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Real estate

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?

Real Estate: That light at the end of the tunnel may not be a train

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Realtors are perennially optimistic, even in the worst of times. You pretty much have to be an optimist (even to the point of self-delusion) to sell things. Especially real estate, these days.

Over the past few months, friends who sell, finance, and renovate real estate have been saying the low-end market is extremely hot. At the weekly business group meeting, our former developer (reduced to handyman status by the depression) reported that he picked up a customer who bought six houses in Sun City—in cash!—to fix up and rent or flip. And the Realtor in our group echoed the same story the Realtor who sits near me in the alto section in choir tells: they can’t keep up with the business. They’re closing on so many houses they’re working six or seven days a week. Almost all these sales are short sales, but the level of foreclosures is dropping drastically. They say that the inventory of homes for sale has dropped below the historically “normal” three-month supply.

The mortgage broker remarked that it is simply not true the banks are, as the myth goes, sitting on a huge inventory of foreclosed houses. He says banks are not in the real estate business. They do not want to sell houses, and in fact, they can’t. He says there is no giant pool of foreclosures waiting to be dumped on the market.

Now comes a newsletter from the Realtors who work our neighborhood and who live here. Bill Goodheart built a fair section of the infill here, having been a builder of upscale homes before he retired and joined his wife in the real estate business. “The weather is finally turning in our favor,” he says. “Believe it or not, we actually are short of houses to sell below $400,000.” A chart from the greater Phoenix Arizona Residential Multiple Listing Service shows the inventory of all homes is well below the normal three- to six-month supply, and in the range below $200,000, the inventory is well under three months.

They report that for houses with sale prices between $25,000 and $200,000, we’re in a seller’s market. The market is “neutral” for homes between $200,000 and $600,000, and it’s still a buyer’s market in the $600,000+ range.

I give this pair a lot more credence than I do friends who report anecdotally that their business is getting better. Why?

The Goodhearts predicted the crash of the real estate market well before it happened. About ten months or a year before the crash, they published a newsletter that made one point and only one point: people who were in a position to to sell their homes should do so, and fast. They suggested that even if you were not considering a move, you should sell; then rent and plan on renting for several years. They urged people who even thought they might want to sell in the near future to do it quickly.

They saw the crash coming, so I figure they’re pretty savvy.

Says Goodheart: “If this trend continues, and I think it will, we should have stable prices for the next four to six months. Then, gradually, the prices will increase. . . . Repos are not a problem. . . . Current repo inventory is under a one-month supply.”

If they’re right again this time, it’s good news for M’hijito and me. Our Realtor thinks the house is worth about $150,000 (vs. the $235,000 we paid for it). In that case, it won’t have to go up much for us to be close enough to even when the 40/15 balloon comes up that we can either get out of the place or refinance the full amount. It’s too bad we can’t refinance now with the rates so low, but I’ll be happy if we can just get enough water bailed out that we won’t sink beneath the bounding main.

Now all we need is some decent jobs.

Image: Sötétkapu, or “Dark gate” in Esztergom, Hungary. Public domain.

Real Estate, the Neighborhood, and the Ideal Dwelling

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Sally, my neighbor to the north, remarked as she was dripping sweat in the alley that she thinks it’s time for her to find a smaller place to live, one with little or no yard work. Yesterday we chatted some more about real estate, the virtues and nonvirtues of our neighborhood, and what we want to live in as we dodder into old age.

I’ve already looked at a few of the condos my Realtor has shown me lately and thought she might like one or two of them, so I forwarded the MLS descriptions he’d sent. She says she wants to move to Scottsdale, not downtown. He’d sent a couple of listings for Scottsdale places, but I could only find one of them, a two-story patio home. Dunno about Sally, but I figure two stories is out of the question for the place where you expect to holler your last hurrah. I don’t want to climb up and down steps every ten minutes now, much less in another ten years when I’m getting really decrepit.

Sally’s determination to move bodes poorly for the Funny Farm. She is the best person to have as a neighbor: quiet and responsible about upkeep. She does not litter the driveway and the street with her rolling stock. She does not allow the paint to peel or the roofing shingles to curl. She’s not a raving mental case. Best of all, she has no barking dogs and no screaming children.

