Given our graying population and rising sea levels Florida should be the role model for managing old people and coping with flooding backyards. We aren’t, though in fairness to Florida, neither is any other state.
Americans — outside of deep-thinking tank people — don’t talk about what the heck we are going to do with millions of old baby boomers arriving at the threshold of decrepitude with little more than a slimmed down Social Security check and an out-sized, erroneous belief that Medicare covers nursing homes.
Not that this should come as a surprise. Born between 1946 and 1964, 76.4 million baby boomers came of age believing they’d never get old, that trusting anyone over 30 was heresy and that because they were so special, there’d always be someone around to take care of them.
Boomers are the “me generation.” What’s good for one outweighs what’s good for the group, and if that means I get mine and you get nothing, well, too bad for you. It’s an rigid, righteous, reactionary attitude that’s fueling the anger in the 2016 election cycle, though that and sea level rise are stories for a different day.
Let’s stick with this old people theme for now. Florida knows old people. We’ve known old people since the 1930s when retiring in the Sunshine State became a “thing.” With the passage of the Homestead Exemption Act in 1934, followed shortly thereafter by Social Security checks in 1940, Florida ramped up tourist development and real estate developers paved over the Everglades.
Down came grannies and grandpops, shucking off the boots and coats of Midwestern winters and pulling their Lucy-and-Ricky-Ricardo Airstream trailers. A winter turned into a lifetime and Florida aged as rapidly as a Smithfield ham.
Florida is already considered the oldest statewith 15 percent of its population 65-plus. Only Maine, Pennsylvania and West Virginia come close. By 2025, 26 percent of Floridians will be 65 and older. The Villages, that stunning planned community of exotic golf carts and 24-7 entertainment for well-heeled boomers, is the fastest growing city in the state.
Seven in 10 boomers will need long-term care and 40 percent will need long-term nursing care. Neither Medicare nor private-pay medical insurance cover that so unless Florida boomers have bottomless bank accounts or kids with the will and the skills, there’s not much good news.
Actually, it’s worse than that. There is no good news. It’s all deplorably, horribly, depressingly bad news. We could start building old people barracks today and still not be able to house and care for the old boomers banging on the doors. Anyone who has tried to find a place for an elderly parent in the past five years knows how bleak things are.
Key West is a city of aging boomers. We are the backbone of the arts and culture communities, the volunteer and nonprofit boards, the places of worship. We pack the restaurants, marinas and fundraisers. And whether they were born here, arrived in the 1970s and stayed, or bought in a year ago, these boomers know one thing for sure: They are going to have to move “when the time comes.”
The health care, especially the kind that comes with assisted living and nursing homes and Alzheimer’s centers, does not exist in Key West. Public facilities are extremely limited; there are no private “retirement” centers; the closest big-city specialist care is in Miami, four hours away.
Unless one has the funds to pay for private home care or has a family-and-friends support network, there is only one choice for Key West’s old boomers: move.
Over the next decade or so that will change the face of Key West in ways we’ll be hard-pressed to recognize. That’s a lot of people, a lot of community and institutional memory and a lot of money that will leave the island, creating a void unlikely to be filled by Millennials or Xers, who can’t afford to buy in and for whom Key West is not a lifestyle choice.
It may not matter. About the time the last Key West boomer turns off the lights long about 2050, the island could be flooded almost to Solaris Hill. Sea level rise, remember?
Linda Grist Cunningham is editor and proprietor of KeyWestWatch Media, a digital solutions company for small businesses. And, yep, she’s got a plan for getting out of town “when it’s time.”
The barrier reef that surrounds Key West ensures placid water and very little sand.
Holden Beach, N.C.
I grew up a Sunday afternoon’s drive from the towering sand dunes of Holden Beach. We’d park the car — mom, dad and five siblings under 10 — check both ways, sprint across the soft, sun-hot, barely-two-lane asphalt beach road with its non-existent traffic, then hike miles up and over the dunes and across the sand to THE BEACH. With shells.
It wasn’t miles. I know that now. But, it was a long way. A long way up, down and across. No houses. No boardwalks. No nothing except the sand mountains, some sea grass, a fishing pier and a sparse handful of similar 1950s families. We’d paddle and dig and almost drown in the riptides. We’d argue and whine and then sleep in the car, piled together like a litter of sticky, sandy kittens.
So begins my six-decade ocean love affair.
It’s a shared love affair, of course. Millions of us plant our toes in the water and our butts in the sand (with apologies to Zac Brown for a bit of literary license) for vacations or forever. Like poet John Masefield, we “must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.”
We’ve built our houses on top of the dunes, paved over the wetlands and we’ve insisted on our amenities. One really must have a super store and a gourmet grocer close at hand. We did it because we loved being at the beach, and we’re close on killing it with our love.
I’m going to stroll on down my sandy memories, but as I do, I ask this of myself, of you: If we can’t — or won’t — find ways to protect our beaches from ourselves, to step back from the water’s very edge by refusing to rebuild what has destroyed the dunes, the natural barriers to hurricane wind and surges, there will be no beaches left for our butts, our toes, or our memories.
