I just got done reading an eye-opening new book: Leisureville, by Andrew Blechman. This book rips the shiny veneer off of the age-segregated retirement cities of Florida and Arizona and shows them for what they are: corporate-run ghettos where fear-stricken old white people can escape from the horrible realities of modern society.

Mr. Blechman is very much like me–a thirtysomething professional raised in big city suburbia now raising his family in a small and semi-idyllic small town in New England. One day his childless and recently retired neighbors plunk a For Sale sign in front of their home and announce that they are relocating to The Villages, a 100,000 person age-restricted megalopolis carved out of Central Florida swampland. He hears his neighbors gush about the carefree, laid-back lifestyle behind the gates of The Villages, where the toughest life choice is “which golf course should we play today?” and immediately decides to write a book about the happy world of leisurely retirement.

There is, of course, a dark side to all the sunshine, one that smacks a bit too loudly of fascism. You see, buying into The Villages (you are of course, not just buying a home, you’re buying a lifestyle) requires submitting to the draconian and sometimes downright evil law of The Villages corporation and, more specifically its ruthless and reclusive boss, Gary Morse. The Villages operates its own Soviet-style media empire (TV, radio, newspaper) and goes to great lengths to both limit the exposure of its residents to bad news from outside the walls and to stifle free speech and political participation. The sad truth is that “Villagers” are essentially subjected to taxation without representation: they pay their association fees to the “central district,” a quasi-governmental board basically run by the management which offers very little meaningful representation.

Beyond its control within the gates, The Villages has gone to great lengths to use its money and politcal muscle to effectively gain control of the local county government, to the point that the county’s public schools are strangled by the fact that an age-segregated community filled with people who don’t want to pay school taxes now effectively holds its purse strings. In the case of Sun City, Arizona, The Villages’ older western cousin, Sun City seceded from the local school district by mutual accord, as the school district grew exasperated at having every necessary expense shot down by the miserly oldsters next door. While this may seem to be a good solution, it sets an awful precedent–now a whole class of retirees can effectively avoid paying for the educational needs of younger people simply by moving behind the protective walls of a retirement fortress.

Mr. Blechman pours out dozens of other vignettes about life in Leisureville. On the amusing side, he goes undercover in the 55+ singles’ scene (which has resulted in shockingly high STD rates), sits in on a bingo game, and investigates the insidious rumor that The Villages’ “wine club” is really a front for a swingers’ group. On the not so amusing side, he befriends a troubled transgendered person who cannot seem to fit into the conservative culture of The Villages, chats up local teenagers outside the gates who are constantly put down by Villagers, and attends an intentionally confusing seminar on local governance run by an employee of the Villages. My favorite moment is his visit to the one and only playground at The Villages, which is all but deserted. During this visit, he spots two sheriff’s deputies asleep in their cruiser in the parking lot and asks them about their jobs. They reply by telling him that it’s pretty easy dealing with the “frogs”–so called because “they come down here to croak.”

After the alternating humor and harshness, by the end of the read I found myself fuming at the idea that a whole generation of Americans was not only allowed to drop out of society to live out their days on the golf course, but was choosing to do so. Members of this segment of society apparently believe that they have served society for long enough, and now it is their right to stop contributing to the maintenance of an orderly society and to the funding of public education. More troubling, as Mr. Blechman points out, is that the lifetime of wisdom accumulated by these retirees will not be passed on to the youth in their communities–because there ARE no youth in their communities. When a society cuts off these links, it risks losing its sense of history and falling into chaos.

I find it quite ironic that most of the denizens of The Villages, Sun City and their ilk are self-professed conservatives. I ask: what is conservative about willfully cutting off links to your cultural past and leaving your children and grandchildren to fend for themselves? Myself, I would call that a radical and thoroughly frightening notion.

While I respect the right of those who have worked hard all their lives to retire in comfort, I simply do not understand why people believe that, after a certain age, they no longer need to participate in society. The same society that educated them, employed them, and allowed them to retire at a relatively young age needs them to stay involved so that future generations may follow in their footsteps. If a whole generation of soon-to-be-retirees feels that playing golf while not paying taxes is more important than the survival of our society, then I fear for the future.

