Boomer boom: Volusia and Flagler are aging rapidly. What does that mean for the area?

May 05-- May 5--At 26, Chris Via was elected to the Holly Hill City Commission with a mind to help youth.

A member of a championship Holly Hill baseball team in 2005, Via was disappointed when the city eliminated its rec league because of low turnout. So he asked kids: If baseball were free, would they play? Turned out not enough would.

With his city's median age of 45.6 coming in at three years older than the state's, Via -- now the mayor at age 29 -- adjusted his vision to a new reality that's true not only in Holly Hill but throughout the area.

America is aging. Florida is aging even faster. And Volusia and Flagler counties are aging even faster than that.

In fact, Volusia County's median age of 46.4 is increasing at double the pace of the United States in this decade, according to the Census' 2017 American Community Survey.

And Flagler County's even older, with a median age of 50.3.

The trend shows no signs of slowing down, as new housing developments that market themselves to retiring baby boomers plus a wealth of assisted-living facilities promise to attract even more seniors in coming years.

Meanwhile, birth rates in both Volusia and Flagler counties have been lower than the state rate every year of this century, and the share of children under 18 is down in both counties and lower than either the United States or Florida.

Flagler, which has been one of Florida's fastest-growing counties in recent decades, has actually seen its school enrollment flatten, similar to Volusia's. In the past five years, enrollment in Flagler has grown just 1.6 percent, with a 0.3 percent decrease this year from 2017-18.

The area's boomer boom has implications for the region, in areas that include:

--Jobs. Nationally and locally people are working longer before retiring, leaving Volusia and Flagler counties with an aging workforce and all of the benefits and limitations that carries.

--Health care. While hospital officials say an aging population can help support physicians in more sub-specialties -- improving access for all residents -- it can also mean a strain on services. For example, ambulance calls in Volusia County have grown, particularly among the over-70 population, faster than the overall population growth, pushing the county to commit $5 million over three years in new spending on emergency medical services.

--Social services. The Council on Aging of Volusia County has wait lists for many of its programs, including Meals on Wheels and assistance for guardianship cases.

--Politics. As Volusia has grown older, it's become a Republican-leaning county for the first time since Reconstruction. Flagler has grown even more Republican. This has happened even though national party affiliation leans Republican in only one age demographic: the so-called "Silent Generation" born between 1928 and 1945, according to the Pew Research Center.

--Transportation. Drivers' license data show a growing number of people turning 80, the age at which drivers face additional restrictions such as passing a vision test, which experts say could add to demand for public transit. Affordable housing for seniors -- just as it is for working-age folks -- is scarcely available.

For Via, all the numbers meant shelving his dream of a Holly Hill youth baseball renaissance in favor of something more age-appropriate: pickleball.

The city agreed to contribute $1 million in community redevelopment area (CRA) funds to a project at Hollyland Park dubbed "the Wimbledon of Pickleball," a 24-court complex with private investment of $3 million by enthusiasts Rainer and Julie Martens of Ormond Beach.

"We are very much becoming an aging community, so what we've decided to do is shift focus to that aging community and provide services they need," Via said. "That's a big reason why we went forward with the big pickleball complex. All ages can play, but it's really popular with the seniors now."

The groundbreaking is Friday, with a projected opening date of 2020.

Why are they moving?

Census migration data shows Florida has gone through both ups and downs in this century. Stefan Rayer, director of the population program at the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, said during the Great Recession, more people were moving out of Florida than moving in.

"Then it recovered to where it was prior to the Recession," Rayer said. "The interesting thing is, when you look at the older age groups, net domestic in-migration in every year, even at the height of the Recession, remained positive."

So while younger, working-age people moved out of Florida looking for work, their elders kept coming.

And now, with baby boomers -- the products of the post-World War II birth rate spike who this year are between the ages of 55 and 73 -- hitting retirement age, many are moving to Florida.

In The Palms, a new section of Venetian Bay of New Smyrna Beach, more than three dozen homes have come under contract, and the real estate agent in charge estimates half of the buyers are northerners, mainly people middle-age to retired.

"The simplest answer is weather," said Carl Vasile, broker/associate with Exit Real Estate Property Solutions. "And the other reason is the taxes."

The Volusia-Flagler area offers much to entice retiring boomers than just being within one of seven states with no state income tax.

There are high-rise oceanfront condos in Daytona Beach Shores, homes and brand-new apartments in developments like Venetian Bay, and age-restricted communities that emphasize active lifestyles such as Latitude Margaritaville in Daytona Beach and the manufactured home community Plantation Oaks of Ormond Beach.

