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Real estate

Hotter Than the Hubs…Still

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Seven in the morning. The dog and I are back from the Morning Trudge. She’s taken up her position in the cool cave under the toilet. The human is desperately swilling iced tea.

Ugh! What an AWFUL morning! Hot and sticky and swampy…feels like hideous Saudi Arabia, there on the shore of the Persian Gulf where we lived for ten years. That was an awful place then. And this is an awful place just now.

We walked by our transplanted neighbor J’s house. It used to belong to SDXB, until he got spooked by Tony the Romanian Landlord and ran away to Sun City. In his panic, SDXB merrily sold the place for a pence to the City of Phoenix, who gave it away to a welfare case.

That lady is a sweetheart and a nice person to have as a neighbor. But she has neither the experience nor the cash to maintain an aging upper-middle-class house. Sooo…. the place has more or less gone to pot.

And of course, that affects property values for all of us.

Thank you, Big Brother! 

😀

Occasionally I think about moving down into M’hijito’s neighborhood. Centrally located, within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store, madly gentrifying, steps from a bus line….  But…

But GAWD, do I hate moving! Even if the cost were irrelevant (which ain’t the case anymore!), packing up four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a dining room, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a two-car garage is more than I care to contemplate. Just. Too. Much. Work!

But…hmmm….  It might be worth it.

Just depends on which way the wind blows.

If the city continues to give away houses here, property values will tank. In that case, I won’t be able to get enough for this house to move into a comparably middle-class neighborhood, and when M’Hijito inherits this place, its value will be nil. So…

Could be worth selling out now and jumping to a more stable district.

My neighborhood is “less stable,” shall we say, because we are the next one south of a dangerous slum. The low-income district to the north of us is notorious, and it took some nerve (and maybe some stupidity?) to buy into our area.

Because of that neighboring blight, I was able to afford much nicer housing than I could have hoped to buy anywhere else in the central city or the East Valley.

Our area has stayed stolidly middle-class since I moved in — a good 15 years ago. But it’s beginning to look like that may not be the case much longer. The accursed city ran a train line up Main Drag West, conveniently bringing every bum in town up to our neighborhood. The nearby grocery stores are getting old…the infrastructure is getting old…everything is getting old. So…

It may be time to start thinking about moving elsewhere. Or consigning myself now to the inevitable old folks’ prison.

At any rate: for the moment…yes. The place is still pleasantly tidy and blandly middle-class. But how long will that be the case?

Anyone’s guess…

Another Soggy Doggy Day in Arizona

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LOL! What was I was mooning on about yesterday, how even though it’s hotter than Hell here, at least the air is dry and the humidity is low?

Har har!!!!

Today we’re looking at a high of 114º, with humidity of 27%.  If that ain’t Rasty Nasty, the lovely American oil compound where we resided on the shore of the Persian Gulf, I’d like to know what it is!

Twenty. Seven. Percent of the air will be water!  Ugh!

Welp! The dawg and the human are back from this morning’s trek around the ‘Hood. The human is drenched with sweat. What a horrid morning!

We passed our friend Josie’s house: she who inherited the place from the City of Phoenix after her place was bulldozed to build an airport runway.

Pore folks live on airport property, ya know. So there she was, minding her own business as she dodged jet airplanes, and along came the City, grabbed her house, and gave her SDXB’s place. He had moved to Sun City — and so anxious was he to get away from his bosom enemy, Tony the Romanian Landlord, that he handed the house over to the City for a song.

Little did anyone (other than SDXB) know that the plumbing under the kitchen sink had been the target — several times — of SDXB’s amateur repair jobs. It had sprung a series of leaks, and each time he, being too parsimonious to hire a qualified craftsman, did the fix-it job himself.

Well…this time when it sprang another leak, the water flooded the entire damn house! Especially the kitchen, the laundry room, the dining room, the living room, and up the hallway into the bedrooms.

Good…
Lord…

So Josie came home to a deluge. All the carpeting had to be removed. Plumbing changed out. Cabinetry repaired. CAN you imagine?

These houses were cheaply built to begin with — though they’re far better constructed than today’s junk out in the suburbs. You don’t even want to know what resulted from SDXB’s amateur plumbing job.

