Coffee heat rising

Real estate

GRONK!!

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Not to say “LOL”!

After a day of bopping around town, bouncing from here to the Mayo (halfway to freakin’ Payson) through the tract-house neighborhood where my son’s pals used to live to a thissa and a thatta…really, I don’t even remember!…Finally got home. So, so melodramatically tired.

One of the stops was a grocery store. Another was a Sprouts…which I s’ppose is a grocery store. Into the house with a fistful of eatin’ cheese and a bunch of food for lunch/dinner. Don’t recall what all that was, ’cause I’m too tired to remember it. Schlep and schlep and schlep…finally get home. So, soooo tired: just want to lay down.

Thinking about my mother, middle age coming on her as I reached my early teens.

In California, she took it into her head to become a real estate saleswoman. Quite possibly not one of the wiser choices she could have made.

But I suppose it was no worse than her career in door-to-door Avon Cosmetics sales.

Yah. No kidding. She did love make-up, and so in a weird pre-liberation era way, it made a kinda sense.

Another disaster for my father to laugh at and to mock. 😮

So now she goes out and she gets herself a real estate license. She goes to work for some woman who has befriended her, presumably so she (“friend”) can leave the amateur saleslady sitting on open houses while she — the REAL real estate salesperson — bops about town at will.

Before long, the erstwhile business partner decided…YES!!! THE FUTURE WAS AT THE SALTON SEA!

This boondoggle — a scam that promised to transform a wide spot in the road next to a stinky, stagnant pond in the middle of California’s hottest, most barren desert — led my mother to destroy my father’s new Mercury. When she drove that swell brand-new car through a sandstorm outside of Palm Springs, the wind literally scoured the paint off the hood and front end — all the way down to the bare metal.

You can imagine how impressed my father was. He was going to sea at the time, so by & large wasn’t home to put the eefus on her entrepreneurial efforts.

***

BING BONG!!!!

***

Bing bong? WTF? Who’s out front at three in the afternoon?

Aaaaahhh jeeez! It’s Wonder-Cleaning Lady. Just as I was about to lay my head down on a pillow…

Ugh! I can barely hold my eyes open. Much less figure out where the money I need to pay her is stashed. Or whether I need to go out and cash a check.

So much for that reverie.

BUT…on the subject of little old ladies and Realtor’s licenses…

I’ve taken the reeel estate course that’s supposed to prepare you to pass that exam. I’d need to review it…but it could be done. And…and…

Well: Here’s th’thing:

If I passed the state Realtor’s exam, then in theory I could get a job selling real estate in some local office. Or…FAR more to the point: it would be easy to persuade a local editor that he oughta hire me to cover the real estate beat. And that could be fun.

Truth to tell, I enjoy real estate: find the whole proposition highly entertaining. So I would enjoy interviewing people and tracking down story ideas and writing copy for local and regional rags. In fact, I used to write for a (now defunct) national real-estate magazine, inspiringly titled Real Estate Salesperson, as well as filling up pages of local newspapers with similar maunderings.

*****

And now a day has passed. Apparently in the commotion that accompanies house-cleaning, I forgot to post this squib.

Ohhh well!

The house is clean. I’ve developed a new and highly uncomfortable li’l ailment that’s had me trotting back and forth to the ER. Nothing much is helping it. Already had an appointment with MayoDoc set up for Friday, so that will be an issue to inflict on her. Goodie…life is grand, eh?

And More Neighborhood-Cruising….

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So, going in search of Donna Freedman, proprietor of the eminent personal-finance blog Surviving and Thriving, I cruised out to where she’s visiting: her daughter’s home in a sprawling suburb north of lovely uptown Phoenix.

Wow! When we say this place is Southern-Californicating, we’re not kidding. The area looks just like Orange County did when I was passing through high school in those parts: square mile on square mile of modestly built but not unattractive tract houses, mostly indistinguishable from each other.

