Coffee heat rising

Real estate

Gorgeous Morning

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The sun has risen on a magnificent clear day. Ruby the Corgi and I have circumambulated the ‘Hood, and now we’re back in the shack waiting for the water to heat so as to make a pot of awesome coffee. And I think…

I’m thinking about a friend of mine and his wife, who was one of my graduate students…

…he used to get up in the morning and walk to work, while she got up and made trouble. And oh, my goodness! Could that lady make trouble! She went to graduate school to learn the best techniques. Seriously: she had taken an M.A. and then pursued a Ph.D. in political science. 😀

They lived in a handsome patio home within walking distance of a prominent horse track, where he had a moderately prestigious job.  Meanwhile, her day job was to make trouble in the condo association. She was very good at it.

When they started finding death threats taped to their front gate, they decided to sell up and move to a house in a nearby development called Moon Valley. And that place was a piece of junk!

I know, because I helped them repair and paint the interior before they moved in. The south-facing wall was so flimsy and so spectacularly uninsulated that the tile floor was actually hot under my bare feet for a good yard inside the building. And flimsy indeed: you could take your fist and punch a hole through the outside wall. Reach inside, unlock the front door’s deadbolt, and let yourself in.

No kidding: it did happen.

He came down with cancer and died, not at all pleased with his wife’s behavior. She shifted around to a few condos and apartments here in the Valley; then moved back to the Midwest, where her family lived. Can’t find her online, so I figure she must have passed away by now — she was no spring chicken when I knew her, and that was some years ago.

Ah, the thoughts that occupy one’s mind on a gorgeous morning….

A…a…n…d furthermore….

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Here’s what was going on yesterday evening, while Ruby the Corgi and I were doggy-walking and dodging bullets.

{sigh}

Y’know, this stuff is gettin’ old. I’m beginning to think SDXB was right; time to move to Sun City, where you can enjoy the Silence of the Mausoleum, day in and night out.

Having lived in Sun City when my parents moved there, dragging me with them and dumping me at the University of Arizona, I really, really do not want to live there again. So, when SDXB announced he was headed west, I refused to go with him. But sweartagod, I’m beginning to think that may have been a mistake.

At the time SDXB moved out there, it was fairly calm here in North Phoenix, for a big-city neighborhood. But…that’s not so true anymore. It feels like every time you turn around, along comes some new shenanigan. You can’t take the dog for a walk around the block without carrying a pistol with you.

But…my problem with Sun City is that I don’t wanna live in a mausoleum. And that’s what the place feels like. The silence of the tomb reigns. Plus you have that generation’s 1950s-style hatred of minority: the place is Whiteyville with a vengeance.

One of my friends moved out there from the East Valley, delighted at the prospect of living in a place designed for retirees. Problem is, it’s a place designed for white retirees…and he ain’t one of those. The locals ganged up on the poor guy and hounded him until he moved out!

Guess I should have warned him. But as a practical matter, it’s been over 60 years since my parents moved to Sun City. And frankly, I assumed the locals would have come into the 21st century by now. Wrong!

That notwithstanding, I find it a dreary and depressing venue. Weirdly enough, I like the sound of children playing. And even of an occasional teenager blasting the car radio as they cruise up the street. That, plus it’s a 40-minute drive into central Phoenix, where my son lives. I’d never see the guy again!

Well. You don’t have to move to a ghetto for old folks to escape the constant whiz of flying bullets. Other areas of the city are reasonably quiet and safe.

Problem is, they’re a lot more expensive than this part of town. Plus they’re further from M’hijito’s house.

I kinda doubt that I could get enough for this house to buy another house in points east. Might be able to get into a fairly tony North Central high-rise apartment…but then what am I gonna do with Ruby?

Plus…truth to tell, I love this house. It’s a couple of bedrooms too large, but otherwise it’s perfect for me.

  • It’s in a moderately safe neighborhood.
  • It’s close to my preferred shopping venues.
  • It’s easy to keep clean.
  • It has a nice pool…one that, for an exorbitant price, responds with Pool Joy to the ministrations of a hired pool dude.
  • It has gorgeous mature trees. And desert landscaping.
  • It has adequately nice neighbors.

Why on earth would I want to move?

A Balmy Afternoon in Lovely Phoenix

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Speaking of garden spots where you duck for cover as the local F16’s blast by you (as we were this morning), jet planes have been roaring over the back yard half the afternoon.

Bored with that racket, I got in the car and went for a real-estate-ogling drive. Frankly, I didn’t see much that interested me — a few districts in North Central Phoenix are better than this one, but none of them outrank it significantly. Did find an area in the shadow of the North Mountain that I’d never noticed before. Drove around and around…kind of a nice spread.

But not so nice that I feel any interest in looking at the real estate offerings there. Certainly not to the tune of another hundred grand…

Like Southern California, North-Central  Phoenix is gifted with a monotonous sameness. The houses are much the same, the road layouts are much the same, the neighborhoods are much the same, the schools all look alike. Ugh.

