Lyons: 55-and-up communities may be unfair, but they're not illegal


Despite jokes about such places, I think residents usually find that 55-and-over communities are much more fun than their old-fogey image.

Not that I've lived in one. I'm eligible, but I don't yet have a desire to ban younger people from my vicinity.

Still, though I usually visit such retirement communities when writing about a controversy of some sort, what I mostly see is people enjoying recreational activities with neighbors. They report a sense of belonging to a community. They have friends close by, and lots of things to do with them there. They like that.

So it didn't seem totally off-the-wall when I got an email from a man basically asking how it is that because of his age — under 55, apparently — he can be lawfully barred from living in those friendly communities.

Isn't that discrimination?

Well, yes, of course it is. No doubt about it.

But it is not the illegal kind of discrimination. Not, anyway, if the communities are following a few rules required to maintain their legally established right to discriminate based on age.

There used to be stricter rules. Anyone starting a community that would ban children and younger adults had to show that specialized services were provided to cater to special needs of retirement-age people. That meant more than providing shuffleboard courts, but it led to much legal wrangling about some rather token-like efforts at satisfying the requirement.

During the Clinton administration, the Housing For Older Persons Act did away with that requirement. The government basically adopted the idea that many older people don't need much in the way of special services but much prefer keeping distance — especially in mobile home parks and other neighborhoods where small homes are often close together — from other people's kids and all the related noise.

Is that unfair to quiet and considerate young people who wouldn't bother anyone?

Well, yes, just as it is unfair that 80-year-old guys get laughed at when they ask college cheerleaders for dates.

The courts have ruled, not in so many words: So what? Live somewhere else.

The aim of anti-discrimination laws is to protect groups seriously victimized by unjust discrimination. And as a group, people under 55 have no such claim, as a rule. Being barred from living in a very few senior neighborhoods temporarily — all will be eligible one of these years! — is not enough of a problem for them that government lawmakers or courts see a need to step in and prevent that discrimination.

That's well-settled law with very few outstanding issues, according to Chad McClenathen, a Sarasota lawyer who has represented a few such communities.

Communities can blow it. They can't just pretend to have such a 55-plus rule but only enforce it to keep out certain people they don't want, for instance. That would void their status as a 55-plus community.

But even so, many exceptions are allowed and even encouraged. The communities may allow younger spouses or relatives or caretakers to live with the person who is over 55. And in part because of divorces and deaths and moves into nursing homes and other unplanned residency changes, such communities can have up to 20 percent of households without a 55-or-older occupant. That can allow younger residents to stay after the older one is gone.

For that matter, McClenathen says, younger people can't be stopped from buying homes there. The rules apply to residing, not owning. But they may have to wait years to move in.

Of course, there's nothing to say a younger guy can't marry an older woman who becomes his ticket into one of those residentially exclusive fun spots.

He could go by and check the bulletin boards for women seeking younger men, I guess.

But mostly he would see notes about social clubs and community sports and daily outings and dances and card games and golf-cart parades and similar neighborly amusements that are a mainstay at many of the 55-plus communities.

Despite all those good-living enticements, it is just not often I hear from anyone miffed about being too young to get in. Most seem quite willing to wait.

Tom Lyons can be contacted at


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