While in this deer-in-a-headlight housing market, boomers can only dream about downsizing to their next house in the perfect location, Barbara Corcoran’s book “Nextville” makes for inspiring armchair reading. For starters, I like a book that projects forward ten, twenty years for boomers and doesn’t even mention the word “retirement” anywhere on the front cover. It’s a gutsy move, but a smart one.
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The whole title is “Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life: Nextville”, and features a perky Barbara on a 50-‘s style postcard set against a backdrop of a roadmap. This cover works on every level for the boomer consumer. The postcard hails to nostalgia without it being in your face. Barbara is letting her “laugh lines” hang out, without apology—and yet she looks hip and fresh. Boomers get the point, know the book is for them, and have good feelings about the whole enterprise—before they even open the front cover.
The content is well-targeted, as well. Corcoran suggests that there are eight “types” of boomers, each of whom have distinct motivations and preferences in terms of what they’re looking for in housing long-term. As boomers have redefined every stage of life through which they’ve passed, so are they defying the stereotypes of retirement living. “Forget Florida!” she writes, noting that our parents’ dream of sitting under palm trees in a Florida condo, is not part of the legacy being passed generation to generation. But without a roadmap to make this next stage of life a no-brainer for the aspiring boomer, she offers a helpful chapter titled “What if I don’t know where I belong?” that includes a quiz guiding you to understand towards which of the 8 types you tend.
In brief, the eight types include:
1. Following your consuming passion to the best location, be it opening a B&B, bird watching, golfing, and so on.
2. Forming an intentional community: think communes (which is a phenomenon that is taking roots in surprising ways in places like Iowa, where spiritual folks gather in Vedic City; the “Golden Girl” phenomenon in cities across the country) in RV centers and more.
3. Gravitating toward a college town to “live young”
4. Living “green” and off the grid in a place like Three Rivers community just outside of Bend, Oregon
5. “Losing Yourself”, in places like Panama, or my friends who have moved to Bali
6. The mission-centered life: a place and way to work with meaning and purpose
7. Becoming a “boomerang”, i.e. what the last generation referred to as “snow birds” but for our generation, living in multiple places often precipitated by having children, or more to the point, grandchildren, in far-flung spots around the country
8. Staying put: those who explore all the options and realize that for them, there’s no place like home.
“Nextville” is published by Springboard, and will be available on April 29.
Carol Orsborn