And yet…strangely, given my longstanding distaste for look-alike architecture….I kinda liked it. All the houses within eyeshot were nicely maintained. And since a place like that has a serious HOA, it’s highly unlikely that any house anywhere in the entire little empire is a care home for juvenile delinquents.

Now…I don’t especially wanna live someplace where I can be bossed around by a club of neighbors. On the other hand…given recent events across the street, there’s something to be said for it. One thing is for sure: a real, every-homeowner-signed-onto-it HOA would be able to limit the use of its houses by private individuals.

We do have an HOA — not one that has a de facto say in what you can and cannot do with your home. But the problem is: the Romanian Landlord has taken it over: his daughter is its president! 😀

At any rate, the tract in question is just vast. It must go on for square mile after square mile. It surrounds a golf course, and it appears to run up against Moon Valley (another upper-middle-class tract) and the north side of the North Mountains. It’s meticulously maintained — nary a weed to be seen in anyone’s yard. It’s an easy drive to the university (toooo late for this retiree! 😀 ). It’s pretty close to a big Sprouts and a decent Fry’s grocery store. It appears not to be directly under the flight path of any local airports. There is a school there, so it’s clearly not a Sun City-style old-folkerie.

Hmm. On the other hand, I could walk to the Sprouts and the Albertson’s here. Now admittedly, I wouldn’t — it’s not safe to walk up Conduit of Blight Blvd. But in theory, it would be possible.

On the other other hand…hmmm… The city’s smog backs up against the south side of Squaw Peak and the North Mountains. That would suggest that even on high-pollution days, the air in that HOA (on the mountains’ north side) would be breathable. Hmmmm…

Well. I may jump in the car, fill up the gas tank, and take a long, lazy tour of that place.

************

Or…maybe not.

LOL! The build on the houses out there makes my house look like Edinburgh Palace! Just a cruise through photos on the Internet changed my mind about that idea. REAL fast. 😀

The prices are possibly a little less than what I could get for the present palace. But the cost of moving would soak up that difference. Add the usual repairs and improvements one invariably has to make when moving into a house that’s been occupied by someone else…and egad!

It just wouldn’t be worth it to move. In terms of cost of the real estate, it would be about an even trade. But in terms of quality, it would be a large step down.

Soooo…. As for potential places to move, that leaves…what?

* Fountain Hills. Some places out there seem to be roughly comparable to my house. But I’ve seen a number that were clearly cardboard and plaster.

* Sun City. Even if I wanted to live in a ghetto for elderly white folks (I don’t), those houses also are cheaply built. If you don’t have a covered carport along the building’s west wall, any room on that side of the structure is gonna be an oven.

* Central Phoenix. A hot spot for the young and the upwardly mobile. Centrally located houses are outrageously overpriced. The pretty old “historic” buildings require a lot of repair, upgrade, and maintenance work…and it ain’t easy to find workmen who know how to deal with architecture that dates back to the late 1920s.

* North Central. Ritzy-Titzyville. You pay a premium — a large premium — for the address.

* East Central. Ditto.

* Scottsdale. Prices are out of the question and architecture ain’t much better than the junk on the west side.

* South Phoenix. Mostly slum. The areas that aren’t ghetto and slum are less desirable because of the surrounding downscale districts.

Truth to tell, I don’t see any of those places as necessarily better than where I am. The ‘Hood  is one of the choice neighborhoods in the city of Phoenix. No doubt there are fancier or safer areas in Scottsdale or to the north. But face it: every area gets its burglars, its sh!theads, and its lunatics. It doesn’t much matter where you live, as long it’s not truly a slum.

Tempus Continues to Fidget

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Crimineee, here we are halfway through the first month of another year. Who’d’ve thunk it possible?

When you’re old, time shifts into the higher velocities. It passes with absurd speed.

Yesterday I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve enjoyed in quite some time. I happened to be driving around on the east side of the city’s venerable North Central district, and in a moment of idleness, I roamed into the neighborhood where one of my old friends grew up. He lives in Portland now, his parents are deceased, and I haven’t seen any of that crowd in years.