Whenever a neighbor moves, it makes one nervous. It’s such a crap shoot, what moves into the vacant property. Around the corner—mercifully out of earshot from my yard—some moron keeps a big, barking dog locked out in the backyard at all times. The animal is never taken indoors, and that (sensibly) is where it wants to be. It barks and cries nonstop: literally. It never, ever stops barking and begging to be let in out of the heat or cold. Apparently the neighbors complained, so the idiot owner had its vocal cords cut, to little avail. Now it makes a nonstop hoarse, groaning bark, a sound that’s even more disturbing (given the cruelty of the human’s behavior) than the only slightly louder normal barking.

Since the morons seem to outnumber you and me and Sally, I naturally worry about what kind of chuckleheads will move into her house.

Sally’s restlessness exacerbates mine. She’s almost ten years older than I am, and right at the point where yes, she probably does need to get into a smaller, easier-to-maintain place. Me, I could last another decade here. But I’d kind of like to get set in a place where I could reasonably live out the last years of my life before I reach the point where I absolutely, positively have to move.

The place on Portland is really very nice in many ways. It’s almost perfect except for its cramped size. If it had a den in addition to the two tiny bedrooms, or if it had just a little more living/dining space, I would jump at it, even though it is on top of a freeway. But I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in three tiny rooms.

The two big problems with my house (besides the encroaching blight) are that it has four bedrooms and I only need two, and that it has a pool, which I don’t think I’m going to be able to care for many more years. A pool requires daily work and is a hole in the ground into which you pour money.

Otherwise, there are many, many things I love about it and that I really don’t want to forsake. For what I can afford, it’s very hard to beat this house. Therein lies the problem: I run around the city and look at perfectly acceptable places but find them wanting compared to what I have. When I do find something that has everything I want and nothing I don’t want, the cost is way more than I could get for my house.

Every time I go through this exercise, I find myself listing pro’s and cons: what’s good about this place, what’s good about that, and so on ad nauseam. This morning it occurred to me that since that strategy gets me nowhere, it might be more useful to consider what my lifestyle is like—or at least, what I value in my lifestyle—and then think about what a house needs to have to accommodate those qualities.

Here’s what happens when I try to codify that thought:

What, in daily life, do I do or like to have that the dwelling needs to accommodate?
• I love to sit outdoors. I’m not crazy about gardening or doing yardwork, but sitting outside to eat, edit copy, or relax is an important part of my daily life.
• I have a dog and probably always will have a dog until I’m too frail to care for one.
• I prefer not to have to drive far through homicidal traffic to get to shopping, work, and social life. Centrally located dwelling minimizes driving.
• Because I can’t afford to travel, I use the house and yard as a vacation venue.
• I really should be walking or running every day; so need safe, pleasant places to walk, bicycle, or hike.
• I crave quiet. Don’t like to be near traffic noise and would prefer to be out from under the helicopter flight path.
• I cook outdoors more than indoors. The gas grill is not an option.
• I cook almost all my meals at home and so need a roomy, well equipped kitchen, preferably with a gas stove.
• In the winter and spring, I live on fresh oranges. And I love fresh lemons and limes from the backyard.
• I dislike housework and am not fond of yardwork; the house needs to be low-maintenance and easy to clean.
• I spend most of my time in front of a computer and hardly any of it in front of a television. The house needs to have computer or office space but does not  need room for a TV/entertainment center.
• I love the park (i.e., open space), even if I’m not walking the dog or exercising.
• I do use the pool all summer.
• I use the outdoors as living space, and expect to be able to come and go in privacy.

A house that would accommodate these quirks would look like…what?
• Two or at most three bedrooms
• Updated kitchen with gas stove
• Enclosed garage with storage cabinetry
• Centrally located
• Reasonably far from blighted areas
• Small, quiet yard with sitting and outdoor cooking areas; at least one shade tree and space for container gardening
• Very private
• No pool
• Sybaritic bathroom; or at least one with a tub that has a view of something other than the toilet
• Far from airports, freeways, and main drags
• Centrally located

And what does that describe?

Yup. The house that I’m in. Or…it comes very close to it.

Given that you can’t have everything—it may be, for example, that I never will be able to afford a place that fits that description in a better part of town, and in a city like Phoenix, it’s impossible to find quiet—maybe what I need to do is rebuild this place so that it can and will shelter me in old age without killing me.