From Holden Beach to the annual teenage girl’s pilgrimage to Atlantic Mecca — Myrtle Beach. Rebels and Redcoats playing slow dance music at the pavilion. Baby oil and iodine. Peggy burned so badly she had blisters along the waistline of her (1960s discreet) bikini. Lots of boys, especially the scary kind one’s parents frowned upon. My 15-year-old self wrote my parents that I thought perhaps I’d go back to Augusta, GA, with one of those boys rather than come home. To their credit, they barely flinched. I went home.
The Jersey Shore. Pizza. Or tomato pie, if you prefer. Taffy. Fudge and giant ice cream cones. Boardwalks. Houses right up to the edge of the water. Miniature golf and cotton candy. And, gaad, that awful sewage smell, a stew of hypodermic needles and medical waste, beer cans, milk cartons and feminine hygiene products washed up on the sand, rotting and stinking and closing the beaches lest one die of some dread, 16th century plague caused by dumping 20th century garbage just off-shore.
Still, we were down the Shore. Asbury Park and Belmar to Cape May with weeks in Seaside (the Park, not the Heights; can’t forget to say that). Summers were always down the Shore, even when the beach was a dump. One just cleaned up around one’s towel and smacked little toddler hands if they reached for a, well, “balloon.”
OBX. You’ll find the letters on the back of my car. The Outer Banks of North Carolina. Six of us 20-somethings pile into one car after deadline at the Roanoke (VA) Times. Ride through the night to be first in line Saturday morning at the campground with a stop for Wonder bread, baloney, mayonnaise, Hostess Twinkies and Dr. Pepper. Forty eight hours on the beach, pile back in the car barely in time for work on Monday morning.
OBX. This time a decade of family reunions. A nine-bedroom monster of a house oceanfront rented the third week of every September. We watch first our children, then our grandchildren discover Jockey Hollow and the Wright Museum (almost broke an ankle there on my honeymoon) and hurricane-driven waves that towered over the sand and ate it away. Today, the government “replenishes” the sand and makes miniature dunes. Nature can’t do that anymore.
And, there were the occasional side trips to Nantucket, Sanibel, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the isolated end of Long Island and the rocky, not-really-a-beach shores of Maine.
Today, I live on an island at the farthest tip of the United States. Closer to Havana than Miami. An island with not much in the way of beaches, completely surrounded as it is with a barrier reef of coral. It, too, is dying. Sun screen, cars, sewage and snorkelers, you know.
Climate change and rising sea levels likely won’t much affect me. But, if I want my grandson, Connor, to share this ocean love affair with his someday-granddaughter, I cannot forget it took less than 60 years to turn the Atlantic shores from soaring sand dunes to parking lots for beach side cities — and me.
It’s a comparison helpful in explaining why Key West isn’t Florida. The cheek-by-jowl closeness of houses whose neighbors share their breakfast flavors and domestic squabbles – and hear their toilets flush at bedtime.
The dissonance of a dozen different languages and a hundred regional accents competing down Duval Street from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. The theater and the art galleries, the music, five-star restaurants and corner coffee shops, the ethnic neighborhoods, festivals and parades.
Breathtaking wealth juxtaposed against crushing poverty. Jaw dropping real estate prices where 600-square-feet and no outdoor space top half a million – plus condo fees.
It’s the idea, as one long-time Key West resident puts it, that the man with whom you’re discussing the relative value of apples at Fausto’s, the local boutique grocer, might well have had dinner with the Queen of England the day before.
At 22.7 square miles, much of it covered with concrete and asphalt, Manhattan long ago forgot it was an island. Not so much Key West.
Key West looks out its 4.2-square-miles of collective windows each morning across open water closer to Cuba than Miami. Key West knows it’s one hurricane, one storm tidal surge, away from trading its multi-million dollar economy for a spit of sand and a handful of palm trees.
Climate change and sea level rise are dinner table conversations in Key West.
There are the oh-so-awares who might happily nail up the NIMBY signs just below the Seven Mile Bridge, or maybe closer in at Stock Island. No trespassers beyond this point.
There is the economic development crowd for whom finding a viable balance between preserving the environment and boosting the economy ends them all too often in a no-win controversy, painted (sometimes fairly; sometimes not) as putting cash before conservation.
There are those who work the tourist trade, who fish and dive, clean the parks and renovate the houses. All know climate change and sea level rise will alter how their grandchildren live on this island.
Key West disagrees, often heatedly, about solutions. The unarguable effects are so far in the future, there’s no shortage of “don’t worry; be happy.” But, everyone knows that someday a hospital, a school, the favorite tourist haunts will be awash.
Hurricane Sandy reminded Manhattan the last week of October that it, too, is an island, subject to the vagaries of salt water, tides and wind that Key West takes in stride.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wasted no time as he made clear that climate change and sea level rise were instrumental in driving the violence of the storm that paralyzed his city.
Hurricane Sandy afforded Bloomberg a bully pulpit to re-up on the 197-page, 2011 update to his original 2007 PlaNYC 2030 comprehensive, quality of life project.
“Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be — given this week’s devastation — should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Key West. Manhattan without the skyscrapers. Both facing the same challenges of climate change and sea level rise – and both prepared to find solutions.
Boomers are the “me generation.” What’s good for one outweighs what’s good for the group, and if that means I get mine and you get nothing, well, too bad for you. It’s an rigid, righteous, reactionary attitude that’s fueling the anger in the 2016 election cycle, though that and sea level rise are stories for a different day.