There’s a Weirdness to driving around places you haven’t visited in forever: It looks familiar, and yet it doesn’t look familiar. 😀  I recognized the neighborhood, but I didn’t recognize it. Exactly.

When that friendship was active, his parents lived there. It’s a pleasant little middle-class neighborhood of pleasant little middle-class homes. Dates back to the 1950s or 60s, I’d guess.

Surprisingly, it hasn’t run down. To the contrary! Apparently centrally located single-family homes are hot property! The place looked as good as or — IMHO — better than it did when Dear Friend lived there. The houses are maintained as well or better…actually, I’d say significantly better. That property, because of its central location, is now worth FAR more relative to the rest of the city’s going value. Yet amazingly, it was full of families with kids.

Presumably the kids of doctors and lawyers…there’s no way the average tract-house family could afford that location.

Hm.

If the houses were not significantly older than mine, I might consider moving into that area. But they ARE older…a LOT older. So they would require a lot more maintenance, much of it very expensive maintenance.

On the other hand…they’re a long way from the grim slum that borders my neighborhood to the north. And they’re nowhere near any piles of grim (indeed!), crime-infested apartments like the mess that borders us to the west.

But on the third hand…those older houses are not cheap to maintain. Plus because of its location, the taxes might be higher than mine or my son’s. They’re practically uninsulated, and so summer power bills are astronomical. How you would insulate such a place escapes me — we blew tons of insulation into M’hijito’s attic, and the AC bills on that place, which is similar to the houses I was admiring, simply defy belief. My house, which is larger but 30 years newer, has significantly lower power bills than his does…and his house is probably newer than the places I was coveting yesterday.

Heh! While all that tempus has been fidgeting, a whoooole lotta changes have happened.

My friends divorced. Both have remarried. One lives in Portland, Oregon. The other in Seattle. DXH and I also divorced, though we both still live in lovely Phoenix, where our son also lives. Said son is now a middle-aged man with a highly responsible job and a house rather like the place pictured above.

I’m now retired and, freed from the joys of teaching college students, spend a great deal of time loafing around a pretty little North Central shack. I love my house but could do without the pool — and the house full of juvenile delinquents my bosom enemy installed across the street.

The hassle and expense involved in moving, however, outweigh the potential benefits. So far, I have yet to find a place that looks like its benefits would trump the hassles. The other day I did see a very pretty house within walking distance of my son’s place. But it was in the upscale neighborhood that borders Central Avenue: the price defied belief. Not only that, but because of its age and construction, the cost of running it would have been phenomenal.

Today, it’s highly unlikely that I could afford a house in an area where I would want to live — between about 7th Street and maybe 15th Avenue, from about Missouri to about Northern. The prices are so Californicated now that the cost of buying is in the stratosphere…and that doesn’t even include the cost of packing up and moving.

And so…time passes.

Unholy Christmas…Unholy Scheming

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Over in the fringe precincts of North Central’s Richistan — within walking distance of my son’s house — we had an unholy event the other day. Some nut case — a rather prominent one — murdered his entire family and then blew out his own diseased brain.

The horror of this happening aside…that place is in a lovely area, and right in the middle of the part of Phoenix I frequent. Not only could you walk to M’jito’s place from there, you also could walk to the beloved AJ’s and over to several decent restaurants and even down to my car mechanic’s place without much trouble.

When the unholy story came in across the Internet, an unholy thought leapt into my fevered little mind: I wonder if I could buy that place at a fire-sale price?

Lots of unholiness going around today, no?

Seriously, though: that house is in one of the nicest, prettiest parts of old North Central Phoenix. It’s a lush, irrigated district, far away from the slums of Sunnyslope and West Phoenix, where my house resides.

