Sure, Florida is the retirement capital of the nation. But for some younger, boomer-age retirees, this is not necessarily a good thing.
Take Russ and Jane Gesme, both 55, for example. After retiring in St. Louis two years ago, they traveled the country to seek out a new home, looking from Arizona to Georgia and the Carolinas. Their goal: to settle in an anti-retirement community. "In our neighborhood, there are kids in the backyards enjoying themselves and loving life, not just a bunch of retirees looking for the early-bird special," says Russ.
To their suprise, the Gesmes wound up in Florida -- or, to be more precise, in Sarasota. It had the best of the Florida cliches: warm weather (okay, so it dips down to the 50s in January), proximity to water, no state income tax and tons of outdoor activities, most notably golf and tennis. Monica Seles owns a home here, Andre Agassi and Anna Kournikova have trained here. In April, the Women's Tennis Association held its first Sarasota Open. What Sarasota also offered, however, was a lot of culture and more energy than other Florida cities they looked at. Gesme, a former PriceWaterhouseCoopers C.P.A., says home prices in Sarasota were measurably more affordable than those that he found in Naples, Fla.
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| The Ringling estate now includes an art museum. |
Hugging the central western coast of the state on the Gulf of Mexico, Sarasota may be most famous for its beaches, especially Crescent Beach. It's hundreds of yards of pure, white sand "that feels like flour," says Sally Hawthorne, age 54, who moved from Dayton, Ohio last year in hopes of eventually retiring here (and adds helpfully that author Stephen King owns a house nearby). There are actually 35 miles of beach in Sarasota, and many retirees, like the Gesmes, live on small canals with docks so they can launch their boats from the backyard to go fishing (for grouper or kingfish) or sailing. If you care to, you can get around some neighborhoods by boat instead of by car.
| Sarasota, Florida
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| • | Nearest big city: Tampa (43 mi.)
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But the city prides itself on its cultural offerings. There's the opera, symphony, film society, aquarium, classic-car museum and dozens of galleries -- an extraordinary amount of culture for such a small town. There's even a permanent circus, as befits the memory of the late Sarasotan John Ringling of Ringling Bros. fame. (The Ringling Museum of Art, part of Florida State University, is on his former estate.)
The Gesmes don't even mind spring break much, when college students flood most of the Florida shoreline. As far as they're concerned, it only adds to the joie de vivre they were looking for in the first place. "When I was in Naples, I felt like I was surrounded by my parents," says Russ Gesme. "When I came to Sarasota, I felt like I was surrounded by my contemporaries."
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