May 17, 1999 — ;A revised and expanded fifth edition of “Retirement Places Rated” ranks more than 180 top retirement communities and areas according to the quality of housing, climate, cost of living, services, employment opportunities, and leisure activities. The book has detailed descriptions of each area and helps you choose the best location based on your lifestyle and budget. Below, read the introduction to the book and get a look at author David Savageau’s picks for America’s top 30 retirement places.

INTRODUCTION

When you arrive at that certain age and bid goodbye to the job, will you stay where you are? “The best place to retire,” advises Dr. Robert Butler, former head of the National Institute on Aging, “is the neighborhood where you spent your life.”
How’s that for a dash of common sense! Most of us do have more power, independence, and plain practical knowledge in the place where we’re living than we might ever have in a distant, unfamiliar location.

The statistics bear this out. Despite all the hype about moving away after retirement, the number of older adults who actually settle each year in another state wouldn’t crowd the route for the Cotton Bowl parade. Most of us want to stay where we are.
There’s more to it than convenience. The psychic connection that comes with raising children, working at a job, improving a home and paying off a mortgage, and building friendships with neighbors in one place may be missed in a new one. When you move you can take the philodendron, the oak blanket chest, the canoe, and the digital satellite dish, but you can’t pack a deep sense of place.

Perhaps for you relocation is unthinkable. You’ve known your neighbors for years; your doctor knows you and your medical history; and you don’t need to look up the bank’s phone number, ask for directions to a discount hardware store, or scratch your head for the name of the one person in city hall who can get the sewer fixed. What you may ultimately want is R&R in familiar territory, not an agenda that takes high energy and risk to put down new roots.

If all this is true, then stay right where you are and instead travel whenever and wherever you want. But possibly there’s someplace in this country where you might prosper better than where you now live. And possibly it’s a lack of information that keeps you from taking a look.

RETIREMENT PLACES RATED

Over a period of 15 years and four previous editions, Retirement Places Rated has profiled hundreds of retirement spots throughout the country. This fifth edition takes the same approach as its predecessors and has been thoroughly updated, revised, and expanded. And it even boasts a new two-color interior design

Retirement Places Rated is meant for those who are planning their retirement and weighing the pros and cons of moving or staying. It’s a guide offering facts about 187 carefully chosen places that have attracted most of the retired persons who make interstate moves.
However, this is more than a collection of interesting and useful information about places. The book also rates these places on the basis of six factors influencing the quality of retirement life: the costs of living, climate, economy, available services, recreation, and crime.
Retirement Places Rated doesn’t treat later life as a kind of autumn or second career, turning point, third age, or transformation. It simply gives you the facts you need to start appraising other geographic locations where you might settle.
After using the book, your hunch that you’ll never find a better place than your own hometown may well be confirmed. On the other hand, given this country’s geographic variety, what are the odds that the place where you happen to live now is really the right one for you?

WHERE ARE THESE PLACES?
If you were asked, in a kind of geographic word-association test, to name the states that spring to mind when you hear the word retirement, you’d probably say the big ones in the Sun Belt: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.

You’d be right, of course. In the generations since the end of World War II, these have attracted most of the older adults who packed up and moved to another state. Several of their large cities — Scottsdale, San Diego, Fort Myers, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Asheville, Charleston, and San Antonio — are as synonymous with retirement as any in the country.
But states well above the Sun Belt deserve a place in retirement geography as well. Oregon and Washington are drawing thousands of equity-rich Californians. The 160-mile stretch of New Jersey’s sandy Atlantic coastline from Cape May up to Monmouth owes a good part of its economic rebound to older newcomers moving in from New York and Philadelphia.
Catalogs mailed out by coastal Maine real estate brokers to baby boomers planning their retirement are getting fatter and slicker. Meanwhile, the requests for relocation packets from Floridians are an amazement to chambers of commerce as far away as the Puget Sound area in Washington State.
It’s no secret that places in every part of the country benefit from older adults moving into them. Roughly every tenth person over 60 is a newcomer in 1 out of 8 of the country’s 3,142 counties. If these locations were to be daubed in red on a blank map of the United States, the nation would look as if it had measles.