Dreadful as it seems to think about this…I am seriously thinking of calling one of my Realtor friends to find out if we could glom the house at a price comparable to what we could get for my ever-so-much humbler (and less bloodied…) abode.

On the one hand, you don’t even wanna think about what it would cost to render it livable. Presumably the flooring would have to be replaced, along with a fair amount of drywall. And everything repainted.

One wonders if their homeowner’s insurance would cover any of that. Probably not. Blowing away your family a natural disaster does not make. Besides…who’s left to receive the money?

On the other hand, even if you had to pay every penny of the repairs, it would be worth it. Those are million-dollar houses down there, in a beautiful, mature centrally located district. So…oh, my goodness, what a place!

On the third hand, I hafta admit: I’m not sure I could even afford the property taxes for one of those places.

But ohhh…it would be a long way from Tony’s Home for Juvenile Delinquents, from the oceans of crime represented by Sunnyslop to the north of us and the run-down slum apartments to the west of us.

Seriously: my neighborhood itself is very pleasant, but it’s flanked on two sides by truly dangerous districts. The fancy-Dan neighborhood that recently hosted the scene of the crime is a very nice area, indeed, and the humbler areas (if you can call them that) around it are on the high side of middle-class. Upper-middle-class, really.

If I could get my hands on that place at a fire-sale price…well… Maybe I could afford it.

Tony’s instant slum across the street will cut about a hundred grand off the asking price for my house. But with a suicide/murder scenario in place, buying that place in North Central could be a wash.

That’s assuming I can get the previous owner’s insurance to clean up the blood and repair the damage.

Think I’ll jump in my car and drive down there…see if I can get close enough to shoof around.

High as a Kite? Or Crazy as a Loon?

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In central Arizona’s lovely August heat, Ruby and I have to get out for the daily doggy-walk right at or even shortly before dawn. This stroll takes us around Upper Richistan, about a mile of shaded walking…two if we elect to walk up toward our friend Marge’s house, visit the cow pasture in those parts, and stroll back to the Funny Farm.

This morning was icky hot and humid, so we limited the day’s hike to the Upper Richistan loop. It’s around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. by the time we get to those parts.

So we’re strolling along the road when along comes this couple, a youngish man and what appears to be his wife or girlfriend. And the woman…well…she’s clearly stoned out of her mind. She’s already kinda raving on, and when she sees Ruby, she goes BONKERS.

She starts carrying on with ohhhh corgi!!! it’s a CORGI. look at her cute little butt! And then on and on and on about the cute little butt.

We’re not going to get away from this nut case, so I end up deciding to make an about-face and take another route, back into our low-rent precincts of the ‘Hood .

***

This is Business as Usual in the ‘Hood. The pair probably came from the slum apartments that stand on the far side of Conduit of Blight Blvd. That place, which once meandered pleasantly through a rambling golf course — now a gigantic weed patch — started out as a compound of upper-middle-class rentals. But over the years they’ve gone steadily downhill, and now the golf greens are dead and the apartments are run-down dumps. A resident once shot a cop through the front door of one of those fine dwellings.

Oh well…. Derailed from our usual route through the sylvan glens of Upper Richistan, we head back into our section of the ‘Hood. Up a cross-street to the north of us…hmmmmm….  Some of the houses there are being rebuilt and upgraded. Evidently somebody thinks that, given the central location and the widespread hallucination that there’s something kewl about the lightrail, they can fancify a house and sell it for quite a bit more than it’s worth.

Oh well, indeed.

We circle back into our part of the ‘Hood, over to where the cop lives with his young family, past the home of our eccentric pal who escaped here from the Darkest West Side. And as we walk, we pass by the Old Lady’s House.

Oh, dear.

This woman, a long-time resident of the ‘Hood — quite possibly an original owner! — was widowed and apparently left with exactly nothing. She simply didn’t have the funds to maintain a house, whether or not she owned it free and clear. And one of the things she skimped on to get by was…oh, yes: homeowner’s insurance.