* Berkeley, this place is not.
* San Berdoo, it is not.
* San Francisco, it is not.
* Hollywood, it is not.
* San Jose, it is not.
* Santa Barbara, it is not.

One could go on and on. Any city that is not like any other city: that’s a category into which Phoenix will never fit. The boredom factor is astonishing! 😀

By and large the whole place is monotonous, dull, middle-class, and boring.

It’s four in the afternoon, and jet airplanes are still roaring overhead. Most of these are now passenger planes, coming into or flying out of Sky Harbor Airport.

I’ve been home less than an hour and the phone has jangled three times, bearing exciting messages from phone solicitors. How can I say how sick and tired I am of jerks who call me on the phone trying to peddle stuff?

They must be able to sucker people in…otherwise, their employers wouldn’t waste money hiring them to dispense phone hustles.

Yes, the damn phone CAN be turned off or disconnected. But that means I’ll miss calls that matter — a call from my son or a friend, for example. How do I resent having to disconnect a service that I pay for to block the constant hustle? Lemme count the ways….

WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU…. HONK HONK HONK!!!

Another ambulance or cop car roaring up Conduit of Blight Blvd…on and on and weeeuuuing on and on…

What a place!

Moving: A Bad Idea

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So here I am: coveting the Old Neighborhood. Thinking how much I’d love to move back down into the historic mid-town Encanto neighborhood, where DXH and I spent the first 15 years or so of our marriage. Where M’ijito grew old enough to pass through the first several years of the tony private grade school where we sent him. Where I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation, got it accepted by a prestigious publisher, finished the degree, and thereby made myself unemployable.

Ahhhh, the good ole days!

Ruby and I traipsed all over the place this afternoon, from our old part of the district through the expensively tony Palmcroft neighborhood, into the park…round and round.

I loved our time in the Encanto/Palmcroft district, and greatly regretted feeling we needed to move out. Before we sold our beautiful historic home and moved up to the North Central area, DXH had told me we would put our son in the highly respected Madison schools, the best public school district in the state. I figured Cool! He could get a first-rate K-8 experience, meet and make friends with offspring of the prominent North Central set, and from there proceed with the other Richistani kids to attend the weighty and prestigious Brophy Catholic High School. Or, failing that, go through Central High School, without doubt the state’s best public high school.

Well. Uh…no.

Once we got moved, DXH refused to switch the kid into a public school. So there we were in Snobsville North, where I knew no one and no one felt any craving to make friends with white trash of my ilk.

(No, in case you haven’t figured it out: My parents were not professionals, they were not even college graduates, and they knew nothing about how to function as socialites…)

The marriage didn’t survive that fun period. I ended up  back south where the WT live, and then eventually skipped around to the far side of the tony North Central district, landed in some apartments on the north side, and extracted a full-time teaching job from Arizona State University.

At any rate, leaving the Encanto District to move up to North Central meant leaving behind beloved neighbors, beautiful historic houses, and a wonderful central location close to cultural and entertainment amenities. Eventually it also meant me leaving behind the marriage, the lawyer, and the trying social life…and the beloved neighbors, the beautiful historic houses, and the central city location with its proximity to cultural and entertainment amenities.

Ohhh well…

Since then, a lot of things have changed. A full-time job at the Great Desert University meant I could support myself. My parents’ dying, one at a time, meant I had no one to nag me to stay in the (highly advantageous) marriage. But their demise also left me with enough money to support me for the rest of my life. I bought into a decent neighborhood on the fringe of North Central, and here we are.

But I still miss the lovely Encanto district. Cruising the area, I wondered: would I like to sell my house here on the fringe of Sunnyslope and move back downtown?

The answer is mixed. A lot of things are improved up here on the north end of North Central, as compared to the picturesque historic Encanto district. But a lot of things are de-proved, as it were…

Why move?

  • Sunnyslope is kind of menacing. It is, after all, a high-crime area.
  • We therefore have lots of noise from cop helicopters.
  • Then there’s the noise from the annoying lightrail train.
  • The noise from  traffic and sirens on Conduit of Blight Blvd amplify the racket.
  • And we do have some interestingly sh!t-headed neighbors.

Why NOT move?

  • I could in theory walk to two markets & a drugstore from here. My spectacularly superannuated great-grandmother used to walk that far several times a week in Berkeley: straight uphill. Here, though, to get through the heat and dodge the panhandlers and thieves, you have to drive to the stores or use Uber.
  • M’hijito wants this house.
  • I don’t know anybody downtown anymore.
  • Young people who don’t like older people infest that place — Encanto is Encanto because of the young people who covet the beautiful historic homes. Discrimination against elders is a real thing, and it’s likely to be far worse there in Yuppieville than it is up here in a more diverse neighborhood.
  • It’s even noisier there than it is here (she says,. as a plane buzzes overhead…).
  • One wonders: why spend that kinda money for not much improvement in lifestyle?
  • The pool here is an expensive nuisance, but it could be drained and decked.
  • The Romanian Landlord’s tribe are shitheads, but WGAS? And what guarantees that you won’t have shitheads there?

