OVER NEW YEAR’S DAY weekend 1960, more than 100,000 people drove from across Arizona and Southern California to a remote intersection twelve miles northwest of Phoenix, a site that had been cotton fields just a year earlier. The advertisements that had lured them there promised a new housing development offering “country-club living,” priced with “unbelievable modesty.” Now, a stone sign with cheerful atomic lettering welcomed them to Sun City.
Golf greens extended toward the desert horizon, surrounded by graded lots waiting for homes to be built atop them. A Safeway that appeared plunked in the middle of nowhere was open for business. In the recreation center, hired actors did arts and crafts and swam in the pool, showcasing the “Way-of-Life” visitors could purchase along with the five model homes on offer, each customizable with a selection of fifteen different exterior surfaces. There was the Kentworth, a compact, rectangular two-bed, one-bath; the Bridgeford, with an expanded living and dining room; the Brookside, with a “king-size lanai”; the Coronado, with an additional bathroom; and the largest, the three-bed, two-bath Pickford. Hundreds of $500 down payments were on the books before the weekend was over, far exceeding the developer’s expectations.
Sun City, current population forty thousand, is a twelve-thousand-acre planned development in the northwestern suburbs of Phoenix, largely responsible for popularizing the concept of the “55+,” or “active adult” community. (Including the adjacent Sun City West and Sun City Grand subdivisions, which were constructed later, the tract spans 27,000 contiguous acres, an area larger than the nearby city of Tempe, and has 79,000 residents—the population of Napa, California, or New Rochelle, New York.) It was built by the Del Webb Corporation, which had used government contracts during the New Deal and World War II to become the largest contractor in the Southwest. After the war, when builders were transitioning from military installations to housing, Webb created an offshoot corporation, DEVCO, that would serve only the retired, taking advantage of then-new pensions and Social Security accounts while promising to improve quality of life for the elderly.
Sun City model home. Min Heo
Entering Sun City today feels like driving onto the set of a period piece. After you turn behind a suburban shopping plaza onto Oakmont Drive, the parade of small homes begins. They are ranch houses with wooden trim and shutters that give them a traditional and slightly cutesy appearance. The hard Arizona sun makes the pastel façades appear even more washed out than they are. The yards, many of them gravel or Astroturf, have few personal touches like pinwheels or wind chimes. “The streets and sidewalks are so clean that they look scrubbed,” wrote Frances FitzGerald in Cities on a Hill, her 1986 study of intentional communities.
On Oakmont Drive, the original Kentworth model home has been converted into a museum. Two three-wheel golf carts adorn the carport. The house is powder pink, with undulating white trim like cake frosting. Inside, its original carpet has been preserved—cream-colored squiggles on a matte gray background. The bathroom and kitchen are also intact, with pink ceramic fixtures and tile countertops. The home’s masonry exterior walls are topped by a simple gable roof whose trusses span the entirety of the small rectangular home, meaning that none of the interior walls are load bearing, my guide, Alan, explained.
After touring the model house museum, I drove through the rest of the development, eager to see what life there was really like. On a ninety-eight-degree summer day, no one was outside, though plenty of cars were coming and going. FitzGerald described the Sun City plat as resembling “a child’s board game”—Snakes and Ladders or Uncle Wiggily.” In the first section, built from 1960 to 1964, the streets are named for sites of golf championships—Augusta, Pebble Beach, Cherry Hills—and multiple nine-hole courses wind through the community. Aside from the palm-lined boulevard medians, these are the only green spaces in the unincorporated community. At the New Year’s grand opening, golf was one of the main draws for buyers. Previously, golf-centered developments had been the exclusive province of the wealthy; here, they were for the middle class. For a premium, homebuyers could have fairway-facing yards.
More than the homes themselves, it was “country club living” at middle-class prices that the Webb corporation promoted in its national advertising campaigns.
After Sun City’s impressive debut, sales dropped off. DEVCO discovered that buyers wanted more luxe accommodations than the simple model homes it had initially offered. So the company began experimenting. When you drive through town, their efforts to anticipate market forces are evident: Cluster by cluster, the homes change—ranchettes for horse lovers, condominiums for snowbirds—while retaining the overarching, unmistakable homogeneity of mass construction with dimensional lumber.