There is some reason for hope, however. Market research is showing that, for all the stereotyping of the Baby Boomers as the “Me Generation,” Boomers are not likely to embrace the Sun City model. Instead, Boomers want to live near cities, near family, and near cultural outlets. Mr. Blechman reviews research that shows that even Boomers that prefer age-restricted developments are seeking out smaller developments located close to their current homes, rather than far flung Leisurevilles like The Villages.

If you are contemplating retirement of know anyone who is doing so, I urge you to read Leisureville. You will not find a better written, more entertaining or more insightful account of the myriad implications of the segregation of our society by age and income.

The stunning victory of Barack Obama in last night’s Iowa caucuses got me thinking: maybe America is finally ready to put the early Baby Boomer/Vietnam culture war behind us. Our national politics have been mired in these shopworn battles between, as one CNN pundit put it last night “those who love Jane Fonda and those who love John Wayne.” Looking at it this way, 1992 and 1996 was the triumph of Jane Fonda and 2000 was the revenge of John Wayne. To me, Hillary Clinton represents the last stand of the early Boomers, who are about to enter their golden years. No matter what she says or does, she is weighted down by the baggage of the culture wars of the past 30 years.

Technically speaking, Barack Obama is a Baby Boomer–he was born in 1961, and the Boom stretched to 1964. But he’s no Jane Fonda. Obama didn’t even get to college until 1979, long after the end of Vietnam, and he didn’t enter politics until the middle of the Clinton years. He comes from a different era–my era, and the era of the tens of thousands of young Iowans who went to their first caucuses ever last night to flex their political muscles for the first time.

Let’s look at this another way. All in the Family premiered in 1970, an astonishing 38 years ago. At the time, Archie Bunker was about 50. Being that Archie was an overweight, cigar smoking, beer drinking man who gets no discernable exercise, the odds are very strong that, if he were a real person, he would have died years ago (in fact, Carroll O’Connor, who portrayed him, did die years ago). “Meathead” Mike Stivic was 22 at the outset of the show–today he would be 60. And, yes, longtime Jane Fonda-ite Rob Reiner, the Meathead himself, is 60 years old…and has endorsed Hillary Clinton!

As America knows, Archie Bunker (a John Wayne guy if ever there was one) waxed nostalgic about the good old days of his youth in conservative, white, pre-WWII America. The show’s theme song “Those Were the Days” celebrated the virtues of Glenn Miller, Herbert Hoover, girls being girls and men being men, and, of course, the lack of a welfare state. Let’s imagine Archie’s ideological heir, circa 2008–a conservative, fiftyish culture warrior celebrating the virtues of his youth in a new version of Archie’s song…

Boy how Charlie Daniels played

Sunday mornings when we prayed

Guys like us, we had it made

Those were the days

And you knew who you were, Mac

White was white, and black was black

Mister, we could use a man like Ronald Reagan back

Didn’t know ’bout greenhouse gas

We were kickin’ commie ass

Gee, our old Trans Am went fast

Those were the dayyyyyyyyys!

It just doesn’t work, does it? Of course not, because Archie’s dead, and Meathead is out of step. America is on its way, mercifully, away from such black and white battles. And who better than a half black, half white politician to mark the changing of the guard? I know, there’s a long way to go in the primaries, but it’s not too early to herald Obama as a harbinger of a new era. He may not succeed at laying the ghost of Archie Bunker to rest in 2008, but at least the exorcism has begun.

Google the word “taxpayers.” Go ahead, I’ll wait until you do. Are you back? Good. Let’s talk about your search results.

“Taxpayers League of Minnesota: fights for lower taxes and limited government.”

“Taxpayers for Common Sense: a non-partisan budget watchdog.”

“The TaxPayers’ Alliance: Britain’s independent campaign for lower taxes.” (Yes, even the Brits are in on this act.)

And so on, and so forth.

I think I’ve made my point–the word “taxpayer” has become shorthand for “anti-tax crusader.” The taxpayer movement ought to be commended for taking a word that for all of civilized human history applied to all of us (death and taxes, anyone?) and making it apply only to them.