😀  You don’t have to know: all you have to do is glance at the ripped-out carpeting piled in Josie’s front yard!

Anyway, just now it’s as wet outside in the open air as it is inside Josie’s house! High, ineffectual-looking clouds lurk off to the east and the north. Not a great day for hiking a mile or two around the neighborhood.

Ugh! I could brain my father for dragging me to Arizona. Too late: his brain resides inside an urn, as part of a pile of ashes.

But seriously: whatever could he have been thinking? Didn’t care, I guess, what hauling me to the middle of the desert and plopping me in a third-rate university would do to my optimistically planned academic career. Hey! Why does a woman need a Ph.D. from Berkeley, anyhow?

July 4? Really? And…then what?

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Here we are on our nation’s birthday. Strolled through the neighborhood, basically to pass the time and to eyeball the neighbors’ homes. And…well…

It’s overcast and gray and wet out there. Not raining…yet. But I reckon it will be, soon enough.

So much for watching the fireworks, eh?

Usually, a bunch of them are visible from our parts. A large housing tract to the north of us puts on quite a show. Neighbors here in the ‘Hood customarily blast the sky for a couple of hours. And the City (or some such entity) expends money and gunpowder on a big show in the central part of town.

We’ll see how that goes tonight, depending on the weather.

***

Meanwhile, today’s sight-seeing stroll suggests the ‘Hood’s property values are holding strong….and probably rising. What I saw this afternoon, hiking from pillar to post, makes me feel very glad that I did not move out to Sun City when SDXB made his escape.

These houses — and this whole neighborhood — are looking better and better. Homes are not only being maintained handsomely, they’re being upgraded, enlarged, fancified. And you can bet their value is upgrading like crazy, too.

It would appear that, as predicted some time ago, the presence of the recently installed light-rail train has indeed jacked up the appeal and the value of the ‘Hood. If that continues, by the time my son inherits this house, it will be worth a sh!tload of money. He’ll be able to sell it and invest the proceeds; or sell his own home and move in here free & clear; or sell both houses and move to…where? San Francisco?

For sure.

Or, I suppose, he could turn one of the two houses into a rental and use that real estate to generate a steady income.

Interesting, eh? 

GLUBBY Glubby Day

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Good Gawd!  High noon on a mid-June day, and…it’s 110 in the shade of the back porch! Today’s high was predicted to be a mere 108 degrees, with 38% chance of rain.

UNbelievable.

The dawg and I shot out of the house at dawn. It was already too late to be walking around out there. But tonight the temp is supposed to drop to a chilly 87 degrees.

Brrr! Better get out the jacket! 

Seriously: the only way Ruby can get her daily walk, in this kinda weather, is to take her out at sunrise, before the concrete and asphalt can heat up. Wait too long, and her little feet will be scorched.

This is the time of year when, really, I do wish I lived somewhere else. And…really…if my son weren’t here, I most surely would live somewhere else. Far, far from here!

Where would I go?

Well…the San Francisco Bay Area is whence my mother’s better side of the family emanated. Most of those folks are long gone…but the City is still there.

Given all the money in the world, I’d rent a flat in the Marina. Beautiful spot!

Given half the money in the world, I’d buy or rent a house in Berkeley: aging but handsome and urbane.

But of course, I do not have all the money in the world, or even half of it. Here in Arizona, a pauper like me (heh!) could afford to wriggle into any of several fairly pleasant venues.

One is a suburb of Scottsdale called Fountain Hills. It’s pretty expensive: upper-middle-class, close to the Mayo Clinic, near a slew of suburban amenities. Nice homes, though often cheaply built. Right now, the median listing price is just $799,000.

Yep. Must hurry right out and buy one!

Moving on… Another famously tony area is called North Central Phoenix. That’s where the Funny Farm resides: on the fringe of that district.

Here’s a one-bedroom, one-bath palace in North Central: a mere $94,500. What a bargain! An actual house, though, rather than a dinky condo? Get ready to pony up $745,000.

Every time I peruse the local real estate ads, I get more horrified.

