Here’s a fine, recently built little palace, billed as 1,400 to 1,600 square feet, for sale in the far-flung Phoenix suburb of Anthem, an instant “community” that contributed richly to the destruction of, at the height of the real estate boom, an acre an hour of irreplaceable Sonoran desert habitat. This great lake of lookalike tracts was expected to house as many people as live in the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, most of whom would commute (endlessly!) into town over one, count it, one freeway.
In 2005, somebody paid $329,000 for this place. The current owners have been trying to unload it for the past seven months, with no luck, at the bargain-basement price of $199,000—a 39.5 percent loss on their investment.
This morning Cassie the Corgi and I awoke to a cityscape imbued with a strange yellow light. You couldn’t call it “golden.” Jaundiced fit better. Off in the distance occasional rolls of thunder rumbled across the sky, sounding for all the world like well-aimed bowling balls shooting up a wooden alley. To the south and west, a dark blue-gray storm drifted our way.
Last night’s windstorm blew a bushel of debris into the pool. After fishing the bonnet cleaner’s net off the bottom of the deep end, I decided to let the leaves and twigs sit until after the pump comes on and pushes them into one or two mounds, discretion being the better part. Standing in the back yard waving a metal pole around might tempt fate a little too far, given the flickers of lightning drawing ever nearer and the rain-fat clouds already overhead.
Most amazing: the air was almost cool! With temps low enough to shut off the air conditioner, we opened up the house and let some fresh air in for the first time in weeks. It’s quarter to eight and the thermometer still reads in the mid-eighties. At last! I’m sitting on the deck watching a gentle rain and enjoying my home—for the first time in many a moon.
This is the way central Arizona used to be, back in the Cretaceous before humans came along and wrecked the place. The hideous Phoenix metropolitan area—and believe me, this town is an aesthetic truck wreck, the city parents having studied everything Southern California did wrong and decided to do exactly that—has created a “heat island,” a thermal bubble arising from our having paved over mile after endless square mile with asphalt, concrete, and fake-tile roofs. Where water is no longer affordable (that is, in all of the newer development), the bladed desert floor has been covered with sizzling crushed granite and rock.
All of Arizona, including the low desert where Phoenix resides, used to experience daily thunderstorms and rain throughout the summer, starting about the end of June and lasting until the middle of August. Along about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., the rains would drop temperatures about 20 degrees, from the low 100s to the low 80s or even the 70s.
Summers were hot, but nothing like what we see today. A 115-degree day was a rarity; it might have occurred once every three years or so, and heat like that didn’t last longer than a day or two. Now, 115 is pretty normal for July, and 118 is commonplace. In Sun City last week, SDXB recorded a temperature of 121 on his shaded back porch. That’s right: one hundred and twenty-one degrees. In the shade.
The cause of this change is supposedly the heat island: as the summer storms approach the urban area, they’re bounced back when they hit the wall of heat reflecting off the paved surfaces. And it’s true, you can see the clouds ringing the valley, see them approach, then part and go around us. Personally, I think climate change has something to do with it, too, but that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon is real: the Valley is significantly hotter and significantly drier than it has been in European memory.
What does all this have to do with money? Well, the usual: reeel estate!
La Maya and La Bethulia have been seriously considering the upland town of Prescott as a retirement venue. Since GDU has exhibited an enthusiasm for online courses, La Maya has realized that if she could teach all her classes online, she would not be married to the Valley. La Bethulia, a psychiatric nurse practitioner with a significant reputation, has already been offered work in Prescott. So, they could reasonably move there before either of them quits working.
And since I’m about to quit working with a vengeance, I could in theory retire there, if I could find a decent house that I could afford. With real estate values depressed, usually pricey property is about within reach, especially if I could sell my house by-owner and save the 6 to 8 percent Realtor’s fee.
This summer has been about the worst in my memory. I’ve never seen it stay so oppressively hot for so long. We’ve had day after day after day of 115-degree-plus temperatures, and nights that don’t cool down: it’s routine to walk outside at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. into 100-degree darkness.
IMHO, that’s not livable. Like snowbound northerners, you avoid going outdoors unless you’re forced to. A drive over almost-melting streets is miserable and dangerous—everyone’s tempers are short, people do crazy things, and nastiness is the standard mood of fellow drivers on streets and in the parking lots. When you come out of the grocery store, having left your car locked up for 20 minutes or so, the steering wheel is so hot it will burn your hands, and if your car has vinyl seats, you’d better not be wearing shorts. Literally: people have sustained second-degree burns from sitting on hot car seats.