Looking again at the pro’s and cons of the house and neighborhood I’m living in:

What qualities do I most like about my house? What elements do I dislike or feel concerned about?
Citrus trees Pool
Covered deck and shade trees, creating great outdoor sitting area Yard maintenance and costs
Gas stove Two bedrooms too many; having to air condition more space than I use
Skylights Worsening blight in surrounding areas
Full room dedicated to office space Noise from flicking helicopters; planned double-decker freeway will increase traffic noise.
Desert landscaping (relatively low maintenance) Lightrail, if it’s ever built, will exacerbate blight along 19th.
Central location Not a disability-friendly building—narrow doors, steps
Close to son, choir, and friends
Ample storage space; place for freezer
Outdoor gas and charcoal grills

One of the neighbors remarked that if this neighborhood were going to succumb to the creeping blight, it would have done so by now. I don’t know about that…nothing lasts forever. However, let’s assume it stays moderately safe, especially if the resident is armed with a nice little Ruger, for another ten to fifteen years. In that case, there are some things I could do to make the place work for an aging Boomer:

The totally unused room is adjacent to two bathrooms: plumbing and drains are right on the other side of the east wall. I could pull out the shower stall in the joke of a minibathroom that serves the tiny master bedroom and install a door, joining the two bedrooms through a pass-through half-bath. Then, put in a fine sybaritic bathtub (actually, I’m thinking one of those fake claw-foot things made of the plastic stuff that’s ludicrously easy to clean), lots of lights, and a set of cabinets to serve as a dressing table. Hang capacious and handsome mirrors over and around this dressing area. Replace the louvered folding closet doors with mirrored sliding doors. Replace the aged, tacky aluminum-framed window with French doors opening onto the back patio.

This would at least make that room useful. The existing bathtub in the hall bathroom could then be replaced with a shower stall that’s accessible by wheelchair; the doorway into that bathroom could be widened to make it possible for a wheelchair or walker to get in there.

Alternatively, I could move the storage in the front secondary bedroom into the unused back bedroom; move my office from the adjacent front secondary bedroom into the so-called master bedroom, tear out the wall between the two front bedrooms, reroute one of the AC vents, rebuild the entrance to the (now new) room, tear out the ridiculous closets and install a large walk-in closet, and end up with a very nice, huge master bedroom. This, too, would eliminate completely unused space and improve living space.

Replastering the pool, which will have to happen in about five to eight years, will cost $8,000 to $10,000 in today’s dollars. For about the same amount, I could fill in the pool. So…why not take, say, $20,000 to fill in the pool, jackhammer up the hideous KoolDeck, and relandscape the backyard, extending the shade cover the length of the back and planting a big, gorgeous emerald paloverde out there? This would eliminate the entire pool care issue and extend the low-maintenance garden, making the back sitting area much more pleasant and cutting power and water bills significantly.

Welp. I have to get up and go to work, so this little reverie needs to end. But…it’s something to think about: would it not be better to make this house work than to try to move to a different house, with all the hassle and expense that entails?

Grass may be greener, but is it cheaper?

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Met my neighbor Sally in the alley this morning. She’d been slamming around trimming shrubs and cleaning up the yard. Drenched in sweat, she said she’d about had enough of the house maintenance care, and she’s fed up with the guy next door to her who’s letting his house, which he inherited from his parents, go to pot.

She said she’s thinking of putting her place on the market and downsizing. This brought to mind a remark I saw a little earlier this very morning by Duchesse, commenting on a post at Frugal Scholar, who asked, “Have you replaced a money-sucking product recently?” Said Duchesse:

But actually, it was downsizing our living space, so much less maintenance and far lower utilities bills.

Well, as you know off and on I think of moving someplace less workful and maybe less burdensome financially. Inspired by Sally’s thought that she would consider one of those loft-like apartments they’re still trying to unload downtown (now at outrageously reduced prices), I called my Realtor friend, who sent along a few listings.

Some friends moved into a two-bedroom at One East Lexington. It’s a nice shiny new(ish) high-rise, and some of the apartments have awesome views. I could imagine myself living there. Further downtown is a much prettier, midrise development on Portland. The apartment has a gas stove (infinitely preferred!), the property has green areas to walk the little dog, it’s right across the road from the lightrail, and it’s in the center of what alleges to be the arts district. It’s not the greatest part of town, but it would be reasonably safe to walk around down there in the daytime. That’s a place I definitely could picture myself and Cassie living in.