The main trend was toward bigger houses. Both then and now, Alan told me, “what retirees want is the same: between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred square feet.” It wasn’t long before DEVCO abandoned the affordability premise entirely and embraced the “Mediterranean” trappings of master-planned Southern California cities like Irvine and Mission Viejo. The taupe and gold stucco homes featured columns, arches, decorative tile, and ornamental ironwork; air-conditioning became standard, along with double carports and higher ceilings. Whereas in 1960 optional add-ons were limited to AC and a larger carport, by the end of the decade buyers could select more closets as well as a beamed ceiling, tile roof, breakfast bar, and other luxuries.
During those years, Sun City also inaugurated its signature circular subdivisions. Instantly recognizable from the air and resembling suburban crop circles, each of the development’s four “pinwheels” consists of four to six concentric ring streets enclosed by—what else?—a golf course. Multiple theories exist regarding the circles, which cause confusion even for residents. Some say they were intended to make the new town feel more intimate and foster a sense of community; others that they were a measure to deter crime by disorienting thieves. Alan offered a more business-minded explanation: Compared to the snaking courses of early Sun City, the design maximized the number of golf green–backing homes that Webb could sell.
Not everyone wanted to live in little boxes on a golf course. Those who did have consistently been white and conservative.
As I drove on, the homes flicked by like the minute progressions of a flipbook or like the rows of tiny teeth of a shark’s mouth. I thought of a line from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): “[Summer] cottages and summer people—forgive me, but it’s so vulgar,” scoffs the land-rich, cash-poor Lyubov Ranevskaya at the idea of subdividing her estate into villas for the middle-class. The American variation of this sentiment might be the lyric “little boxes made of ticky-tacky / little boxes all the same,” made famous by Pete Seeger, about the postwar housing boom in the San Francisco Bay Area.
PERHAPS NO OTHER AMERICAN CITY is so reviled as Phoenix, which many people from wetter, less scorching climates confidently declaim “shouldn’t exist.” It’s the juxtaposition of the “vulgarity” of middle-class mass consumption with the extreme heat and dryness of the desert climate that makes onlookers’ heads spin. And yet Phoenix emphatically does exist—and Sun City is one of its major exports. In 1988, the federal government created a special overlay exempting age-restricted communities from antidiscrimination housing laws. Today, over two thousand such communities exist across the United States.
Sun City changed the American urban environment in more subtle ways, too. DEVCO helped popularize the “common-interest community,” a legal designation that allows developments to limit the use of amenities like golf courses and recreation centers to residents; it also helped foster the adoption of a “planned area development” provision in local zoning codes. Such ordinances grant developers of large sites creative control over their layout and land use to create, in the words of Maricopa County’s current code, “an attractive and harmonious unit of the community through creative site design.” As these planned-community ordinances became increasingly common, Sun City’s influence spread to the fringes of cities across the country, inspiring suburban utopias like The Woodlands, a conurbation of leafy hamlets operated by Howard Hughes Holdings on the northern outskirts of Houston, and the Disney-imagineered town of Celebration, lying less than ten miles from Orlando, Florida.
Indeed, in the 1992 book Magic Lands, historian John Findlay places Sun City within an urban tradition inspired by Disneyland: special districts “set off from [their] surroundings, […] peopled by a more or less homogeneous crowd” and endowed with thematic flourishes—in Sun City’s case, a new and improved retirement lifestyle—that “both gave them greater spatial coherence and invested them with distinctly western meanings.” With its combination of commercial construction, master planning, and privatized recreation, argues Findlay, Sun City ended up providing a blueprint not only for numerous active adult communities of the future, but also for many other residential developments across the United States. It’s a compelling theory—and one that, once you start applying it to the contemporary American panorama, you can’t unsee.
