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Real estate

Sentimental Journey…

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

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

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

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

But equally amazing is the other growth out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He lasted…what? about three weeks.

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

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

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

Home or Old Folkerie?

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Sittin’ around the house thinking….

Am I gonna be able to stay in my home until I croak over?

Or will I be forced to sell this place and lock myself up in one of those prisons for old folks?

You know whereof we speak: “life care communities.” All the rage for keeping elderly delinquents off the streets these days.

Welp, y’know… Those institutions had just come into vogue as my parents entered their dotage. My father, having gone to sea all his life, was not the slightest bit daunted at the prospect of selling their little home in Sun City and consigning himself to the care of an institution.

But…my mother would have none of it! NO WAY in hell was she going to put herself in a nursing home before she needed it!

Little did she know how soon she would need it. She died on my birthday in her 65th year.

The cancer so generously gifted to her by the world’s tobacco companies killed her….less than a month after her 65th birthday. The nursing home was rolling her, in her hospital bed, down to the Medicare ward when she passed.

She was decently cared for in the nursing home…probably because my father drove in from Sun City every day. walked in the door when they opened at 7 a.m., and sat there beside her bed, watching, until they threw him out at 11 p.m.

But…

Frankly, I think my father was right: They should have imprisoned themselves in Orangewood, the “life-care community” of my father’s choice, before she got sick. He had discovered the existence of such places about eight months or a year before she fell ill, and he’d tried to persuade her to move into one. She would have none of it.

And…

Well, I don’t blame her. Personally, I loathe institutional living. Truly, truly hated living in the dorm. And that is why I don’t want to move into one of them. Too much like living in prison…

After she died, he promptly sold the little house in Sun City and forked over most of his net worth to move into Orangewood. And I can assure you that he liked it there. Well: except that he made a key and unreconcilable mistake: he married a horrible dragon lady who, once she had him trapped with a wedding ring, made his life miserable.

No, he wouldn’t divorce her, because

a) He was afraid she would “get all my money” in divorce proceedings; and
b) He was afraid of the gossip a divorce would create among the other prison inmates.

Dragon Lady was outgoing and busy: she was extremely popular with the Orangewood natives. And he probably was right: if he did divorce her, he no doubt would want — if not need — to move out of that place. But…those “life-care communities” glom ALL YOUR CAPITAL. He probably wouldn’t have had enough money to get himself into some other place, plus all the money he had given to Orangewood was basically disappeared.

Result of that: he lived out the last few years of his life in utter misery.

***

Would my father have been better off if, instead of institutionalizing himself, he had hired people to come in and take care of him at his place in Sun City?

Putting aside the fact that he was too tight to do that…let us think about it:

* Here, Pool Dude keeps the drink pristine. My father’s Sun City palace had no pool. However, because it was so poorly built (basically uninsulated), its AC bills were far higher than mine. So one might regard SC power bills, compared to my house, as a wash…in the pool.

* Wonder-Cleaning Lady comes in every two weeks and renders the house spotless. Because there are no kids or cats here, the place stays reasonably clean between visits.

* Gerardo wrangles the landscaping — which, because it’s xeric, doesn’t demand much. It has an automatic watering system: I don’t even have to do a hose-drag to maintain the place.

* I have no problem caring for a small dog. Ruby is basically effortless, as roommates go.

Given that my father’s house was paid for, to have stayed in Sun City and hired a yard guy and a cleaning lady wouldn’t have cost him anything LIKE what Orangewood cost. Not even if he hired someone to come into the house daily, check on him, take him to the grocery store, maybe prepare a week’s worth of meals for him.

Zillow estimates my house’s current value at $484,100. Borrowing against that would buy a WHOLE lot of service from Pool Dude, Lawn Dude, and the Cleaning Lady from Heaven. Years’ worth.

And again, let’s remember, he didn’t need either a pool dude or a lawn dude…

Now, what did my father get at the honored old-folkerie?

At Orangewood: a two-bedroom apt.  They refuse to tell you the cost on their website…which ought to tellya something….  As I recall, it took the entire proceeds of the sale of his house to get him into that place. The apartment was tiny: I would describe it as an elaborate studio apt. It didn’t have a real kitchen — just a counter with a minimal stove and a sink. The living room, dining area (if you could call it that), and kitchen occupied one (count it: 1) room.

Median monthly cost of “independent living” in Arizona is $2,738.

He couldn’t have afforded that. ONE YEAR would consume almost a third of his life savings. That’s $32,856/year, bare minimum. Without maintaining your car, without going anywhere, without even buying clothes. Basically what was happening was that he was forking over ALL of his Social Security, plus a substantial chunk of his savings.

It certainly would not cost $35,000+ a year to hire someone to come in and take care of my house. The total cost of everything — maintenance, car, groceries, utilities, pool care, and general living expenses — may come to something like that. Or not…. just now I’m not drawing anything like that out of savings, but I get a decent amount of SS. Not enough to live in middle-class grandeur, but certainly not so little that I would starve.

