Leesburg, Florida area is very Republican. All of Lake County is very Republican. The towns in Lake County have quaint names: Howie In The Hills, Chain O'Lakes, Okahumpka, and The Villages, to name a few. Most of the homes built in Lake County over the last 15 years have been in planned communities. Emphasis on planned.
How much "planning? A lot. Think of the X Files episode where Mulder and Scully go under cover as a married couple in a planned community....Yes, pink flamingo lawn ornaments can be banned from Lake County yards especially if they feature flapping wings activated by a breeze. Mailboxes do not clutter up the streets, they reside in their designated gazebos near the community's common areas. People are restricted to painting the exteriors of their homes to an exciting palette of 280 shades of grey and/or beige with the occasional, lightest shade of sky blue sneaking onto the palette. This town could be/should be called Scooterville. Many homes have a golf cart parked beside their cars so they can scoot around their community to the various pools, private marinas, ball courts, classes, or golf courses.
The Hawthorne in Leesburg is a development of about 3,000 triple wide and quadruple wide "manufactured homes" formerly referred to as trailers. Don't. Call. These. Homes. Trailers. The Hawthorne has a private marina, nature trail, putting green, club house, a heated pool, community vegetable garden, exercise room and an abandoned shuffleboard court. This glorified trailer manufactured home park is fairly typical of the area. Most developments in this area have at least this much or more.
I must admit that most of the people I encounter here are very nice. It's their politics that I object to. These are people who love the Tea Party and despise "big government". They are staunchly anti-abortion, pro-church and mourn the loss of the simpler times where June Cleaver was a celebrated domestic goddess. Kids here have fewer tattoos and piercings, but they are just as addicted to texting as the rest of the teen populations elsewhere.
It's a highly regulated environment that appeals to old white people that used to live in your neighborhood where they yelled at the kids for walking on their lawns. Although these communities are 95% white and over the age of 55, a few younger people and people of color are sprinkled into the communities for reasons beyond my ken (meaning, why anyone younger and/or hipper would want to live there is beyond me). It's not the amenities, which are many, but the highly regulated and obtrusive rules that bug me.
Yes, this is Republicanism at it's most stifling. Although the entire area is not a Stepford development, sometimes I feel like I've stepped into the embodiment of a Rockwell nostalgia that never existed. Those who live without repressive home owner's associations tend to be a conservative as their counterparts who safely ensconce themselves behind their community's gates.
Those gates are about as secure as a sieve. One homeless, shoeless person, pushed a grocery cart filled with all their worldly possessions across that development's nature trail into the community where she started stopping at every home asking for assistance. Rather than doing something faith based like clothing and feeding her, the "good" people of this community called their front gatehouse and complained. Rather than help her, security unceremoniously ejected this poor woman from their picture perfect world.
The Huffington Post did a piece on this area of Florida and despite some of the gripes in the comment thread, I have to say it is a fair representation of the people and attitudes that prevail in the Leesburg area. The Villages Sun is a fluff piece of a newspaper. This superficial community doesn't like reality based news. It doesn't fit their world view bias.
My mother-in-law lives in this area and due to her illness, I've spent some weeks here leading up to the election. This was a Romney town and I was was fairly outspoken in my support for President Obama. It didn't win me many friends. One of the more notable exchanges I had was over the repressive aspects of these home owner associations which I will tell you on the other side of the squiggle.