Another possibility is an aging enclave with a dozen freestanding homes not far from here, in a more solidly middle- to upper-class part of North Central. It has an HOA that covers the (lush!) landscaping, the pool, the water, and the garbage, so you don’t have to deal with the yardwork and pool care. Though it’s right up the road from my ex’s $650,000 rancher, the price is much closer to right. But you do have to cope with the usual house maintenance stuff: roof, paint, and the like.

Would it really be cheaper to live in a smaller but newer unit in a rabbit warren? One that while it has no pool also would have no beloved orange, lime, and lemon trees and no real place to sit outside and take the morning air? And how would this place compare with the nearby house in an HOA, which would relieve me of yard and pool work but still have the things I really enjoy about my home?

Well, interestingly, smaller is definitely not cheaper, at least not in Phoenix if you want to stay in your present socioeconomic class. Check it out:

How amazing is that? As much as it seems to me that this four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre of land with a big, deep pool and a forest of trees is costing, apparently it costs a lot less than a two-bedroom fake “loft” in a renovated high-rise or a new building in a sketchy neighborhood.

Two things are pushing the One Lexington and the more desirable Portland Place condos so high: taxes and HOA fees.

Now, the HOA fee does cover the roof: repairs and replacement. And it covers the water and garbage pickup and exterior maintenance.

Since reroofing this house costs about $8,000, that’s not inconsiderable. Thanks to last year’s act of God, though, it shouldn’t have to be done for another 20 years, by which time I’ll be in the old-folkerie. Another big cost that will come due in the next ten or fifteen years is replastering the pool: about $10,000. If I started saving for that now, you could add about $83 a month to my monthly costs. That still would be several hundred dollars cheaper than living in a stylish two-bedroom apartment.

The enclave on Third Place has a much, much lower HOA bill. Taxes are lower, too. So from month to month it probably would cost about $100 a month less to live there, give or take some. But it has a flat roof, which requires expensive maintenance every four or five years; it’s aging; it may have black iron plumbing; and the exterior paint and plaster have to be maintained.

Given the hassle and expense entailed in moving, is it really worth the grief to decamp to a comparable house in a roughly similar neighborhood just to get 19 blocks from the blight to the west of me? Does one really want to go from a roomy house with  shade trees, a pool, three exterior sitting areas, and lots of elbow space to a hutch in a people warren? Hm. One wonders.

For the $300 or so in added expenses, I could stay in my present home and hire a pool service.

You Don’t Always Know When You’re Lucky

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The other day I was agonizing because the county raised the taxes on my paid-off (and hugely devalued) house by $300 a year and on the even more vastly devalued, upside-down house my son and I are copurchasing by $200.

As nothing.

This weekend during the kickoff for this fall’s choir season, one of the potluck dinner guests remarked that the taxes on their house had gone up $1260.

TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS! Holy mackerel!

If a tax bill like that had arrived in the mail, my house would have gone on the market the next day. That would make my annual tax bill—on this house alone—around $3,000, almost what I pay now for taxes, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance combined!

Their house is very nice—a relatively new (10 or 12 years?) two-story place on a piece of infill next to a tiny, aging golf course), fenced off with a wall and an electrical gate—but it’s not that fancy. For heaven’s sake, there’s a trailer park across the street! And they’ve got the same slums on the other side of 19th Avenue that I’ve got.

Another person who lives down near M’hijito’s house said their taxes had also gone up, to a lesser extent—something like $600.

So, I guess I’m lucky that I can still afford to live here this year.

And I’d better face the fact that sooner or later the taxes will outstrip what I can afford to pay on a limited income. This house will have to go—when SDXB moved to Sun City, his insurance dropped by 50% and his tax bill was a third of what he was paying here, on a comparable house. (Comparable, except for its being in dreary Sun City…). Since property values were even more severely trashed out there than here in town, I should be able to sell my house here, pick up a place there that doesn’t require a lot of fix-up, and still have money in my pocket. Well, in the car salesman’s pocket: I’d have to buy a lower-mpg car so I could drive into town.

The only other possibility would be to invest the proceeds from this house and use it to rent an apartment. I don’t at all care for apartment living. Well, let’s put it more accurately: I loathe living in apartments. But if I want to keep going to choir and live near my son and my friends, that would be the only option. With a 6 percent drawdown from the most optimistic guess at what I’d clear on the sale of the house, I could afford about $950 a  month. At 4 percent, the affordable rental would be around $790. That won’t get you much around this place, especially with half the population displaced from their houses and trying to rent.

