Leisure World Seal Beach is an active-seniors’ retirement community opened in 1962 that introduced many innovations characterizing later senior property developments. When built, it was the nation's first mass-marketed housing project, first gated senior community, first all-electric community, and the first to have a health insurance plan and access to an on-site medical center included in its residents’ monthly payments. At its opening, it was the world's largest housing development for seniors, the United States’ largest cooperative housing development, and the prototype for six other Leisure World communities across the United States built by the Rossmoor Corp, co-founded by developers Ross W. Cortese and his wife, Alona Marlowe Cortese. It is located in Seal Beach, which fronts the Pacific Ocean in Orange County, California. Leisure World houses approximately 9,600 residents in 6,608 one- and two-bedroom apartments and condominiums.
History While both were taking evening real estate classes at Hollywood High School, Ross W. Cortese, a Depression-era high-school dropout, and a part-time contractor flipping homes in Compton, met former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract actress Alona Marlowe (née Ilona L. Goetten). They married in 1948, and capitalizing on her real estate license, organized a corporation under the name Alona Rey Homes, Inc. After building a small development in Culver City, the couple began undertaking larger projects such as Frematic Homes in Anaheim.
Frematic Homes employed designer Cliff May’s innovative California Ranch residential concept “that let the outside in," integrating extensive prefabrication techniques, post-and-beam construction, slab floors, and floor-to-ceiling windows later incorporated into Leisure World. The Frematic development also showcased the Corteses’ emerging public relations sensibility, with Westinghouse spokesperson, Hollywood actress Betty Furness, appearing in newspaper photographs with Ross Cortese in one of Frematic's “Betty Furness Beautility Kitchens.”
The Corteses’ repeated successes led them, along with general contractor Murray Ward, to found Rossmoor Corp. in 1951.(5) From 1955 through 1961, the company built the “Walled City of Rossmoor,” a comprehensive Orange County development the company envisioned would contain all the services of a town for its projected 10,000 residents. However, Ross Cortese's concept of a “comprehensive” development was thwarted when the hospital he wished to build for Rossmoor's population was repeatedly denied.
Interest in Aging
Nonetheless, the couple's study of medical services drew their attention to the health and housing needs of older adults, whose numbers were growing rapidly in the post-war period. The Corteses’ interest culminated in the couple's $4 million gift founding what became the University of Southern California’s gerontology school, now the world’s largest academic program researching older adults. Alona Cortese later endowed The Alona Cortese Elder Law Center at the Chapman University School of Law, which provides pro bono legal representation for seniors.
This interest influenced many of the Corteses’ future business enterprises. In 1961, upon finishing the Rossmoor housing development bordering Los Alamitos, California, Ross Cortese said the housing needs of seniors “have not been met even half-way thus far. None has answered the attendant economic, medical and sociological needs of the majority of our senior citizens.”
While Arizona’s Youngtown and Sun City senior living developments had already established the concept of dedicated retirement communities,(11 ), p. 166 the Corteses contemplated a new model for senior housing: a comprehensive cooperative development in which the residents owned not their residential unit, but a share of stock that permitted them to live in the community and own the rights to all the development’s common amenities. The community’s managers, not individual residents, would be responsible for their homes’ maintenance, painting and plumbing, appliances, and landscaping. It would be “not stuck out in the desert,” but near a city so residents could continue to enjoy a city's cultural opportunities and frequent visits from families and old friends. Emulating the company's “Walled City of Rossmoor” experience, the community would be the United States’ first and largest gate-controlled, walled retirement community. One of the most important amenities was a plan offering free on-site medical care and prescriptions as part of the monthly resident's fees, again a first in a U.S. retirement community.
Financing and Construction
Rossmoor Leisure World (as it was initially named) was to be built on a portion of the Hellman Ranch in what was then an un-incorporated square-mile plot in Orange County. Nearly adjacent to the walled Rossmoor development, the $150 million project ($1.4 billion in 2021 dollars) would be the United States’ largest cooperative housing development and its first all-electric community.
However, the project's scope and its “untried” cooperative ownership scheme generated skepticism among potential lenders. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. eventually agreed to finance the project, but stipulated the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guarantee the loan.(6 )
FHA authorities agreed, but established “very strict regulations.” Rossmoor could provide the land and the plans, but “could have no part in building, sales or management.”(6) p.5 Instead, the FHA required that separate nonprofit corporations share the project's ownership. One, the Leisure World Foundation, would supervise the project's construction and marketing.