Sooo… When the wild, hurricane-like storms we had a few years ago came through and tore a hole in her roof, she couldn’t afford to get the roof fixed!

This apparently didn’t much matter most of the time: she couldn’t afford air conditioning, either, so it was gonna be hotter than the hubs in there all summer and colder than a bygod all winter. But the big problem was, whenever it rains, water pours into the house like a cascade.

That’s what the wretched woman was having to live in.

Finally, the house was removed from her possession… Unclear whether she died, whether she moved in with someone and just abandoned the place, or whether it was taken for taxes. Most of us think the latter, but who knows? She was moved out of there, and the place stood vacant for awhile.

Now apparently someone has bought it. Whether as an investment or to live in it is unclear. WhatEVER: they just finished installing a whole new roof! And now they’re over there fixing up the walls and presumably repairing and spiffing up throughout.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the present owners move into it, or whether they’ll sell it for a handsome profit.

A place around the corner that was basically rebuilt from a few surviving walls recently sold for something over a million bucks. To give you an idea: my first house in the ‘Hood was a block up the street: I paid $125,000 for it and felt that was too much….  Zillow thinks my present house — same builder, same model, a block & a half further from Conduit of Blight’s noise and crime — is worth $535,000 and change.

Can you imagine?

I sure can’t!!

Coolin’ Down!

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Wunderground sez it’s supposed to hit 112 today. But I wouldn’t put any money on it.

After yesterday’s scorcher, this morning is nice and balmy. Skies are overcast, the cloud cover very slowly growing thicker. It looks suspiciously like we’ll get some rain today.

But best of all, the inside of the house has cooled into the habitable range. Without the sun blasting down on the roof and the skylights, the temp in the house is an astonishing 77 degrees.

Crazy!

Speaking of attempts to cool down…I bought a couple packages of Talenti ice cream at Albertson’s the other day. The kind that comes in small round plastic containers. And the one I happen to crave just now? I can NOT get it open.

Ran hot water over the lid.

Nope.

Tapped the lid all the way around the rim.

Nope.

Knocked the lid hard on the floor, all the way around the rim.

Nope.

Ran hot water over it again.

Nope.

So I guess whenever I get off my duff, I’ll take it back and complain. O’course I’ve already tossed the receipt, so won’t get any money back. But after this, I also won’t buy ice cream there.

Don’t buy much at that store anyway. It’s one of those fine establishments where you don’t feel safe in the parking lot. So it ain’t much loss.

Eyeballing real estate ads.

The prices have gone completely out of reason.

Here’s a place in town…not far from where I live, as a matter of fact. They want SIX HUNDRED GRAND for it.

They’ve renovated the interior…hafta say that for it. Looks like they’ve done a good job at it, too, if you like that kind of stark effect. The backyard, while not a wreck, is gonna require some expensive landscaping. All in all, not a bad li’l house…but still…that’s an INSANE price.

But so is everything else. I couldn’t even begin to get into the coveted Central Avenue high-rise now — prices are pushing a million bucks. For two-bedroom blah apartments.

Price of a house in the same zip code? $1.15 million bucks. And up.

Here’s a two-bedroom look-alike apartment in the high-rise where my friends J & L live.  It looks exactly like their place. Under 1200 square feet…over 700 grand.

Wow!!

For what I could get for my house, I couldn’t afford to move anyplace in the city of Phoenix. Well…not anyplace where one would want to live. Prices are comparably crazy in Fountain Hills

This thing is a condo — an apartment — and centrally located. Look at the insane price! And you’d be running up and down stairs all the time! And it has no yard!

Sun City prices are still below the market in the rest of the metropolitan area. That would be because only a certain type of person wants to live in a ghetto for old people — thus the market is limited, to a degree. And they’re cheesily built, just like most of the cheesy new(er) construction in the Phoenix area.

Well…I’d better post this. WordPress keeps trying to throw me out. And I really should get off my duff and start moving around. ‘Bye!