Anyone who is even remotely politically aware knows exactly what I mean. You can’t go to a public hearing, read the letters to the editor in any local paper or visit a local business group meeting without hearing some crank assert that “I’m a taxpayer,” therefore empowering him to rage on about the need for unregulated business activity or the need to slash government spending.

To challenge such a person has, thanks to the taxpayer movement, become tantamount to treason. The “taxpayer” is held up as a noble warrior, fighting evil bureaucrats for the right to, well…keep his own money. Here in Biddeford, some rich guy from away bought a choice piece of property near the beach and, to his horror, his property assessment kept going up (imagine that!) So, of course, he declared himself a “taxpayer,” sued the city for inconsistent assessment practices and actually won his case due to a procedural goof by the city assessor. This fine fellow just ran for city council and, while he lost, his candidacy drew many letters to the editor praising him for “standing up to City Hall.”

Folks, this man is not a hero. The taxpayer movement is driven by the desire to, as its oracle Grover Norquist puts it, “make government so small that you can drown it in the bathtub.” I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, but in the meantime, Mr. Cranky Guy saved two thousand clams last year.

While he’s saving his two grand, the city’s high school continues to fall into disrepair. A section of the ancient brick storm sewer that runs underneath Main Street crumbled during a recent storm, shutting off a vital traffic artery for two days. The foul odor of trash from the trash-to-energy plant continues to envelop downtown. The local university decided to build its new pharmaceutical school in Portland, instead of here. The last textile mill in town, a remnant of an industry that once employed 10,000 people here, just laid off its second shift, and is down to 200 workers.

All of these things add up to a city that is going to start losing its economic foothold unless it acts on these needs. Should the jobs start to go, the non-residential tax base will go with it. And then taxes will really start to go up, as the residential base left behind will have to maintain all of the infrastructure that’s already here.

I’ll say it. I’m a taxpayer. So are you. So is the cranky rich guy down by the beach. So is everybody. To be a taxpayer is not to be a liberal or a conservative, it is to be a citizen. Without the public purse, there is simply no democracy. And reflexively saying “no” to all taxation may be individually beneficial in the short run, but is unquestionably harmful in the end–to all of us.

I know that few people read this blog, but if you’ve stumbled upon it, I urge you to think long-term when it comes to taxes. When you run a business for nothing but the short-term gain of shareholders, you end up with Enron. Those who label themselves “taxpayers” and cast themselves as your saviors may truly believe that they are standing up for the little guy, but, really, they’re not helping anyone, not even themselves.

If you have attempted to fly between two small U.S. cities in the past several years you have undoubtedly suffered the consequences of our failing airline industry. I mostly fly out of Portland, Maine, meaning that nearly all of my flights are on regional jets or (gasp) turboprops. My typical trip is two short hops on such planes: from Portland to a major urban hub, then from that hub to another small airport (my recent destinations have included Charleston, WV, Greensboro, NC, Richmond, VA, and Buffalo, NY).

The urban hubs, usually LaGuardia, JFK, Philadelphia or Dulles, are busy places that have to chew up and spit out hundreds of flights a day, including many international jumbo jets. In this environment it is inevitable that flights on tiny planes bound for places like Portland get overbooked, delayed, diverted and, frequently, cancelled altogether.

A number of recent articles have documented the folly of relying on smaller planes moving through large hubs, as they naturally result in more flights to move the same number of people, thus taxing an already-overburdened system.

I have been victimized by this system all too often: in the past two years alone I have missed the last connecting flight of the night by less than 30 minutes on three separate occasions and been stuck overnight at airports. I also had to hitchhike home on my birthday from Manchester, New Hampshire, where I ended up after my flight to Portland was pushed back by four hours and I went standby to Manchester, only to find out that the price of a shuttle to take me 75 miles to my home would be $250.

There there’s the security screening at Portland, which is set up for failure. My typical business trip begins with a 6AM flight from Portland, which would be fine except that the security gates don’t open until 5AM so all early morning passengers have to be squeezed through the three security gates in less than an hour which, clearly, doesn’t work.