Meanwhile, every plant on my considerable piece of property has to be watered EVERY DAY. The potted tomatoes, herbs, squash, and cantaloupe are wilting by 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., and if I had the temerity to take a weekend’s vacation in cooler climes, every plant would be dead by 5:00 p.m. on the day I left. Even in full shade, some plants’ leaves are burned. Because of the hot, dusty winds and the fact that Satan and Proserpine (previous owners of the House from Hell) planted the devil-pod tree next to the pool directly in the flow of the prevailing summer winds, the damned pool is chuckablock full of cleaner-choking pods and straplike leaves, all of which have to be fished out of the pool before the system comes on. The tiles have to be cleaned every day, the walls scrubbed down every morning, the pool refilled (it loses about an inch a day to evaporation) every morning.
These outdoor chores take about two to three hours. Every. Single. Day. Miss a day, and you get a green pool and a yardful of dead plants. All this work gets done in 100-degree heat, starting at about 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. It means I get to put in two hours of physical labor in crushing heat under a searing sun before I can feed the dog or have my own breakfast.
And the dog, the one that refuses to use a doggy door and regards the out of doors with horror? She has to be walked before the sun comes up and again after the sun goes down. Otherwise, the pavement will burn her feet.
Know what? I’m bloody sick of it.
So, once again, I’m seriously considering selling the house and moving someplace more habitable.
La Maya’s online property searches have found a number of very nice homes in Prescott in the $300,000 to $400,000 range. I can’t afford that. My house is only worth about $280,000, max. If I have to fork over a Realtor’s commission and assorted rips to the various other characters that have their fingers in every realty transaction, the best I can expect to net on the sale of this house is about $263,000. There are a few places in that price range in and around Prescott. Most of them are tract houses that look cheaply built. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about moving into one of those. But every now and then something like this little historic house pops up: looks like a shotgun house on the outside and appears to be surrounded by newer construction, but all the interior pictures look make it look very charming.
Then there’s the actual cost of moving to be kept in mind. It’s not cheap to pack up a four-bedroom house and haul it to another city. Although I don’t have a lot of furniture, what I do have is stuff I’m not getting rid of—solid birch casework that my mother bought when we came back to this country in the late 1950s, and some leather pieces I couldn’t begin to replace on the nonsalary that will be my income after December 31.
And finally, there’s the question of whether Prescott can provide me a job to earn the required $14,100 to supplement Social Security and retirement income, money that will just barely keep me out of poverty. I’m not at all sure about that. Prescott has only two colleges, and neither of them pays what the Maricopa County Community College District pays adjunct faculty. I’m afraid I’d have to wait tables to keep the coyote from the door. And…well, I don’t want to.
Those are the financial issues. Others: I don’t know anyone up there. And a check of the Weather Underground shows lows of 16 degrees during December 2008 and January 2009. Daytime temperatures are balmy enough…but I’m not at all sure I want to deal with subfreezing nights and the attendant ice on the roads, frozen pipes, and high heating bills.
Nice grass over there, but maybe that green effect is some sort of illusion.
My house is too big for me, and the pool is an ungodly amount of work that’s turned into quite a grind. Maybe what I need to do is look for a smaller place here in town—maybe even a cheaper one, and use the profit to rent a place in the north country during the summers.
One way or another, the weather issue > a livability issue > a real estate issue > a money matter. How is it that everything eventually boils down to money?
Comes a newsletter from the predominant Realtor in our neighborhood, the ineffable Sandy Goodheart. She reports that she just unloaded a house in the neighborhood for a mere $325,000, not bad under the circumstances. Then she adds,
The real estate market has improved dramatically since the first of the year. In January of this year, the inventory of homes for sale stood at about an 11-month supply. A balanced inventory is between four and six months. As of Memorial Day, the inventory stood at a 4.5-month supply.
Of course, what she’s not saying is that the drop in inventory came from foreclosures and short sales. Foreclosures in particular have become so hot that buyers are bidding up prices. La Bethulia missed the boat twice in efforts to buy foreclosed properties in our area; she eventually bought a nice little place near M’hijito’s downtown house, to rent to the two nieces.
That notwithstanding, it’s a good sign. Before the real estate market could even begin to recover from the burst bubble, we needed to clear the flood of foreclosures and houses that couldn’t be sold when lending dried up. If it’s true that the inventory is about back to normal, we should see real estate values begin to appreciate at their former stately but dependable pace.
In fact, that’s about what’s been happening, if you pretend the bubble never occurred. I bought my house right before the inflation started. Assuming Zillow’s machine-generated estimate of its present value is roughly correct, it has appreciated at about 4 percent a year over the past five years.
