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Why are 55+ communities allowed? What are the perceived benefits of 55+ communities? https://x.com/LeahRain77/status/2079094767233745170 has blown up on X and I know I've seen 55+ communities when searching for houses. They usually come up on searches as less expensive and I guess I assumed they were assisted living facilities but looking at today's drama that's not the case.
It's weird to me that people are getting so offended at the idea of an almost-30 year old woman can continue living in the same home she lived in before her father passed away. What is at stake here to these people that is worth the expense of suing a woman out of her house?
The time I've heard the most complaints about these was from a friend (grad student) trying to find housing in a college town and complaining that lots of the (good) places were 55+ and obviously not available to students. Honestly, in-context I can imagine older adults appreciating some guarantee that the neighbors won't throw a kegger and loudly play beer pong into the wee hours of the morning.
I'm less content with, but maybe understand, not wanting young families adjacent. We should really do better about making most spaces more family-friendly.
and if there was student housing on that magic dirt, I'm sure the neighborhood would be just as good. (neighborhoods can be geographically advantaged, but that generally isn't the determining factor.)
Yeah, living in an off-campus apartment really made me understand why homeowners fight student housing tooth and nail. Students are young, transient, and generally not personally responsible for their own finances, which is a triple whammy red flag for "will absolutely destroy the neighborhood."
Plus, beyond drunken destruction, the presence of student housing is inversely related to how responsive the local government is to community issues. Students don't pay property taxes and are often still legally domiciled (and therfore are registered to vote) at their parents' home, and will be gone within a couple of years anyway. So nobody at city hall cares about their complaints and the infrastructure all goes to shit. Landlords don't bother keeping up with capital maintenance and don't care as much about the quality of public infrastructure since they have a guaranteed renewing pool of cost-insensitive and naive tenants who tend to be unreasonably tolerant of conditions more established tenants would demand be fixed.
College students make terrible neighbors, even when they're well-behaved teetotalers, because they're fundamentally foreign tourists with no long-term stake in the community.
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