OK, I’m done complaining. I’ve got a solution, which is obvious from the title of this post: TRAINS.

I’ve heard there is a proposal to dump $20 billion in federal funding to improve airports in the Northeast U.S., mainly due to the glut of flights caused by the reliance on small planes. What if we took that $20 billion instead to create a viable passenger rail system, as the rest of the modern, industrialized world has consistently done? I don’t know the exact dollar amounts, but a $20 billion public investment could be leveraged for a whole slate of major improvements that would fundamentally change life for the better in this part of the world. In the big cities, train travel would instantly replace air travel as the best way to go. Upgrading tracks to run real high-speed rail in Northeast Corridor could cut the travel time between Boston and Washington to (think of it!) four hours. Right now, if you factor in getting to the airport, going through security, flying, landing, getting into the city, it takes at least five hours door to door on an airplane.

In the smaller cities, offering better, faster and more frequent service would take enormous pressure off of highways and airports. For example, the Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Boston currently takes 2 hours and 45 minutes, terminates at the wrong train station in Boston, and only runs 5 times a day. Under these conditions, most travelers going to or from Maine either fly out of Portland or drive to Logan Airport (only a two-hour drive, non rush-hour).

I won’t claim to be an expert on transportation planning, but I certainly know enough from my own personal experience to recognize that we’ve taken our current system of cars and planes about as far as it can go. It’s long past time to bring train travel back into the picture in a meaningful way.

Three summers ago the usually peaceful Maine summer raged with a debate over whether or not it was a good idea to allow the development of a resort casino. Pro and anti-gambling forces poured millions of dollars into our region (thanks for the economic impact!) to attempt to influence public opinion, almost invariably making personal appeals. The yes people touted 2,500 good jobs, lower taxes and, of course, Las Vegas style entertainment! Right here! In Sanford, Maine! The no people consisted of an odd far-left/far-right coalition. The former appealed to people’s gut feelings about Maine, using tried-and-true scare tactics to make the development seem like an ominous cloud of greed on our horizon. The latter, quite simply, fell back on the religiously-inspired argument that gambling is immoral (never minding that the Book of Esther celebrates the holiday of Purim, which derives its name from the casting of lots).

At this point in my career I was a staff planner for the regional planning commission serving the target area. We convened literally dozens of stakeholder meetings, public forums and high-level discussions on the issue, trying our damndest (sorry churchgoers, I mean darndest) to paint a reasonable and accurate picture of how this development would actually affect our region. I personally had the task of determining what effects the project would have on the area’s already-strained housing market. I concluded that we would need to come up with a truly coordinated and regional approach to providing the necessary housing to support the project. In other words, this major development on the horizon could actually accomplish the previously unthinkable: forcing a fragmented and often contentious region to pull together for a common purpose.

Ultimately the casino proposal crapped out after a statewide vote to legalize casino gambling failed by a fairly healthy margin. And, naturally, all of the talk about regional cooperation on planning, infrastructure development and housing went right out the door with the casino madness. Today, all of the region’s problems that existed before the casino mania arrived have only gotten worse and there appears to be no impetus for regional problem solving on the horizon. The infighting among municipalities has not stopped, in spite of the best efforts of state government to force regional cooperation on them.

Cue Mr. Burnham:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big. ” Daniel Burnham, late 19th Century architect/urbanist

I have come to believe that Americans are rapidly losing the ability to think big when it comes to solving our urban development problems. New ideas inevitably “cost too much,” “will raise taxes,” or “are too risky”; they are “politically dangerous,” “too radical,” or “un-American,”; they “hurt local control,” “take power away from the little guy,” or “reek of corporate welfare.” It seems that no big and wonderful idea out there can survive, lest it cost a dime, challenge the status quo or break up parochial political power.

Daniel Burnham died nearly 100 years ago. I worry that his vigorous vision and optimism will soon die with him. We planners need to stand up for the notion that complex problems warrant big ideas and that the politically-driven incrementalism that has plagued our profession for too long must be set aside.