Something many accounts of Sun City miss, however, is that it wasn’t Del Webb’s first planned community. In addition to a large housing subdivision, he had already built two master-planned cities of a very different sort. During World War II, Webb constructed the Colorado River Relocation Center at Poston, Arizona: the largest of the Japanese internment camps. Meanwhile, the war’s Strategic Minerals Act encouraged the development of new domestic copper mines, including the Magma Copper Company’s San Manuel mine, northeast of Tucson; Webb designed the layout and built the homes of its company town, San Manuel. The recreation-centered retiree community of Sun City has more in common with these places than meets the eye: It combines the idle time of captivity and the federal subsidization (now in the form of Social Security) of Poston with the paternalistic social engineering of the company town.
BORN IN FRESNO, California, Webb worked as a carpenter while training to go pro as a baseball player. In 1927, however, a bout of typhoid put him in the hospital for months and left him with a damaged throwing arm, putting an end to his athletic ambitions. He moved to Phoenix to recover—on a tip that the city was ripe for a building boom.
In Arizona, Webb took a job hanging doors at the Westward Ho, a downtown hotel at whose Kiva Club the city’s elite businessmen gathered for drinks after work. He soon struck out on his own, learning to win federal building contracts and taking advantage of the ample New Deal funds flowing into Phoenix at the time. In May 1940, his fortunes turned even better. President Roosevelt announced that most war production would take place in the country’s vast interior—a strategy of dispersal to ensure that no single bomb or blockade could ruin the war effort. Phoenix’s Chamber of Commerce had already been making changes to its tax, oversight, and labor regulations to help attract the high-tech industries (aerospace, electronics) that defense development would require.
Arizona businessmen made trips to meet with the war production planning agencies in Washington, lobbying successfully for airfields and flight schools. Webb convinced the powers that were to grant him the contracts for Fort Huachuca, Luke Field (now Luke Air Force Base), the military airport in Mesa, and all of the other military installations in Arizona but one, Tucson’s Davis-Monthan. “Construction,” he reportedly quipped, “is no longer a private enterprise but rather a subsidiary of the federal government.” (Rumor has it that Webb, who ended up co-owning the New York Yankees for close to two decades, closed many of his deals on the fourteen golf clubs of which he was a member.)
In the communities Webb built, nearly identical plans have produced divergent worlds.
In April 1942, the federal government sent its contractors on a new mission. At a conference in Salt Lake City, plans were announced to “evacuate” the Japanese-born and -descended residents of the Western United States to detention centers called internment camps. In twenty-eight days the Army Corps of Engineers built temporary shelters for more than 100,000 detainees, mainly at California racetracks and fairgrounds, where they would wait for construction companies like Webb’s to build more permanent facilities farther inland.
The Colorado River Relocation Center, more commonly known as Poston, was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, with the reluctant consent of its tribal council. Engineered by Webb with a capacity of twenty thousand internees, the camp’s physical footprint was the largest of any—though the overcrowded Tule Lake eventually surpassed it in terms of population. And though its name evoked the rugged beauty of the Grand Canyon, it was located three miles from the Colorado River in one of the hottest, driest, and flattest stretches of the United States, if not the world.
Like the future Sun City, Poston was planned in three sections. Unit 1 was laid out in an isosceles trapezoid between an irrigation canal and a highway; its dormitories were clustered in blocks of four, their arrangement gridded without forming a complete square. It had a recreation area, a mess hall, latrines, and a laundry room—though washing machines had yet to be installed when the detainees arrived. Units 2 and 3, which had similar layouts three and six miles to the south, were still under construction at that time. (Poston inmates nicknamed the three sections “Dustin,” “Roasten,” and “Toasten.”)
A major task for the camps was ensuring that the thousands of residents who had been suddenly displaced and isolated from their normal routines were kept occupied. Administrators intended to do this through work crews. Part of the government’s rationale for the camp’s location was to take advantage of the prisoners’ labor to improve a section of the reservation. The nearby Parker Dam had recently been completed, and the government wanted experienced Japanese farmers to prepare the land for intensive agriculture, digging canals and cultivating guayule plants for rubber.
For those who weren’t working long days in the desert—and even those who were, on evenings and days off—incarceration replaced the routines of ordinary life with hours of captive idle time. Concerned with keeping peace with and among its inmates, the government assigned an activities director to oversee recreational and educational programming and a committee of social scientists to “view and advise on the adaptive problems of the internees,” in the words of historian Paul Bailey. The bureaucrats’ attempt to manage how people filled their time proved a failure, however, when a revolt and strike broke out in November 1942.
