omnipresent, hagiography flowing through the capacious Sun City
PR pipeline. After reading the marketing copy and canned advertorials in the
Statesman, picking up your glossy brochure in the lobby of the Sales
Pavilion, and contemplating the large wall display therein, if you still
haven’t gotten the message, you can stand in the master bath of one of the 13
model homes at Sun City Georgetown, press a button, and through a speaker in
the wall hear a recorded testimonial to the virtues of the late Mr. Webb. None
of this post-mortem spin credits Del Webb with a great vision that changed the
way Americans aged, or even suggests that Sun-City-as-concept was his idea —
it merely reiterates that Webb was a stand-up guy, hooked on baseball, who over
a long career built a lot of shit and hung with the likes of Barry Goldwater,
and in the process became a legend. The Forrest Gump of modern American
industry.
So why bother? The company’s been public for years, none of Del Webb’s kin
hold visible positions of power, and even the most weathered prospects
wandering the Sun City Georgetown model park have little memory of Del Webb’s
time spent here in meatspace. From beyond the grave, though, Del Webb has
become a character trademark like Snap, Crackle & Pop, an element of a
wraparound marketing scheme that should be the envy of all businesspersons and
professional communicators. His personal myth lends resonance to all that
defines Sun City, and by extension to the folks who live there — pluck without
daring, enterprise without risk, variety without diversity, community without
kinship, and luxury without grandeur. The rent-a-cop cars at Sun City
Georgetown have the words “Safety and Security” emblazoned in
larger-than-necessary letters. You’re in good hands with Del Webb.
And my, what fun you’ll have, in the same way that eating at Luby’s is fun.
You have lots of choices without ever encountering anything truly unexpected;
someone else takes care of the hard work, and no one cares how much you waste.
What does it portend that the ultimate dream of millions of aging Americans is
to have a second childhood? “Friends and fun” is the Sun City mantra — in the
myriad scenes captured in the brochures and photo displays, everyone is
smiling, and no one is alone.
In the middle of the drought
of the century, in a part of Central Texas that’s water-poor in the best of
circumstances, the artificial creeks and fountains at Sun City Georgetown
burble on. The company offers 13 model homes from which to choose, far more
than what you’ll see from the average builder, yet what strikes you as you
transit through them is how little they differ from one another. Aside from the
smallest homes, explicitly marketed as second homes and as affordable options
for the very old and widowed, each house has the living/dining combination, the
artfully appointed little den, the wide-open kitchen with breakfast nook and
sectional sofa, the huge master bedroom with huge master bath and huge walk-in
closet, the little second bedroom, etc., and the utility room with adjoining
craft area where the missus can wield the hot-glue gun and the mister can
organize his tackle box.
The regularity obscures the fact that the houses more than double in size as
you progress, because you don’t get more different spaces, just more of the
same space. When you cruise the real live homes on their winding streets and
cul-de-sacs, they are exceedingly hard to tell apart, except by their exteriors
— stucco, brick or cultured stone, your choice, all beige. The entire Design
Center in the Sales Pavilion, comprising samples of all the different materials
and fixtures you can use to “personalize” your Sun City home, is about the size
of one of these master bedrooms; your local Home Depot uses the same amount of
floor space simply to display bathroom tile.
This makes it all the more disconcerting to hear one prospect, who currently
both lives and sells homes in Sun City Tuscon, tell one of the Ask Me’s with
conviction how different Sun City Georgetown is from his community, how unusual
it is to see such variety in a Sun City. It was hard to tell if this was
pleasing to him, but Del Webb is banking on it being pleasing to Texans, who
have historically paid scant heed to the siren song of the Sun Cities. The
pocket-sized lots here are actually bigger than the Del Webb norm, and a choice
of facades is unheard of. Sun City Georgetown is the only community in the
chain that hasn’t been completely terraformed; fairly large stands of oaks and
expanses of limestone rubble remain, though the place still must have sucked up
the complete local supply of sod and warm-weather groundcovers.
The Texanization seems to be working, at least based on the anecdotal evidence
of the Ask Me’s; most of those whom I encountered came from elsewhere in the
Lone Star State. Aside from some traits we can concede as givens from the
outset — they appear to be all white and Anglo, none has a visible disability,
and all are, well, extremely nice — there is a fair measure of variety to
their lot. Some are younger, newly retired or not-yet-retired couples who moved
in as soon as the kids were out of the house; others are older, mostly female,
recently widowed, and living in the smaller homes that come with community
association maintenance agreements for $100 per month atop the mortgage. Some
have parents still living, though not in Sun City; some have family in the
area, some have none. The age distribution seems to mirror that throughout the
Sun City chain, where the average age is 62, but the real population clusters
are above and below that median mark.
If the Ask Me’s ever thought of living anywhere but a Sun City, or of living
in any Sun City other than Georgetown once that became an option, it is not
conveyed in their conversations. The typical pattern is that Mr. and Mrs. Ask
Me decided long ago that they wanted to retire to a Del Webb community, visited
one of the older ones and were confirmed in this notion, and jumped on
Georgetown as soon as lots went up for sale last summer. (Indeed, the company
itself assumes that its current rapid sales rate is due to pent-up demand and
will soon slow down to more reasonable levels; full buildout to 9,300 homes
isn’t expected for 15 years.) They like their houses, and the fact that they’re
all the same automatically gives them something to share with their neighbors.
(“Are you in the Angelina or the Sabine on Whispering Wind as it enters
Neighborhood 3? Did you get the bay window?”)
They love Georgetown, its charm, its friendliness, and its antique stores,
which were already vultured by Del Webb simply to furnish the model homes with
suggestive lifestyling props (every closet in the models is stocked with
vintage suitcases, hatboxes, fishing waders, et al.) Georgetown, of course,
loves them back, since the local economic impact of Sun City is already being
measured in the billions of dollars. The governor of South Carolina called Sun
City Hilton Head’s residents “tourists that never leave.” Even the possible
drawbacks of Sun City’s eventual domination of Georgetown — such as reduced
enthusiasm for public expenditure and direct competition between Sun City-based
and town-based enterprises — seem small prices to pay for a huge expansion of
the tax base and a meager impact on budget outflow.
All this information came flowing freely in the course of conversation, so all
that was really left to ask the Ask Me’s was “So, what happens now?”
“I’m really happy that I moved in now,” one said, acknowledging that, at
present, with none of the amenities finished and houses going up around the
clock, the place more resembles Bergstrom Airport than a Hill Country paradise.
“Because now I’ll have the chance to make some good friends from the beginning.
Everyone is so friendly here, and helpful to each other. And that’s good,
because I’m all alone. He’s gone now.” It was unusual to hear any of the Ask
Me’s refer to “my (late) husband” — always just “he.”
“And my other family down here” — she was from Dallas, I believe — “was my
son, and he passed away with cancer a few years ago, right as we moved down
here. Here at Sun City, I won’t be alone, but I’m not living in a home or a
condo, either. I’m still on my own, have my own place, and I like it. It’s all
I need.” Even without the golf courses, the pottery wheels, the square dance
clubs and the vacation getaways, Sun City Georgetown has already delivered on
the most important promise it makes. You are not alone.
This article appears in August 2 • 1996 and August 2 • 1996 (Cover).