| Spotlight: real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran |
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 You name 100 retirement destinations. What are your three favorite spots?
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 What happens is I start to fall in love with so many of my picks! But there's a little place called Harbour Island in the Bahamas that I just love. First of all, it's probably the equivalent of three city blocks wide, but it's like popping into a universe out of the Great Gatsby era. It has three large rickety-rackety mansions on the sea and everyone else in that town lives in bungalows. There are no cars; everyone drives a puttering, rusting golf cart. There are goats everywhere; they seem to freely graze. It's lovely and it's so cheap to live there. You can get a beautifully restored cottage for under $200,000 on the ocean. The food is cheap and there is a whole culture of people there who are so into cooking.
Another one I really like is this tiny little tree house community (Tryon Farm, Michigan City, Ind.) an hour east of Chicago. These are some of the friendliest people in the world and they're all kinds of people. You have young people with families and kids go to school, but when they come home they live in tree houses. For many of us who want to be one with nature, what can be so bad about living in a tree house?
And I love Eugene, Ore. It's probably the greenest city in America, and I don't just mean in terms of trees. There are very few cars because people opt not to have them; people travel by bike and on foot. They constructed the entire city around the concept that it had to be self-sufficient, so it generates all of its own power. It's designed around its bike trails, and much like many places in Europe now, you take a bike and leave it wherever you want and take another bike home. This is a community of very happy people because they have something in common, so they become friends. What they have in common in the universe -- they're all dedicated to the simple way. You wind up feeling very much at home there if that's your cup of tea.
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Where does Barbara Corcoran fit into this matrix? |
I'm one of those "Boomerang" type people. I could not envision ever leaving New York City, but put me there seven days a week, I'm going to go crazy. What I have now is a place on Fire Island; there are no cars, just bicycles, an hour outside of New York so I can get to it easily. It's a total pulling-out of the plug; it's the opposite of New York. But we now have our third trip planned out to Harbour Island. We really want to trade in our little summerhouse to an all-year-round-type house. I think my pick is going to be Harbour Island, but I'm arguing with my husband because he thinks that Panama City is a much better pick, a much more exciting place. So we're sorting it out. When it comes to where we live, usually it's the wife who wins, I find.
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