Well, if by some miracle I can hang onto the Funny Farm until I die, M’hijito will inherit a valuable chunk of dirt. Zillow thinks my house is worth $584,000. Not much, by comparison of other Los-Angelized real estate in these parts.

But…he has expressed a desire to move to his dad’s home town in Colorado: a little burg called Grand Junction. Prices there are MUCH lower. For a fraction of what he can get for my house, he can buy a palace there.

Small town living is not to my taste, personally. But…he hasn’t spent his childhood in such a place, and so maybe as a grown man he might find it pleasant enough. Highly desirable, even. 

Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda…

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Stumbling around the ‘Hood through a superheated afternoon exercise walk, I happened to think of a long-ago near-miss in the Department of Real Estate. Videlicet: years ago — yea verily, a couple of decades ago — I very nearly bought a house in a distant suburban development called Fountain Hills.

It’s a pleasantly ritzy-titzy town — I would (and do) call it a suburb — clinging to the far east side of Scottsdale. My son had not yet moved back to Phoenix, and so the distance from central Phoenix wasn’t a concern. In fact, it was closer to where I was working — Arizona State University — than where I’m living  now. So, in some ways it would have been a practical move. And it would have put me into a piece of real estate whose value was headed for the stratosphere.

By random serendipity, I decided against that move.

And a good thing that was, since there was no way my son would have settled halfway to Payson at the time he moved back to Phoenix.

And by serendipity, too, SDXB bought a house in North Central Phoenix, just as we were becoming an Item. Consequently, I bought a house a block from his new place, and now…here I am, basically within walking distance of the kid’s house, altogether within walking distance of three major grocery markets, a doctor’s office, a dentist’s office, a computer store, a hair stylist’s, and…on and on and on!

I ended up in the middle of everything, happy to be here, and surprisingly close to my son’s place. What more could anyone want, eh?

But sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if I’d gone ahead and bought a place out there on the far side of Scottsdale.

* It would have been within walking distance of my best friend’s house: she who worked prominently and successfully at Scottsdale Community College.

* Between her influence and the that neighborhood’s relative proximity to Scottsdale Community College, I almost certainly would have landed a full-time job there.

* In Maricopa County (where we dwell), the community colleges pay exceptionally well — usually more than the university does.

* For a non-tenurable employee of the university (graduates of ASU or the UofA are ineligible for tenure in the state universities), the community college’s pay would have been much better. And a job at one of those colleges would have been much better better endowed with upward mobility than my job at ASU was.

No doubt by now I’d be retired from any such job, and living happily ever after.

* And if my son had been willing to subject himself to his freshman and sophomore years in junior college courses (not bloody likely!), I could have gifted him with two years of tuition-free college credit.

So…on reflection, one can see that moving into the community colleges would have had some substantial — even huge — benefits.

Ultimately, though…I think I’m glad I stayed with Arizona State University, glad I drifted into this neighborhood, glad I floated along here until retirement. I really do like this province of Phoenix, and like this specific part of the city. 

Real Estate Awe

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Wanna see something that’ll drop your jaw? 

Take a look at this mansion…

The place is in Fountain Hills, an upscale tract on the northeast side of Scottsdale.

WHAT A WRECK! And they want four hundred grand for it!

Hey. Fountain Hills is real tony and all that…and yeah, you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from there. But…good lord! EVERYTHING in this shack would have to be renovated, including the pool and the landscaping.

Well. I guess it tellsya: Rich people will let real estate go to wrack and ruin, too. 😀

***

But doesn’t it boggle your mind? I mean, when you consider what that place should be worth… Fountain Hills is one of the toniest subdivisions in the Valley — probably in the entire state.

I can’t even imagine letting a place like that…in a location like that!…go down the tubes.

Even if they used it as a rental, it’s hard to believe anyone with half a functioning brain cell would have turned it into a wreck.

Four hundred grand at auction. Hell, I wouldn’t give them four hundred bucks for it. Just imagine what it will cost to restore that place to a livable house in a radically upscale subdivision!

Clicking through the images takes your breath away, doesn’t it?  Really…the best you could do with this place is to level it and build a new house. And that would require you to get your hands on it for one helluva lot less than 400 grand.

Wow!!