HUFFINGTON
07.15.12
TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE
ing seniors and the business that
hope to sell to them.
“We offer the lived experience of
a real community not a lab setting,”
Tim Dutton, one of the founders
of the nonprofit, tells me on a visit
to the mostly empty offices of the
brand-new enterprise. The institute hopes to encourage companies
to come to Sarasota to experiment,
for example, with new designs that
would make grocery stores more
friendly to older people — best
practices that could give them a leg
up in attracting customers elsewhere as the population ages.
In Tampa, Stephen Klasko, the
high-energy dean of the University of South Florida’s medical
school, says Florida’s aging population “is an amazing opportunity” for medical research and
study. He is currently conducting
a wellness study in the Villages,
part of an effort to make it “America’s healthiest community.” He
says the study has produced the
highest response rate of any study
he has ever conducted.
Barring the unexpected — a European economic cataclysm, for
example — economists predict
that Florida’s economy will return
to pre-crash size by 2015. Newly
arriving seniors, tired of shoveling snow in New Jersey or Michigan, will help drive the growth.
But despite some small measures
by forward-thinkers like Dutton
and Klasko, the state as a whole is
woefully unprepared for the profound demographic changes ahead.
One of the most disturbing statistics about where Florida is right
now, and what is in store for its
future, concerns the fate of recent
college graduates. Butler, the state
economist, says that more than
a third of recent graduates from
Florida’s universities and colleges
are not working in the state. This
means that the young workers that
the state will need so desperately in
the next few decades are either living in Florida and are unemployed,
or have moved elsewhere in search
of better economic opportunities.
The last person I meet in
the Villages is Angel Pedraza, a
20-year-old recent college graduate. We talk on the front deck of
Toojays, a burger joint in the Villages, where she has just dropped
off a job application. She is living
temporarily with her grandpare