God's waiting room: The rise and fall of South Beach as an unplanned retirement community, 1950-2000

摘要

Between 1950 and 1980, South Beach, at the southern tip of Miami Beach, was transformed into an unplanned retirement community by the arrival of thousands of elderly, poor, mainly Jewish in-migrants. South Beach seniors had a profound impact on the local economy and became a dominant force in city politics, profoundly altering perceptions of what was formerly a tourist resort. After 1980, the elderly population of South Beach declined rapidly and effectively disappeared by the turn of the century. This essay traces the rise and fall of South Beach as a large-scale, informal, voluntary, urban retirement enclave to show how key features of the political economy of cities in the United States may frustrate the aspirations of environmental gerontology to enlist municipal governments in the effort to provide desirable options for aging-in-the-right-place to a broad socioeconomic range of seniors.