Some time back I recall reading in another publication that such predictions of doom-and-gloom seem to be as regular as snowbird season and complaints about bad driving. There will always be those who see the glass as half-empty.
One of the things that fascinates me about them is the inevitable referral to "an aging population", as if that fact spells death for this-or-that area or business. Yeah--TV has an "aging population". But the result of aging is death. And as people die, they are replaced with younger folks. In our neighborhood we've had five families move in this year that I know of: two of them has one or both spouses still working remotely. the rest are younger retirees. The Village we live in came online in the late 1990s. My guess is that the average age of Villagers in our little corner of heaven is younger now than at any other time in the past ten years.
The other fallacy is "growth". As in mushrooms apparently. But the fact of the matter is that The Villages doesn't grow up. It grows OUT. Individual villages with their own individual character and architecture are pretty much constant. My guess is that, again using our Village as an example, if you went back in time to, say, Y2K and took a drive through it, virtually the ONLY difference you'd see between now and then is that the cars look somewhat different.
As to that "footprint" growing larger, in terms of space anyway, that is admittedly having an impact. But population outgrowing infrastructure, especially in a place growing as fast as TV (or Florida in general, for that matter) is natural. You won't see businesses being developed or medical services being implemented on merely the EXPECTATION of growth. The growth has to actually happen first. Infrastructure (services, roads, utilities, etc.) then is developed. But the settled, older neighborhoods aren't experiencing that. The last major infrastructure expansion here was the widening of 27/441. Businesses come and businesses go, but the restaurants closing in Spanish Springs are being replaced by restaurants that are significantly BETTER in most respects than the ones that have closed, and are doing commensurately better than the shuttered ones did. Don't confuse the results of healthy competition with "shrinkage" caused by whatever imagined reason.
TV is healthy. And as expansion continues and more and more opportunities and services are created, is getting healthier.
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