As for the downtown house, this development means there’s a good chance the credit union’s loan officers are right that by December its value will increase enough to put us rightside-up again. Right now nothing is for sale in that neighborhood. With one possible exception, the foreclosures have sold, and no new ones have come on the market.
The damnable City has decided to turn down the stimulus money that would have completed the light rail line up the main drag past my neighborhood. That’s bad for the area where I’m living (since the city has already ripped out homes facing that road before it decided to suspend construction, trashing nearby property values), but good for the downtown house: it makes close-by light rail a rarer commodity, and that will increase its perceived value…jacking up the real value of neighborhoods near it.
Un-freaking-BELIEVABLE! I just scored enough red bricks to build the coveted garden wall at the downtown house and probably pave a couple of patios: for about 15 cents apiece!
The things are selling for 65 cents apiece at Home Depot. They’re practically brand-new: the “estate sale,” as it develops, was actually a foreclosure sale. The evicted owner had planned to build a circular driveway in front of the large tract house that he was forced to vacate. He never got the things on the ground, and so…his misfortune is my good luck.
The sale organizers advertised 1,000 bricks, but when I counted them I came up with 1,448.
Gerardo sent a crew in a decrepit pick-up to load the bricks. I had my van, too: there were so many bricks it took us two trips with both vehicles. The men loaded and unloaded all those blocks, one at a time. While Gerardo was at the estate sale, he picked up another job: some used furniture dealer hired him to transport a heavy, solid brass baker’s rack. So he did OK, despite not asking anything like enough for his and his workers’ time.
For some reason, stucco often doesn’t seem to hold up well to the passage of time. The foreclosure is in a district of aging stucco tracts that once formed an upper-middle-class Scottsdale suburb, now surrounded by development and fading fast. The houses were built in the 70s and the 80s. Mile after mile of houses, many of them spacious and once upscale, are now tired and run-down—and they’re just not that old. IMHO, a thirty-year-old house shouldn’t look like it’s ready to be torn down. Too many of these houses, which were anything but cheap at the outset, look exactly that way.
A few houses in the tract were built of slump block, and they still look very good. But the stucco affairs have weary and worn-out air about them. And since stucco is the predominant style in all new construction here, I guess that in twenty or thirty years, we’ll be seeing vast swaths of blight where developers bladed an acre an hour to cover the beautiful Sonoran desert with tens of thousands of look-alike fake-tile-roofed stucco “homes.”
So I’m feeling smug about the two sturdy, centrally located block houses M’hijito and I managed to get our hands on. Once we finish the landscaping project, we’ll be done with making the downtown house livable. Now that neither of us has any debt other than the mortgage on that little place, we should be able to ride out the depression, come what may. After the economy recovers, both these houses will be worth a lot of money, because of their location and because of the quality of their construction.
Now…all we need is to find an estate sale where someone’s trying to unload 65 tons of Madison Gold quarter-minus and a pallet of extra-thick flagstones…
Sometimes I think the modest things I have in life are so much better than anything I could buy for a zillion dollars. Maybe I suffer from the sour-grapes syndrome. But…well, you tell me. Is this sour grapes or common sense?
This morning La Maya invited me to go with her to an estate sale in one of the tonier parts of the far northwest Valley. The sale organizer touted “upscale” goods in a “4,000-square-foot house.” So shortly after dawn cracked, we set out for the ocean of orange tile roofs that is the westside.
When we got to the neighborhood where the sale took place, we found ourselves in one of those curvilinear tracts where all the stuccoed houses look pretty much the same. This HOA dictated dust-brown paint with mud-brown trim. It being a fancy tract, some of the houses had stone facades: dirt-brown granite, every one. If you came home late at night and three sheets to the wind, you’d never figure out which of the half-million-dollar shacks was yours.
But seriously: the area was clean, obviously expensive, and very nice. I guess.
Inside the target house, we found more beige paint and brown stone, plus lots of very expensive designer furniture, mostly brown. And huge. There was a freeway-sized L-shaped leather sectional, big enough to accommodate a theater full of movie patrons. A fat chair and ottoman that would seat three children and a labrador retriever. A leather-topped desk and $999 leather desk chair. An outlandish leather-covered ultra-king-sized bed. And on and on.
All this stuff needed to be huge, because the house’s stratospheric ceilings created so much empty, soulless space that you felt you were inside a cave. But nothing about the size or the priciness of the furniture made the house feel like anything other than a showplace for some interior decorator’s contract project. The overall effect was about as cozy as a hotel lobby.