Gerben and Sandra Swart, retired boomers, moved to Plantation Oaks a few months ago from Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part because of the weather and to follow friends who'd settled in Ormond Beach.

"We didn't want to be in a condo. We didn't want to be right, smack on the beach due to the hurricanes, and we didn't want a home because we didn't want to do the upkeep," Sandra Swart said.

New Smyrna Beach Mayor Russ Owen has heard stories like theirs time and again: First-time visitors discover the area on a trip or while visiting someone. They buy a second home and spend a few winters here. Then they retire to the area permanently.

"That's such a common story anecdotally about who makes up our population," Owen said.

New Smyrna Beach is among the cities that are investing in their senior population. The city recently opened its Live Oak Cultural Center, to be shared by young and old both for arts programs and Council on Aging events.

Nancy Maddox, the city's leisure services director, said municipal parks programs often were designed in the shape of a downward-pointing triangle, with seniors occupying the bottom tip and youth in the widest section. "Now it's like an hourglass kind of shape," Maddox said. "You've got to have multi-generational facilities and things to offer the community."

New Smyrna city commissioners were also cognizant of -- here's that sport again -- the power of pickleball. Next to the cultural center they overhauled the City Gym, which now hosts the NSB Pickleball Club, with 130 members strong, playing five, even six, days a week.

Jim Brown, the club's president, said the average age of folks he plays with is between 65 and 70.

"We'll have 35 or 40 people together playing pickleball," Brown said. "When they're not out on the court, they're actually talking and socializing with their cohorts."

Boomers might be big on pickleball and other activities, but as they reach 75 or 80, their physical limitations could leave them looking for less stressful ways of staying active.

An older work force

The Volusia-Flagler area's growing median age could change the nature of the economy, says Sean Snaith, an economist with the University of Central Florida.

"Any population growth of whatever age will help the economy," Snaith said. "But 75-year-olds are not going to be doing all the same things as 25-year-olds. ... You might need more comfortable shoe stores and less Vans shoe stores."

An aging population presents opportunities in some career fields, including health care and service-based businesses such as restaurants. Robin King, president and CEO of CareerSource Flagler Volusia, also noted Volusia is attracting its share of assisted-living facilities.

With people living longer and facing higher costs of living, many people choose to keep working or retire from one career to start a new one.

"They want purpose," King said. She said expectations of a "silver tsunami," of a mass exodus of seniors out of the workforce, haven't materialized.

"People went through a lot of their savings during the Recession. A lot of them took out of their retirement fund to go back to school. ... They might have planned (retirement) fairly well. They just didn't realize how fast they could go through it."

Jim Spletzer, principal economist for the U.S. Census Bureau, said employment among persons age 65 and over has grown steadily in the past 25 years, from fewer than 4 million nationally to nearly 10 million in 2017.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 9.7 million Americans age 65 and older were working in 2018; about 44 percent were in management, business and professional occupations.

While there are 639,000 educators, 193,000 CEOs and 172,000 lawyers over the age of 65, the number of waiters and waitresses drops off to 31,000 and roofers is around 5,000.

But with a rise in population, the Volusia-Flagler area will need people to work in those industries serving seniors and others. And to keep those workers, the area will need better-paying jobs and affordable housing.

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The fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach metro area is $868, according to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department. Average households in the area can't afford that.

Hank Fishkind, a longtime Central Florida economist, said Volusia and Flagler would do well to figure out what services its seniors desire and create conditions to "capture the downstream."

"In Volusia County, I think the stated public policy needs to be geared toward making it more attractive to working-age families who provide services to the older residents who need and want services and want to pay for them," he said. "What we've not done is provide the skilled, trained human capital and provide more affordable housing."

Health care opportunities

Between the fiscal year 2012-13 and 2017-18, the number of emergency transports in Volusia County went up 13 percent. And the number of emergency transports of persons 70 and older over that same stretch grew 18 percent. Overall, the county's population grew by about 8 percent during those years.

In February, the County Council approved $5 million in additional spending on seven new ambulances and 28 emergency medical personnel. The move followed complaints about response times.

Florida Health Care Plans, the Volusia-Flagler region's largest health maintenance organization, announced expansion plans last year as its work force topped 1,200.

Meanwhile, hospital executives, who keep close tabs on their market's demographics, acknowledge the older market generates business, or in their parlance, utilization.

"Volusia County has always been a little heavier on the plus-65," said Arvin Lewis, chief revenue officer at Halifax Health. Flagler County has been, too.

