Ruth and I purchased our first home in The Villages in 2004. Since then, we’ve owned four. Each was larger than the previous and in a new Village. In the process we’ve determined a 2,000 square foot home serves us best. I control about a hundred square feet including a recliner in the living room, a chair at the dining room table, and my four by two-foot desk and office chair. Ruth manages the rest.
If you’ve never been, The Villages is a collection of what we call subdivisions in suburban Michigan. Each has a unique name. The collection of the “subdivisions” is known as The Villages. The current population is around 136,000, most living in single family homes with a couple of senior citizens residing within each. There are a few apartments style options, but these are a relatively new development. It covers about thirty-two square miles with 70,000 homes working toward doubling itself. The developer already owns the expansion land. When it’s completed, it will be the fourth largest city in Florida.
In addition to the homes, The Villages boasts of over fifty golf courses with over seven hundred holes, in excess of ninety public pools, dozens of recreation centers, three town squares with live music each night, and over 3,000 various clubs. It’s housed in an area large enough to have three separate zip codes. All are accessible by the more than seventy thousand golf carts owned by villagers who navigate more than one hundred miles of golf cart paths. You can bank, shop, visit your doctor or dentist, access restaurants, go to the movies, view live theater, visit various bars and honkey-tonks, and even go to the hospital on your cart.
The Villages bills itself as “Florida’s friendliest hometown.” It was founded in the 1960s when a Michigan businessman, Harold Swartz, began selling tracts of land via mail order. When he died in 2003 at age 93, The Villages had a population of thirty-six thousand. Prior to his death, Harold recruited his son, Gary Morris, to join him in the expansion project. Since that day it’s been full speed a head with no end in site.
The Villages’ three town squares are known as Spanish Springs, Sumpter Landing, and Brownwood. Spanish Springs has Spanish influenced architecture and Villages and streets with Spanish names: Alhambra, El Cortez, Hacienda, Mira Mesa, and La Zamora.
Sumpter Landings’ main building was influenced by the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island. The lakeside vibe of the town has been influenced by Gary Morris’s Michigan ties. The development of Brownwood ties more deeply. Gary once managed the Brownwood Acres development near Michigan’s Central Lake. He brought the name, and several other Michigan names, to the Brownwood area: Grand Traverse, Acme, Charlevoix, Leland, Petosky, Kewadin, and Torch Lake.
Ruth and I live in the Village of Pine Hills. Pine Hills and our neighbor, The Village of Pine Ridge, lie on the land formally known as the Pine Ridge Dairy. All of the streets in Pine Hills are named after real-estate agents working in The Villages: Peterson, Kauska, Pope, Milhorn, Coleman, and, yes, Fink. The history of tying names to people and places near and dear to the Morris family got me thinking about the current expansion that’s taking The Villages to the outskirts of the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, a federal prison for male offenders near Coleman, Florida. I had a thought.
TBC