Houses in outlying suburbs here are notorious for their shoddy construction. When we went into the professionally landscaped backyard with its spectacular outdoor kitchen and elegant two-level pool, what should we see but gaping structural cracks just about everyplace we looked. One wing of the stuccoed structure that held a gas grill, a sink, a refrigerator, and storage cabinets had pulled loose from its adjacent segment. The second level of the pool arrangement had two big splits, one on the north side and one on the south: given time and a few soaking rains, the whole lash-up will collapse into the luxuriantly finished lower pool.
The house itself looked sound…but it’s hard to tell. A skilled craftsman can cover a wealth of sins with stucco. A single crack of the sort we saw out back would create some serious homeowner headaches.
Inside, every ceiling, even over the halls and closet-sized bathrooms, was a good 16 feet high, creating vast walls to have to dust and paint—you couldn’t paint them yourself, because you’d need scaffolding to do the job. God only knows how many cubic yards of empty space had to be needlessly air-conditioned. And the effect?
Well, after we left, I remarked to La Maya that the house seemed kind of depressing. She agreed: she said the towering walls struck her as cold and unfriendly. I said I didn’t think the house could possibly be 4,000 square feet—it was only three bedrooms, none of which was significantly larger than the rooms in our houses, and although it had a generous family room and kitchen, there were only two other public rooms: a dining alcove and what must have been intended as a formal living room (the owners used it to house a pool table). She speculated that the high ceilings somehow, by a trick of perspective, made the interior seem smaller.
Could be. The house wasn’t really a house. It was a warehouse partitioned with plasterboard masquerading as walls, any one of which you could punch your fist through without bruising your knuckles. For a half-million dollars or more, the owners had themselves a cheaply built barn better sized for giraffes than for humans, a dwelling with the mood of an empty train station.
Both of us came away feeling that our houses, which certainly cost nothing like what those shacks do, are so far superior that we wouldn’t think of trading “up” to such a place. At the outset, neither of us wants to live in an outer arm of the galaxy. But more to the point, our homes are proportioned to fit people. People who actually live in a house. Simply by the way they’re built, with rooms that enclose living space, not empty air, they start out more inviting. The saltillo tiles throughout La Maya’s and M’hijto’s houses, the none-too-airtight banks of sunny windows and French doors, the varying ceiling heights and floor levels, the generous yards, the diverse and variegated neighborhoods…
The 60-year-old tract house M’hijito and I are copurchasing in the central part of town is, amazingly, vastly more pleasant and charming than any shiny new styrofoam-and-stucco affair out in the far-flung suburbs. Besides being close to everything—he’s within bicycling distance of work and walking distance of the new light rail system, to say nothing of the shopping and restaurants he can walk to or reach in a five-minute drive—it’s sweetly charming and it has a vast yard, which we soon will transform into a fine, shady xeriscapic garden. The double-course red brick walls have an air pocket between two layers of block and are finished on the inside with lath and plaster. Almost a foot thick, the walls insulate the interior so that on a 95-day degree day the house needs no air conditioning to stay comfortable indoors.
My own tract house, now 38 years old, has its own charms: centrally located on a large lot, it’s bright and cheerful with lots of natural lighting; its five citrus trees produce a never-ending supply of oranges, lemons, and limes; it has an almost trouble-free pool; and its bedrooms are huge by new-construction standards.
La Maya and La Bethulia’s house, a cut above mine and in the pricier neighborhood a block closer to the park, is paved throughout with genuine, antique Saltillos, unlike any flooring you can get today and absolutely gorgeous. So are the walls full of French doors that look out onto the pool area and into the front courtyard. A previous owner added a wing on the front parallel to the garage, converting what was an early snout house into a hacienda wrapped around a sylvan courtyard with a wall fountain, gardens, and a flowering peach tree.
All three houses fit human beings. Because they were designed on a human scale, they feel like homes and not like partitioned barns. They’re comfortable to live in, places you want to come home to. Not only that, but they’re furnished with stuff that matters to us: with tables and chairs that belonged to our mothers; with bedsteads we picked out for ourselves, without benefit of an interior decorator; with things that were given to us or pieces we scored at estate sales. Ceilings vary in height from seven to ten or twelve feet, but none enclose a volume of wasted space. The houses look and behave like places people live in.
Our houses cost nothing like the eave-to-eave palaces we saw out in the hinterlands this morning. But we think they’re better. We think they’re built better, they look better, and they live better.