"They're seeing the same thing as Volusia," he said. "They're just seeing it at a more rapid rate."

Halifax Health is anticipating the growth in senior population to continue, Lewis said.

That means big changes could loom for health-care providers.

Wall Street has been backing companies with the potential to disrupt the health care environment, as Amazon has done to retail, in an attempt to improve preventative care and lower costs overall, Lewis said.

Both Halifax Health and AdventHealth, the other major local health care provider, anticipate some innovations, including telemedicine, are only likely to become more prevalent.

"There's a huge amount of difference of technological adoption between somebody who's 75 and somebody who's in their 60s," said Steven Jenkins, vice president of strategy and marketing for AdventHealth's properties in Volusia, Flagler and Lake counties. "We've evolved from a technological standpoint so quickly as a society that we're starting to see people as they are approaching that Medicare age who are willing to utilize some of those services, or are at least more open to it."

AdventHealth is seeing growth in its home care services, including post-surgery care and hospice.

"Those services will grow as the population grows," Jenkins said.

Jenkins said transportation is an issue that will emerge as a challenge with an aging population. "That isn't directly related to health care but directly impacts health care," he said.

Social services demands

Sarah Gurtis, president and CEO of the Council on Aging of Volusia County, said many of the people who arrive in the area aren't living at a poverty level -- but they don't always remain there.

"They're coming with assets. What is happening ... people are not planning to live into their 90s," Gurtis said. "They are doing their 401(k)s or savings plans, thinking, 'No one lived in my family past 83,' but, well, this is a generation now that's living into their 90s."

The Council on Aging administers state and federal elder care programs, but there isn't enough government grant money to meet the need, she said. "There doesn't seem to be any appetite to try and meet that need."

As a result, the county's senior programs, including Meals on Wheels, have waiting lists. As of early April, the wait list for Meals was 810 people, with the most needy moving up the list fastest.

There's one silver lining for this so-called "silver tsunami:" Gurtis is confident the growing population of seniors will provide her an ample number of volunteers to help meet some of the need.

But Gurtis is convinced the growing number of seniors poses future issues that aren't much on community leaders' radar.

"I don't think it is recognized as broadly as it needs to be as the subject that it is," she said. "Volusia's going to be in the vortex because of our population need."

Victoria Reid, 78, is a Council on Aging client.

She lives in a two-bedroom condo overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, the Ocean Ritz in Daytona Beach. At one point, it was a getaway, a weekend home for a busy real estate agent who lived in Jacksonville with her Navy husband, Gary Reid.

But their well-laid plans fell apart with the Great Recession, when she lost a lot of money in the stock market, and she was further hurt by her 62-year-old husband's death 2 1/2 years ago.

"We planned for my husband to outlive me because he was younger than me," she said. "I live on Social Security and that's it. My husband has his military retirement, Social Security and disability when he was alive. I had three times as much."

Among Florida's seniors, Reid is hardly alone. The Pepper Institute at Florida State University noted unemployment lasted longer for workers age 55 and older during the recession. "Almost one in four older workers spent nearly all of their retirement savings during the first two years of the recession," the 2015 report reads. "Many older adults are now left wondering if they'll ever be able to retire."

After having been in three car accidents when she was younger, Reid said her physical condition has deteriorated to where she uses a Hoveround scooter and has a car with a lift that she can't drive because she can't walk.

She mostly stays inside and relies upon Meals on Wheels and other services, including help with sponge baths and light housekeeping assistance.

"What keeps me going is my two cats," she said. "I feel like I have an obligation to them. I don't want them to end up in a shelter or put to sleep. I hope I can live long enough ... after that, I'm ready."

Another Council on Aging client, James Ball, started coming to Florida in the 1960s, marveling at its cleanliness and wild beauty. So nearly 20 years ago, he retired to Ormond Beach, rewarding himself after a life of work.

The 80-year-old Westchester County, New York, native, has seized the Florida he loves while he can. Driving up to the Funky Pelican on the Flagler Pier. Going to Bike Week, a onetime passion, even without his Harley-Davidson Softail. He might not walk for miles along the beach anymore, but he still sometimes eats lunch with his significant other, Pam Drury, at the Tom Renick Park picnic tables, listening to the ocean and children on the playground.

Here he remains. He's outlived family, friends, neighbors -- in the past year alone, eight people in their lives have died. It leaves him philosophical and appreciative for the lifestyle he's found in retirement.

"Subliminally, everybody knows when you came here, you came here to die," he said. "And everybody is supposed to know that the only damn thing you've got going for you is between now and the day you die."

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