As for the downtown house…I don’t know what we’d do if they raised the taxes that high. Default, probably. We’re already at the limit of what we’re willing to pay on a worthless piece of property.

Well, it’s off and running. After an incredibly hectic week, a relatively normal one is coming up…but before it starts I have to manually vacuum the storm debris out of the pool, and it’s already 6:20 in the morning.

Real Estate: Is everyone down the Rabbit Hole?

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Who pays people to write headlines like this?

Home Prices in U.S. Showed Signs of Stabilizing in June

Filled with optimism, we dive into the copy:

The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities fell 4.5 percent from June 2010, after a 4.6 percent drop in the 12 months ended May that was the biggest since 2009, the group said today in New York. The median forecast of 31 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected a 4.6 percent decline.

Well, that’s cheering. So…where does the bright, sunny headline come from? Anywhere in this story???

Values fell by 0.1 percent in June from the prior month after adjusted for seasonal changes, matching the decrease in May, indicating the deterioration is slowing.

That values continue to drop does not, to my mind, represent “stabilization.” In the next breath, Bloomburg’s reporter adds,

Nonetheless, any recovery in home values is probably years away as foreclosures dump more properties onto the market, while a jobless rate hovering around 9 percent and strict lending rules hurt sales.

Property values have dropped so sharply here that the county is predicting most of us will see a drop in taxes, even though the community college district, which has something like absolute taxing authority, is jacking up the tax rate.

In spite of property tax rates that rank Arizona among the lowest 11 states in that department (and give us a school system to match: yesterday one of my students came up to  me, pointed to a word in the syllabus that she couldn’t pronounce, said she’d looked it up in several sources and tried to figure it out, and added that she still could not understand its meaning. The word was urbanization), our doughty citizens continue to call for a Proposition 13, which goes on the ballot here next year.

LOL! The politics here get stupider and stupider. We can say good-bye to our libraries, as well the health and public safety infrastructure. Roads have already gone to Hell, as the city has stopped filling potholes and repairing heat and rain damage. One silver lining: our schools couldn’t get much worse, so I guess we won’t have to bemoan the loss of that service.

Meanwhile, homeownership is going away in this part of the country. My Realtor friends say they’re doing a land-office business. One woman is working 14-hour days, seven days a week. She says she’s selling almost exclusively foreclosures and short sales. One day she closed on seven sales. In one day! Another friend has reinvented himself. He no longer calls himself a real estate salesman. He’s now a “property investment consultant.”

Both say most of their buyers are Canadians, with a few well-heeled American fix-and-flippers. Most of them are buying homes with the specific intention of turning them into rentals.

The rental market here, for obvious reasons, is very hot. We’re told now that even if you’re stuck with an underwater mortgage, you can often rent a house for as much as the mortgage payments. The locals are no longer buying, whether because underemployment will not support a house purchase, because they can’t qualify for a loan no matter how good their credit is, or because they’ve lost their homes and won’t be able to borrow to buy a house anytime in the foreseeable future.

So, large numbers of houses in formerly quiet residential neighborhoods are being turned into commercial properties owned by foreign investors.

Experience suggests that this is not a good thing. The last time hordes of Canadians bought Arizona real estate—in the wake of the savings and loan fiasco—the result was a contagion of blight. When you live in some other country or state, you do not care about the condition of your “investment property.” It does not matter to you whether the lawn is mowed (or even watered), whether the paint is peeling, whether the shingles are curling, whether a public nuisance occupies the place.

This was so when the clown in upstate New York bought the house across the street, where the obnoxious Biker Boob and Bobby McGee resided for a couple of years. Before those two, we had the passel of male roommates, one of whom led a police chase through the neighborhood and had to be subdued in the front yard by the occupants of five cop cruisers plus two motorcycle cops. He finally unloaded the house. Whoever bought it did some fixup on the inside but nothing to the exterior. Unclear whether the owners live there or whether it’s a rental. Various signs suggest the latter, though. People who rent a house do nothing to care for it, and if the landlord doesn’t maintain the place, it quietly (well, sometimes not so quietly) sits there and deteriorates.

A steadily declining rate in property values “stabilization” does not make, any more than an excess of renters “stabilizes” a neighborhood of single-family homes.