When residents began to move in, there would be elections from among the residents to serve on the Golden Rain Foundation (GRF) as trustees for all the development's common facilities and to provide community-wide services such as recreation and security. Finally, as each of the parcels comprising the development were populated, the 6,470 planned residential units and the land on which they would be built would be controlled by “mutuals,” a third level of non-profit corporation collectively owned and managed by a board elected by residents of each of the development's parcels.(6) p.6
Promotion
Notwithstanding the awkward governing arrangement, construction of the Seal Beach Leisure World began in mid-1961. Interest rose quickly, propelled by a national marketing campaign that included a 1962 Life magazine advertisement claiming the development was “the most revolutionary new concept in housing since World War II.”
The Life advertisement was part of what is thought to be the first national mass-marketing campaign for a housing project. Hill and Knowlton, then the world's largest public relations firm, obtained widespread newspaper, radio and television coverage that by mid-1963 let the community claim residents from 43 states and 11 countries. The Corteses’ Los Angeles-based advertising firm, Brangham Brewer, spent so much money marketing the development that Leisure World's 1963 ad budget was announced in a free-standing Advertising Age magazine item.
Leisure World's prominence soon allowed the Corteses to assemble a Leisure World Foundation board headed by William G. Simon, the former head of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office and a founding director of The J. Edgar Hoover Foundation; and executive vice president Kenneth E. BeLieu, the former undersecretary of both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army. The other seven trustees included Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley; Hollywood producer Mervyn LeRoy; Paramount Pictures vice president Y. Frank Freeman; Sylvester Smith Jr., a past president of the American Bar Association; and former U.S. Rep. Allan O. Hunter.(6)
While the development would include usual retirement amenities - a golf course, swimming pool, clubhouses and shuffleboard courts - the Seal Beach construction incorporated insights the Corteses had gained through their “desire for data about older adults.” Stairs, steps and curbs would be replaced by ramps. Countertops and wide doors simplified wheelchair access. Showers had built-in seats to avoid slipping accidents. An on-site medical center and pharmacy would provide free access to doctors, diagnostic services, physical therapy and medication to all residents. Every mutual would include large greenbelts, and centralized parking structures would preserve the residential units’ parklike setting and encourage walking and physical activity.
Opening
On Oct. 29, 1961, about four months after construction began, the first model units, called “manors,” went on public display. By day's end, 10,000 people had thronged the grounds and approximately 550 of the 844 units offered had been sold. By March 1963, the administration estimated 300,000 people had toured the grounds and the model homes.
The development's sub-800-square-foot units drew surprisingly prosperous buyers. Even though most residents no longer worked, their annual per-capita income in 1963 was $6,000, 80% higher than the national average.
On June 8, 1962, a single year after construction began, the first residents moved in. A year later, 5,200 of the units had been sold. Over 10% of the first 4,500 units were purchased via mail transactions, many without the buyers ever having seen Leisure World. All the original units were sold by late 1964.
Leisure World's "Medicare"
The Corteses’ health plan, launched amid a vigorous national debate over government involvement in social welfare measures, was frequently labeled “utopian.” It was an important perk touted in the extensive advertising and public relations campaigns that drew attention from national magazines, local broadcasters and newspapers throughout the United States and Canada.
The community's initial executive director, Lewis M. Letson, formerly the top administrator at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, California, said Leisure World's health plan was explicit proof the free enterprise could effectively meet older adults’ health care requirements: “It indicates that there are better solutions to the medical needs of the elderly than socialized medicine.”
The Corteses made major investments in the medical plan. Cortese recruited a former medical director for the United States Public Health Service, surgeon Weldon A. Williamson, to be Leisure World's medical director. Leisure World was almost immediately recognized as a test bed for senior health. Within the clinic's first year, two studies, on heart and vascular diseases, were being conducted among the community's population.
Similarly, the concentration of seniors in one well-known community located in politically conservative Orange County made Leisure World a target for the John F. Kennedy administration's push for its projected government-subsidized senior health care plan. In a 1963 visit to Leisure World, Kennedy's under-secretary for Health, Education and Welfare, Ivan A. Nestingen, mocked the American Medical Association, which he said characterized medical professionals urging government elder health care as “quacks and charlatans.” After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched his and Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to make another personal pitch for what would become known as Medicare.
Ironically, the Corteses’ health care plan precipitated their removal from direct involvement in Leisure World Seal Beach's management. Almost immediately after the first Leisure World residents settled in, their recognition of the value of free doctor visits, medical tests and prescriptions overwhelmed the 10 doctors and 26 nurses Leisure World had hired to manage the community's health needs. The Corteses’ projections dramatically underestimated the attraction of free health care. Instead of the predicted 6.2 doctor visits per year, Leisure World residents averaged 12 doctor visits annually.