13533 Seal Beach Boulevard, Seal Beach
One of the earliest deliberately age-segregated communities in the United States, Leisure World was designed by Ross Cortese in 1960.
(Sun City, Arizona, also opened that year and claims to be the first.) Cortese promoted his affordable “country-club” lifestyle to “active interesting people over 52,” later increasing the age limit to fifty-five. Early residents had monthly payments as low as $93 for cooperatively owned, condo-like homes of about seven hundred square feet, built around a golf course and multiple clubhouses, along with studios for art, woodworking, and ceramics. The community contained shuffleboard and horseshoe courts, an amphitheater offering free summer concerts, a guarded security gate, and a strict homeowners’ association that promised to ease home maintenance.
At the time of its construction, the Los Angeles Times grumbled that Leisure World’s architecture resembled “rabbit hutches” in a “concentration camp” for the elderly, but, with twenty-five thousand people visiting model homes here in its first week, it proved enormously successful. Life magazine quipped that there were so many clubs that “in Leisure World there is no leisure.”
This privatized, age-segregated community offered many public-seeming amenities, from transportation to health care. Before Medicare began in 1966, the community had a free clinic for residents, funded by homeowners’ association fees and staffed by ten doctors and twenty-six nurses. Cortese went on to build Leisure World Laguna Hills in 1964 (now the city of Laguna Woods) and then Leisure World Walnut Creek near San Francisco, while acquiring land for more Leisure Worlds in Arizona, New Jersey, Florida, and Maryland.
In 1983, the California Supreme Court ruled that age-restricted zoning was illegal discrimination, so California’s Leisure Worlds lobbied for a law allowing communities to ban children if one resident of each household was over age fifty-five. They also tried but failed to ban younger spouses. Committed to the “active leisure” image, in the 1980s they banned a proposed nursing home within Leisure World Laguna Hills, so nursing homes now proliferate outside the gates. The community currently hosts more than two hundred clubs and better bus service than most of Orange County, reflecting the way Leisure World created community-wide services in this private space for the elderly only.
To Learn More
- Lasner, Matthew Gordon. High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
- Trolander, Judith. “Age 55 or Better: Active Adult Communities and City Planning.” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 6 (November 2011): 952–74.
- Botanical Photography Club at Leisure World Laguna Hills (now Laguna Woods), circa 1965. Photo courtesy of Laguna Woods History Center.