Having perused today’s doom-and-gloom piecein the Times to the effect that property values in my neck of the woods have dropped 50 percent in the past three years, I was moved to visit Zillow by way of checking up on the current value of my real estate empire.
Lo! Zillow’s estimate of my house’s value is $293,000! That’s $61,000 more than I paid for it five years ago, an increase of about 4.75 percent a year. Not great appreciation on investment, but one heckuva lot better than the negative numbers we’ve experienced in stocks and bonds.
Meanwhile, the downtown house that M’hijito and I are copurchasing comes in at $177,000, a whopping $58,000 less than we paid for it and $34,000 less than we owe. That’s more like the stock market we know and fear.
Our lending agent at the credit union points out that the depressed value in what ought to be a stable centrally located neighborhood came about because a high number of foreclosures is pushing prices downward. Indeed, the house directly behind his was foreclosed; the bank recently unloaded it for $153,000, and the house is 100 square feet larger than M’hijito’s.
That house was bought and lost by a speculator who was halfway through renovations when he defaulted. The kitchen and front rooms were redone, but the rest of the house is stripped down to the concrete and needs significant fix-up. The yard, of course, also needs a lot of work. Meanwhile, a house at the corner of his street and a main drag is valued at $227,000; that place has been in foreclosure not once, not twice, but three times. It presently has an auction sign out front.
Even though things aren’t looking so good there, the lender says we should wait another nine months before assuming our shirt is lost. She says their appraisers have found that when a series of foreclosures pushes values down in a neighborhood, prices start to recover after about that length of time. In discussing the matter, she remarked that the area, within walking distance of the new light rail line, can be expected to recover its value over the next few years.
Assuming we believe Zillow’s Zestimates (a big assumption, that), it looks like our real estate investments are about a wash just now: a gain of $61,000 less a loss of $58,000 leaves us $3,000 to the good. Still better than the stock market, eh?
Out of idle curiosity, I checked the house SDXB sold five years ago, one street to the north of me. Zillow values it at $314,500, up from the $215,000 or so he got for it. The slum house directly behind his (well, “formerly his”), which was allowed to run to ruin by its original slob owners, then absorbed into Mr. B***’s rental empire, then sold at the top of the market to a couple who did some serious fix-up but soon divorced and turned it back into a down-at-the-heels rental, supposedly is worth $305,000.
La Maya and Bethulia’s house, around the corner and in the ritzier part of the neighborhood, sports a $392,000 Zestimate, almost a hundred grand more than they paid for it. My old house, about two blocks away, is valued at $243,000, having been bought out of a short sale for $253,000 a year ago. I sold the house to the woman who defaulted on it for $211,000, so even given the foreclosure, the house’s value has increased over the past five years.
My old friend’s house in Moon Valley shows a value of $273,000, a lot less than I would expect but still more than she and her husband paid five years ago. They’ve put more into the house’s renovation than it has allegedly appreciated. Interestingly, Moon Valley, arguably a nicer area than mine because it’s free of bordering slums and is built around a very attractive country club and golf course, seems generally to be exhibiting depressed property values; five years ago I couldn’t touch a house in that area, but now many apparently are worth less than the house I’m in.
And what about my beautiful old house in the Willo Historic District, a place my ex- and I were crazy to have sold? Five hundred and eighty-one thousand dollah.
How crazy were we to have sold that place? Crazy as foxes. His house—the one we moved into—is now $607,500. Allegedly.
Mwa ha ha!
Of all the shacks in my present and past real estate empire, my current house is far and away the nicest. M’hijito’s is cute but needs more fix-up to qualify as cuter than cute. My house is newer than the ex’s, ever so much more snazzily renovated, with a real garage and a gas range and beautiful Mexican tile and skylights in three rooms and a gorgeous pool. The house in Willo is now 80 years old, all very quaint and all very expensive to keep shored up; it’s sandwiched between three heavily traveled streets with a fire station just down the road. My house has a beautiful park within a three-minute walk, and it’s located so far from every main drag that it’s quiet—something you can say about very few houses in grid-patterned Phoenix. Yet, like all the other houses, it’s centrally located, and soon it will have easy access to the wonderful light-rail system.
So…whatever’s happening, none of us seem to have lost 50% of the value of our homes. As in other parts of the country, the real estate crisis works on micro-local levels. If you bought in one of the new Styrofoam-and-plasterboard suburbs that were tossed together on Sonoran desert habitat the developers were blading at the rate of an acre an hour, you got shafted. But if you bought in town, sticking to a centrally located part of the urb, you spent a little more on real estate, got block construction and a big yard, saved a lot on gasoline, and probably did OK on your investment.