What that suggests, IMHO, is that moving into one of those places would cost as much as — or more than! — I would have to spend to stay here and hire people to come in and help me. The money I take out of savings, in most years, is recovered because the remainder stays in professionally managed investments.

I would be better off — and my son would be better off — if I can manage to stay in this place until I die, or at least until a few months before that happens. Proceeds from the sale of this house would nicely plump up his retirement savings. Or he could sell his place, invest any profit from that, then move into this place and invest the monthly amount he’s been forking over to his mortgage company.

Speaking of the value of a shack, my parents’ house in Sun City last sold for $255,000: two and a half times the amount of my father’s life savings. Lest you think that was bargain, the place was about the size of the first apartment DXH and I moved into. I think they paid about $8,000 for that house.

Indeed, that first apartment may have been bigger than the SC house…it certainly was no smaller.

Our apartment:

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
Walk-in storage closet in kitchen
2 bathrooms????? Can’t recall…maybe not, though

SC house

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
2 bathrooms
Don’t recall a storage closet, but think there was space behind carport
Lots of wasted space in hallway

The SC house last sold for $255,000!!!!!  2 1/2 times the total nest egg that my father saved for his retirement!

Cruisin’ and Musin’…

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Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…

Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.

As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.

Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.

Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.

It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.

Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.

I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.

***

Time having passed…

Cruising the real estate ads, ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.

My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.

But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….

Quack Day

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A-n-n-d…speaking of doctors, as we were yesterday…in a few minutes I need to head off to a dermatologist. One of my fingernails is lifting right off its bed — for, as far as I can tell, no good reason. I haven’t hurt my hand, and none of the other nails are doing that.

Well…no: not so. You could argue that the thumbnail is starting to do the same thing.

Hmmmmm…. An infection, maybe? Far’s I can remember, I haven’t stuck my paws in any caustic solutions. If I had, you’d think all the nails on that hand would be acting the same way.

This guy is a partner of the beloved Young Doctor Kildare, who once again has left the practice of medicine to take up the leadership of a charitable organization. I hope he and I get on (I adored YDK!), because these are my “doctors in the wild,” as the Mayo calls them. That is: doctors who do NOT practice at the Mayo Clinic.

😀  The Mayo is truly wonderful. But their doctors’ offices are located halfway to Payson. No kidding: they’re on the far northeast side of Scottsdale, almost an hour’s drive from here.

So I’m not inclined to safari all the way out there for just any li’l ailment that I don’t consider life-threatening.

***

So it was over to said local doc. No satisfactory explanation or diagnosis was given. But they want me to go to a neurologist.

And of course, getting in to see this worthy entails a whole new set of endless hoop-jumps! Goodie!

How do they get people to go to doctors at all, these days?

I am JUST NOT UP for this kind of hassle now.

So instead of hurrying home and making a new appointment with the new guy, I cruised up behind YDK’s offices, into a sprawling middle-class housing development of ticky-tacky stick-and-plaster homes.

My dear (late, absconded) friend Elaine and her (now late) husband lived there. I helped them fix up and paint the house when they moved in, which was how I got a good, clear, horrifying look at the place’s construction. What junk!!!! 

And when you drive around (and around and around and around and…) in there, what you see is square mile on square mile of junk.

How the Hell do developers persuade Americans to buy this stuff?

😀

In theory, it ought to be a nice place to live...but…but… Heh: but if you happen to look closely enough to see how the houses are built, you want to RUN away. The structures are as flimsy as flimsy can be. Really: if you’ve ever done any work on one of them, you know that “flimsy” overstates the quality of the construction out there.

So what you have in lovely Moon Valley is mile on square mile on square mile of tossed-together ticky-tacky. Expensive tossed-together ticky-tacky.

Well. Not spectacularly expensive — most of it isn’t, anyway, though there are some fancier(-looking) areas. But these are people’s houses. Houses that are supposed to last a generation or three.

Some of them, you’d be amazed to see last a decade, to say nothing of a generation.

****

Ohhh well. Here’s a rather interesting passage about a new theory of Alzheimer’s, speaking doctoring. It appears rather little is really understood about the condition…and it’s a condition that’s spreading to drastic proportions.

****

Tuesday
August 20

And now it’s quarter six, after several more sleepless hours. Might as well get up and walk the dawg before it gets hot.

What a life! Such as it is…

Soggy Doggy Day II

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Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!

NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.

At the crack of dawn.

Garden spot, this….

Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀  Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.

As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.

A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.

As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.

Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!

It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.

Yeah. Well…whatEVER.

It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.

I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…

We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.

{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.

But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.

No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.

Another Balmy Arizona Summer Day…

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I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!!  Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.

Arizona…what a garden spot!

Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.

Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.

Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.

Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.

ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.

See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.

😀

Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….

Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!

Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.

If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.

But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.

Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!

😀  😀

Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.

Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.

I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.

Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.

***

Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…