Instead, detainees devised organic initiatives to build a community from the ground up. They formed their own work gangs to build communal buildings—an assembly hall, library, hospital, school, and theater—out of adobe. (The pit from which they dug the dirt for their bricks became a lake for swimming.) They organized volunteer fire and police departments and started an outdoor theater, a newspaper, and several churches and temples. “Piano school,” “judo,” and “tofu factory” are labeled on the government’s 1945 map of the internment camp, their locations mainly found within detainees’ barracks. Decades later, in the radically different context of Sun City, these components of a community—religious services, dances, volunteer first responders and affinity groups—would again emerge from a mixture of top-down planning and self-organized initiative.
MEANWHILE, PHOENIX was undergoing a rebrand. As historian Andrew Needham recounts in Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (2014), the city’s chamber of commerce conducted a survey in 1935 about the moniker “Salt River Valley,” then used to refer to the region of which Phoenix was a part. They learned that people thought it evoked an “alkaline wasteland.” A Scottsdale businessman suggested an alternative: “Valley of the Sun.” The new nickname soon adorned the letterhead of the Chamber of Commerce, which partnered with a local bank to produce a brochure titled Life in the Valley of the Sun that aimed to attract people from elsewhere in the country to come to Phoenix resorts, build winter homes, and establish branches of their businesses. A subsequent 1949 campaign by the chamber, called “It’s fun in the Valley of the Sun,” received coverage in numerous national magazines. (The now-common term “Sunbelt” did not attain widespread use until 1969.)
Perhaps no other American city is so reviled as Phoenix, which many people from wetter, less scorching climates confidently declaim “shouldn’t exist.”
The combination of boosterism and corporate welfare worked: By 1964, more than seven hundred manufacturing firms had moved to or opened offices in Phoenix, while the city’s population had increased tenfold from 65,000 in 1940 to over 650,000. In the postwar era, government incentives shifted from sponsoring military installations to underwriting the construction of housing for growing cities.
Webb first took advantage of these not in Phoenix, but Tucson, where he hired Los Angeles architect A. Quincy Jones to design a subdivision of seven hundred homes, backed by the Federal Housing Authority, to be sold on speculation. Pueblo Gardens had the shape of a triangle, with a major thoroughfare running north-south down the western edge and a railyard forming the long hypotenuse; it had a school, a shopping center, and park space. It opened in 1948.
What most set Pueblo Gardens apart from contemporaneous developments like Levittown was Jones’s design. The setbacks and orientations of the houses were varied. This manufactured the illusion that the subdivision had grown organically while allowing, he hoped, ultimately in vain, for greenbelts behind and between residences. For the homes themselves, Jones designed six plans, with one-, two-, and three-bedroom models and duplexes—all perfect, timber-framed rectangles on concrete slabs. Some exteriors had California redwood siding; others had painted plywood or earth-toned stucco. Asymmetrical low-sloped peak roofs dominated, a modernist flourish.
Jones’s previous experience had been with luxurious ranch-inspired houses in Southern California; at Pueblo Gardens, he attempted to re-create the same effect for the middle class. Like those aforementioned greenbelts between lots, these design ambitions did not fully materialize. For instance, the model homes boasted floor-to-ceiling glass walls in one room, a style favored by Cliff May, California’s luxury ranch-house guru, but driving around the neighborhood today, it doesn’t appear that this feature was carried across the entire subdivision.
Pueblo Gardens’ earth-toned brick and stained redwood siding was replaced by concrete block painted in pastels and plywood trim painted white—a kind of mass-produced neo-farmhouse aesthetic intended, Findlay writes, to “accommodate tastes imported from other regions of the country.”
In 1953, Webb’s firm began construction on the town of San Manuel, built to house the workers at what was then the largest underground copper mine in the world. From the plans available in archived advertisements, they appear to have reused Jones’s designs from Pueblo Gardens, with minor changes. (The standard three-bedroom, one-bath house in Tucson became a three-bedroom, 1¾ bath in San Manuel, but the layouts, dimensions, and building materials remained nearly unchanged.) Webb alternated the homes’ rooflines to allow for some visual variation from the street. Some of the houses incorporated a swatch of wooden siding into their brick face, as had been done at Pueblo Gardens; others had large windowed areas.
