Linda Burgess believes that age is just a number. When she set off last year to buy a house in the Los Angeles area, her goal was to find not just the ideal home, but the ideal community to support her active social life.
She was hoping it would be in the South Bay. Ms. Burgess, 73, had been a longtime resident of this coastal pocket of southern Los Angeles County, which includes the cities of El Segundo, Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach. She never married and has no children; over the decades, a tight-knit group of friends had become her family.
When her role as an underwriter for the health care company Kaiser Permanente took her to Oregon in 2007, it wasn’t just the lack of sunshine that made her homesick. “I really missed my people in Southern California,” she said. “I moved there when I was in my 50s, and it was so hard to build a social circle. So I decided to come home.”
In 2017, she bought a two-bedroom house in the waterfront neighborhood of San Pedro that she could share with her foster dogs, who sometimes number as many as nine. But Ms. Burgess, a self-professed serial homebuyer, soon felt itchy feet. “I get restless every five years or so,” she said. “I don’t stay put for long.”
Kathleen Callahan, a broker with eXp Realty, whom Ms. Burgess met through a friend in her book club, signed on to help her find the next spot. “Linda’s in maintenance mode at this point in her life,” she said. “She just wanted to cash out and maintain her lifestyle.”
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They looked at several homes in the South Bay, but with a budget of around $450,000 in a frenzied pandemic market, Ms. Burgess knew she would have to make a choice: pay more and rent out part of the house to defray costs or leave her friends behind and head inland, where prices were lower. “Nothing near the beach cities was affordable,” she said.
She felt her options expand slightly, however, when she visited a friend in Arizona who had recently moved into an active-adult community, where owners must be at least 55 years old. Ms. Burgess had never considered 55-plus housing, and she was intrigued by the swimming pools, walking trails and busy calendar of activities.
“Everything about it was awesome — except I don’t want to live in Arizona,” she said.
But she began to think that, with the right fit, she might be willing to leave the South Bay. Affordable homes in desirable 55-plus communities were much farther inland — in Beaumont, for example, a fast-growing bedroom community 90 miles east of San Pedro. But some developments were subject to Mello-Roos, a special tax paid by residents at many planned communities in California. So she kept an eye on conventional homes in the South Bay as she hunted.
Among her options:
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