These spots are found along country roads within commuting distance of big cities. They’re in the midst of forested federal lands. They’re positioned along rocky ocean coastlines, in river valleys, around lakes, on mountain slopes, and in desert crossroads with striking distant vistas.
To identify likely places from among the hundreds of possibilities, Retirement Places Rated uses several criteria. The place should have a 1999 area population greater than 10,000; a smaller population may signal a lower level of human services. Moreover, the place should be growing. Between 1990 and 1999, the U.S. population grew by 8%; the retirement places profiled here together grew 19%.
In addition, the place should be attractive to older adults. In almost all the retirement places in this book, there’s a much greater number of persons aged 60 to 65 today than there were persons 50 to 55 only 10 years ago. This simple demographic exercise means that older newcomers have moved into the area over the previous decade.
The place should be relatively safe. The U.S. annual average crime rate, for example, is 5,759 crimes per 100,000 people. In 8 out of 10 of the places profiled here, it’s less. The place should be affordable too. The money it takes to live in 9 out of 10 of the places included in this book is well under the U.S. average estimated cost for a retired household.
Finally, the place should have natural endowments. Most of the locations included here have either large areas of federal recreation land or state recreation land, large areas of inland water, or an ocean coastline. Several are blessed with all four.
Based on repeated visits and recommendations from hundreds of older adults, this edition of Retirement Places Rated profiles 187 places. One hundred and nine are in the 13 Sun Belt states. Retirement relocation is still a march to low-cost living and milder winters, that much is certain. Because there’s a growing counter-movement to attractive places outside the Sun Belt, 78 of these are profiled. In all, locations in 42 states — from Florida to Alaska and from Maine to California — are represented.
Though this selection doesn’t by any means include every desirable destination, it does include many of the country’s best and does represent the variety many persons are choosing for retirement.

SOME WORDS ABOUT PLACE NAMES
None of the 187 places profiled here coincides with the corporate limits of towns or cities. For good reason, most of them are counties. Thanks to the car, the space you can cover on a typical day has expanded since the nostalgic era when Main Street truly was the noisy, exciting center of things. Now people likely live in one town, work in another, visit friends in still another, shop at a mall miles away, and escape to open country — all within an easy drive.
It’s no different in retirement places. Metropolitan Colorado Springs, with a population of nearly half a million, not only takes in the country’s 54th biggest city but also includes Black Forest, Cimarron Hills, Fountain, Manitou Springs, Palmer Lake, and other suburban places in surrounding El Paso County, some in Rocky Mountain foothills and others downslope at the beginning of the shortgrass prairie.
County names ring a bell with travelers. Hawaii’s Maui, Wisconsin’s Door County, and New Jersey’s Cape May are three such places. Other counties — South Carolina’s Aiken, New Mexico’s Santa Fe, and Arizona’s Yuma — have the same name as their well-known seats of government. In these instances, it’s natural to call the retirement place by its county name.
But county names aren’t usually tossed around in the basic where-to-retire scuttlebutt. Washington County, Arkansas, is one of 31 counties honoring the first president of the United States. The name draws a blank to Texans, Louisianans, Missourians, and Oklahomans (neighboring states with their own Washington County). But everyone recognizes Fayetteville, the seat of Washington County and home of the University of Arkansas. Another case is Barnstable County, Massachusetts, which includes all of Cape Cod from Buzzards Bay out old U.S. 6 on the famous sandy spit of land to Provincetown. Centuries ago, Cape Cod elbowed Barnstable County aside in popular New England usage.
Sometimes the name given a retirement place is that of the one or two biggest population centers. Thus North Carolina’s Orange County becomes Chapel Hill-Carrboro, Florida’s Charlotte County changes to Port Charlotte, and California’s Nevada County turns into Grass Valley-Nevada City.
In other instances, the name of a town may be paired with a well-known natural feature. Alpine-Big Bend identifies the county seat and one of our finest National Parks, all in sparsely peopled Brewster County, Texas. Murray-Kentucky Lake names the college town and one of the world’s largest man-made lakes, both in Calloway County, Kentucky.

Copyright 1999 by Ahsuog, Inc. Macmillan is a registered trademark of Macmillan, Inc.