Isolated in the mountain foothills, San Manuel differed from Pueblo Gardens and other suburban developments in that it didn’t lock into an existing street grid. The town was, and still is, accessed by a highway that runs along its eastern side. The plat was laid out in an oval shape, with concentric residential streets cut through by two avenues that intersected in the center of town at an X, whose negative space created zones for parks, schools, and commerce. Construction proceeded in stages as the mine grew, with the population reaching a peak of 4,400 in the late 1950s. Yet in the end, the southern half of the plan was never constructed, leaving its shape more of an apostrophe than an ellipse.
“A ****ing joy.”
One hundred fifty miles away, a realtor named Ben Schleifer was laying out a subdivision called Youngtown. He had purchased 320 acres of former cattle pasture northwest of Phoenix and surrounded its reservoir with, as John Findlay put it, “a crude grid of gravel roads and … inexpensive houses [marketed] to ‘low income’ retirees and others over the age of fifty.”
Schleifer claimed that the idea for such a community had come to him both from watching elderly relatives grow isolated and bored and, perhaps a bit outlandishly, from reading Plato’s Republic. The old farmhouse on the property was used for parties, potlucks, and club meetings—the first chapter of the AARP was founded in Youngtown in 1958. But the development’s emphasis on affordability above all else, and Schleifer’s own limited capital, resulted in clear shortcomings. The town’s electricity system, for example, wasn’t powerful enough to heat electric stoves, leaving residents cooking with hot plates.
A high-ranking employee of the Webb company learned about Youngtown from the NBC show Wide Wide World and regretted not having come up with the idea himself. Retirement was a new concept: The first generation of workers to hold social security and pensions, which had been introduced in the 1930s, were leaving the workforce with both unprecedented good health and disposable income. Just as the defense contracts that had sustained Webb’s dramatic growth had been federally subsidized, so would the retirement complex, in the form of modest, reliable fixed incomes.
Determined to repeat and improve upon Schleifer’s model, Webb sent representatives to Florida to interview pensioners about their needs and desires, and to visit common destinations for elderly visitors, such as Tampa’s Riverside Tourist Center and the Bradenton Trailer Park. (Central Florida’s The Villages, the largest age-restricted community in the US and a direct descendant of Sun City, was still pastureland at the time.) The developers determined that Sun City would have a grand entrance, a motel, a shopping plaza, a nine-hole golf course, a community center, and five models of “the very lowest cost house buildable, plus several upgradable plans,” in executive John Meeker’s words.
Cluster by cluster, the homes change— ranchettes for horse lovers, condominiums for snowbirds—while retaining the overarching, unmistakable homogeneity of mass construction with dimensional lumber.
Sun City’s board game–like street design substituted the shared greenbelts that Jones had attempted to thread through Pueblo Gardens’ backyards with putting greens. For the early homes, meanwhile, the company again reused Jones’s floorplans from Pueblo Gardens: For the Kentworth model home, for instance, they made only slight adjustments to the locations of closets and removed a wall separating the kitchen and dining area. The exteriors were a different story. Pueblo Gardens’ earth-toned brick and stained redwood siding was replaced by concrete block painted in pastels and plywood trim painted white—a kind of mass-produced neo-farmhouse aesthetic intended, Findlay writes, to “accommodate tastes imported from other regions of the country.” (Though buyers initially hailed from Arizona and California, Sun City soon became popular with Midwesterners; by 1980, one-fifth of its residents had come from Illinois alone.)
MORE THAN THE HOMES THEMSELVES, it was “country club living” at middle-class prices that the Webb corporation promoted in its national advertising campaigns. The company made sure that clubs and activities flourished at Sun City: Besides golf, residents could choose between table tennis, shuffleboard, lawn bowling, needlepoint, bridge, cards, and ballroom dancing, among other diversions. Webb’s obsession with having amenities in place at Sun City’s opening came, in part, from the executives’ observations in Florida, where some elderly people had bought lots in developments whose promised communal facilities never materialized. But it also came from the company’s previous experiences with planned communities of a very different sort. The need to entertain residents and manufacture consent recalled the sociologically motivated administrative priorities at Poston, as well as the demands of running a company town like San Manuel.