Many more nuances come into play:

  • Care of elders: soon enough, I may have to hire someone to come in to care for me, or else move into a long-term care facility.
  • This house is paid for and in good condition. If I pass it to M’jito he could move in here and have a palatial little shack with a pool and about four times more space than he needs.
  • On the other hand, who wants to pay for and ride herd on four times more space than you need?
  • Unloading this place and moving into a care facility might greatly reduce my taxes.
  • This area is really not very safe.
  • But then, neither is the area where M’jito lives. Toss-up!

The truth is, I don’t know which way to jump because it probably doesn’t matter which way one jumps. Either way presents a set of pro’s and a set of con’s.

So…we’re cast back on that reliable old adage:

When in doubt, don ‘t.

The Salton Sea Boondoggle

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About the time we came back from Saudi Arabia for (thank gawd!) our last long leave, my father celebrated by purchasing the Car of His Dreams: a Chrysler sedan. He bought it in New York. He and my mother drove it across the country to San Francisco, where he took up a first-mate’s job on an oil tanker and we lived for a couple of years in a tony apartment complex called Parkmerced. Then he got another, better-paying job, shipping out of Long Beach, California.  So my mother and I packed up all our worldly goods, sent everything south, and moved into a (crummy!) apartment in Southern California.

Of course, we took the new Chrysler with us.

My father was so proud of that car. It was a Rolls Royce for the working classes. At least, so it was in his mind.

Meanwhile, my father being quite the cheapskate, my mother took it into her head to create her own little career: selling real estate. She had become friendly with a real estate saleswoman who was quite the scam artist. This woman persuaded my mother to get a real estate license and throw in with her, selling houses at the Salton Sea.

Salton Sea, then imagined to be a developer’s bonanza, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.  And my mother got swept right up in it. Fortunately, she didn’t buy any property down there, so my father didn’t lose his hard-earned shirt through her real-estate exploit. But….

Among other things, one aspect of my mother’s project involved driving from L.A. through Palm Springs and down to the half-baked development at Salton Sea. And that involved driving through a broad, sandy desert, where the wind blew fiercely.

Fiercely enough to sandblast the finish off that swell new car, right down to the metal.

My father must have just been horrified when he came home from the ship and saw the paint scoured off his beautiful new car.

And for what?

For naught. Salton Sea, as it developed, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.

***

She had no clue. Neither, unfortunately, did he. But one senses that if he’d had a shore job, if he hadn’t been off at sea for week after week and month after month, he would have sussed out the rip-off before she got caught up in it..

I was just a kid in high school. I therefore had an excuse (of sorts) to have no clue. Instinct suggested that all was not perfect there, but there was no way in Hell (where we were dwelling…) that I could have figured out that it was a huge, ridiculous scam. Even if I could have, my parents paid no attention to me. I MIGHT have alerted my father…but probably not. As far as he was concerned, I was just a weird little kid — and worse, a weird female kid.

So they got sucked into the Salton Sea boondoggle. How much they lost — above and beyond the damage to a brand-new Chrysler — I do not know. They didn’t share their financial matters with a weird little kid.

Mercifully, she didn’t buy any property down there. I’m pretty sure that was only because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He clung to every penny more fiercely than Scrooge McDuck hung onto his dollars.

Luckily for me..

Sentimental Journey…

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Oh, my goodness! You cannot begin to imagine how much my mother would have loved my son. How smart she would have thought he was. How right on in his moral compass and opinions.

And how I would have loved for her to meet him.

Those thoughts (among one helluva lot of others) drifted through my dainty head his morning, as I cruised around the west-side housing subdivisions, sightseeing.

Sun City, where my parents betook themselves for their retirement, is over on the west side. The tracts have continued to grow, crawling across the desert like a hungry fungus. The parenta would be just AY-MAZED if they could see the place today.

But equally amazing is the other growth out there.

The Sun Cities are now HUGE. And whereas the original neighborhoods consisted of little brick bungalows, now the newer parts are built up with standard plaster-and-tile tract houses. Interestingly, though, they’re pretty well designed, Result: even though the houses are eve-to-eve (that would drive me nuts!), they’re rather attractive, and the entire development is more than pleasant enough. I think my mother would have liked its new incarnation.

There’s much more shopping and things to do out there now. Back in the day, my mother had to drive in to Phoenix to shop for anything other than groceries. Now, it looks like just about anything you want can be had without having to drive around much.

The newer chunks of Sun City run right into similar, older tracts, built of brick and mortar.

Would I like to live out there, now that I’m old?

Probably not…for the same reason I’ve never coveted the Sun Cities: It’s segregated housing. Only people of the desired age (and, we might add sub rosa, the desired color) need apply. That’s just not how I wanna live.

A Black friend of mine bought a house out there a few months ago.

He lasted…what? about three weeks.

No kidding: so much hate greeted him that he turned right around and moved back to the East Valley, whence he came. Charming, hm?

That notwithstanding, today it was kind of entertaining — in a blandly monotonous way — to drive around and inspect the houses and the neighborhoods.

But I’m mighty glad I don’t have to live there anymore…