The Frye Retirement Community, with its elegant library and fireplace, hallways lined with Romare Bearden prints and services that include a personal trainer for each of the 150 residents, felt like the “ahead” Chambers had strived her whole life to attain. “I was so excited that someone in our community thought enough about the elderly to build a place like this,” says the 69-year-old former social-service aide. “I would pray, ‘God, you know I want this’.”
Last May, Chambers’s prayers were answered when she moved into Frye–one of a small but growing number of African-American retirement villages that are sprouting nationwide. Many, like Frye, are rooted in the black church. Others are civic- based. The black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha is developing a 48-acre site in Winston, N.C. Black developers are working on low-income assisted-living facilities in Florida, a middle-class community in North Carolina and a luxury complex in Texas. By 2005, more than 3 million African-Americans will be over the age of 65. Nearly half a million blacks moved to Florida in 1997 alone, many middle-aged professionals positioning themselves for a cushy retirement.
For the vast majority of blacks, retirement planning has traditionally meant buying burial insurance or hoping their kids had an extra room. Now increasing incomes and net worth are allowing black seniors to retire in larger numbers than ever before. With only a handful of predominantly black retirement communities open, many blacks are faced with a quandary. “They say, ‘[Traditionally white retirement communities] don’t want us there. It’s too expensive. They don’t have the things that I want’,” says Samuel J. Simmons, 71, president and CEO of the National Caucus and Center for the Black Aged. For this first large wave of black seniors, planning for retirement means addressing these concerns without precedent or example.
Some say the discrimination is blatant. When Ronald Chainey’s grandmother Mamie Byrd wanted to move into a planned community in West Palm Beach, Fla., seven years ago, she experienced repeated humiliation. “It was fine when I talked to people on the phone,” he says. “But when we showed up there were suddenly no vacancies.” Now Byrd lives in a flamingo-pink low-income complex built by Chainey and his partner, Edward Kinsey. In January the businessmen broke ground on their second venture.
Retirement communities that ignore black customers are being called on it. Henry Ford Village, a predominantly white, upscale retirement community in Dearborn, Mich., has launched a $400,000 affirmative-marketing program to African-Americans, after a suit over ads picturing whites only and slogans like “Your Kind of People.” Parent company Senior Campus Living denies past discrimination. “We have always used residents in our advertising. Traditionally that has meant whites from the suburbs,” says CEO John Erickson.
Forced or not, the new campaign is having some effect. Now about 35 black seniors live alongside the 1,000 white residents. When Dorsey Walker, a retired professor of American and African-American history, moved in back in 1993, there were no other blacks living on the 35-acre complex. The only reference to black heritage was a notice reminding workers that the Martin Luther King holiday was a day off. This year the community organized a full program for Black History Month with weekly events and speakers. “It’s very friendly here,” says Walker, 86. “Most people appreciate the diversity.”
For working-class blacks, retirement is a new and sometimes bewildering idea. “Leisure time was never an option for black people,” says the Rev. Michael King, who founded the Frye center. “That’s why communities like this are so crucial. Taking better care of our elderly includes asking them to consider what else there is to life. We take them on trips to museums and animal parks, [places] they’ve never been.” The success of Tiger Woods, says resident Robert Chambers, “got us all into” watching golf. “We’re so proud of him.”
In some ways, residents of low-income facilities such as the Frye Retirement Community represent a “bridge generation” of black retirees between a generation too stymied by Jim Crow to retire and black baby boomers who will enter their senior years with bigger bank accounts and higher expectations than any generation before them. These boomers include folks like George and Margo Hale, who have just bought a house in a sprawling West Palm Beach development called the Villages, complete with an outdoor Jacuzzi and an orange tree in the backyard. “It doesn’t matter really what race you are or where you come from,” says George Hale, 62, who moved his career south from Boston in 1993. “Everybody just wants to live the best life they can.” Of course, he’s right. But for many seniors, African-American retirement communities provide, at a reasonable cost (as little as $350 a month), what they could never have imagined: a place to enjoy their golden years, surrounded by gospel music, African-American art and peers who share their life experiences.