Initially, prominent voices from Del Webb himself to the leading gerontologists of the era expressed skepticism about whether Sun City would succeed. The former worried it was bad business to turn away the majority of the population as potential buyers; the latter objected to the “segregation” of the elderly from society. Yet specialists and residents gradually reached the consensus that the citizens of Sun City had higher morale and more friendships than other elderly Americans.
In part, this sense of belonging was a product of self-selection: Not everyone wanted to live in little boxes on a golf course. Those who did have consistently been white and conservative. When Sun City reached build-out in 1978, less that one percent of its residents were Black. A company executive defended this state of de facto segregation in 1974, “Let’s face it, a Negro would be miserable in Sun City.” Today, the community remains over 90 percent non-Hispanic white, compared to just 53 percent of Maricopa County as a whole. And from the start, Sun City was overwhelmingly Republican—some 85 percent at build-out. As Calvin Trillin judged in The New Yorker in 1964, Sun City is “a town that vigorously avoids irritation, differences of opinion, and, in fact, differences of all kinds.”
Just as the defense contracts that had sustained Webb’s dramatic growth had been federally subsidized, so would the retirement complex, in the form of modest, reliable fixed incomes.
When polled about the choice to move to Sun City, respondents cited climate, cleanliness, orderliness, and amenities. But they also liked the low taxes. In 1973, after a majority of Sun City voters shot down multiple school bond measures, the community withdrew from the Peoria school district, meaning its residents pay no public school taxes. (This loophole is unique to Sun City: Other fifty-five-plus communities do not have the voter base to overwhelm their localities in this way.) The retirees also repeatedly rejected incorporation, even when the Del Webb corporation encouraged it. At first, the company bankrolled many of the services that a municipality would ordinarily provide. But it shut off the tap in 1978, leaving an already-overextended Maricopa County in charge of all of Sun City’s needs. What followed was a feat of libertarian teamwork: Residents opted to fill the gaps themselves. The Sun City PRIDES—Proud Residents Independently Donating Essential Services—was created in 1980 to provide litter cleanup, tree trimming, sprinkler maintenance, and other services. That civic structure still exists today.
Sun City has stuck to its mold, even as its “Way-of-Life” requires enforcement through eight pages of HOA conditions, covenants, and restrictions—no chipping paint, no landscaping that blocks a yard’s view of a golf course, no cars on the street or in the driveway, no multifamily residences—and nosy neighbors eager to enforce them. In contrast, Pueblo Gardens, San Manuel, and Youngtown today look very different from how they did in Del Webb’s era. They are racially integrated working-class communities whose residents’ lives do not revolve around leisure. The homes are overdue for maintenance, the yards often crowded with possessions. The meager tax bases of San Manuel, whose mine closed abruptly in 2003, and Youngtown, which lost its age-restricted status in 1999 after a series of lawsuits over the restriction’s inconsistent enforcement, limit the services they can offer to residents. Yet these planned settlements have an afterlife in which residents are free to deviate from the top-down suburban utopianism of their design.
In the communities Webb built, nearly identical plans have produced divergent worlds. The design of a place goes only so far in cultivating the rhythms of its inhabitants; marketing, overlays, associations, and tax codes also condition and entitle the lives we live, to say nothing of those formidable externalities of health and wealth. “Don’t let retirement get you down! Be happy in Sun City; it’s a paradise town,” went the town’s radio jingle. Of course, one man’s paradise is another’s perdition, as the r/suburbanhell subreddit, with its photos of Sun City’s Astroturf lawns and creepy crop-circle plat, attests. It’s tempting to wallow in Proust’s melancholy truism: “the true paradises are paradises we have lost,” which is just another way of saying, “Youth is wasted on the young.” Then again, Proust died in Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy, France, at age fifty-one. He never made it to Sun City.