One of my friends, a contributor to Arizona Highways when I worked there, lived about a half-mile from the Investment House. Late one night he was murdered by two young thugs who thought it would be fun to beat an elderly cripple to death and then run their car back and forth over his head a few times.

It happens in the best of neighborhoods. The pair who murdered their business partner and dumped him in a garbage bin, the society matron who took a chainsaw to her husband’s corpse, the dude who shot his wife and kids and burned the house down around them and then disappeared into the desert: they lived in snooty Scottsdale. The couple whose house guest was dragged into a bedroom by home invaders and summarily shot lived in Sun City. No place in any large city is safe.

Make that no human habitation is truly safe. Man is the most dangerous animal on the face of the planet.

Most Arizona public schools are very poor. The house is within walking distance of a school, but it’s one that most middle-class residents would avoid. The school is bordered by a downscale shopping center, a large cluster of low-rent apartments housing transients whose children rarely attend the same school for an entire year, and a gang-infested slum. People who live in the area who can afford it put their kids in private or parochial schools. There are a few charter schools, but most of them target special-needs children, so if your kids are bright and you care about their education, you end up paying your taxes for the inadequate public schools and then ponying up some more cash to put your kid in a private school that, in a state where the leadership cared about public education, would be considered just OK.

This situation is a major cause of the Southern California-style sprawl in Arizona. Developers, who populate and run the city council and the county board of supervisors, over the years have stacked the deck against residents who want to live in centrally located neighborhoods by deliberately letting central areas run down, by granting permits for low-income housing in or near the few remaining middle-class neighborhoods, by running freeways through gentrifying historic districts, and by underfunding central-city schools. This tends to push middle-income families into the suburbs, where the schools are newer, more homogeneous demographically, somewhat safer, and somewhat better academically. The result is that the market for centrally located property tends to be limited to DINKs, gay singles and couples, and high-earning professionals who can put their kids in private schools.

That’s not all bad, because DINKs, affluent singles, and lawyers, doctors and business executives can afford to pay for the privilege of not having to drive an hour to get to work. But it does mean there are fewer people interested in buying middle-income houses in the central city. We were betting that the area would gentrify; thanks to the collapse of the Bush economy, it will be quite a while before that happens.

I know it must be scary as someone with a second home, given the current environment. But if you can just hang onto it for awhile, my guess is that you’ll be glad you did. If your son is occupying it/going to school right now, then it’s probably a good investment. At least here in Seattle, anything even remotely close to a school is worthwhile investment property. There will always be students going to school, and chances are those numbers will always be increasing. The dorms, however, rarely increase proportionally. So housing is always desirable.

Just a thought.

Abby