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?
yes it is. Sell if you are able and move. Peace of mind is priceless and is even worth losing a little money over. Just my 2 cents…
Sorry to hear about those horrible things. I agree with the comment above. Peace of mind is indeed priceless.
I second that emotion. You have been talking about this for a while. I think peace of mind is priceless, plus you would have more time for all your other endeavors with less maintenance.
Would HOA or other fees make this potential home less attractive?
Your neighborhood is getting worse and worse. I think it’s time to move to a more serene place.
Now, tell us about the Night of the Screaming and the Burglar Who Is Still Running. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee or two. I have PayPal. 🙂
Sell – yes! But why buy? RENT something nice and stick your money in CDs or ??. You’re retired – consider getting the money out of the place. (although it makes for great reading! I would miss hearing about all your adventures – but sure don’t want you to become a statistic.) Now – what Stephen said….tell us the REST of the story…
The gate makes it attractive, although in the abstract I don’t like gated communities. It’s at least one line of defense against miscreants. Not that I’d suggest leaving even one window un-alarmed.
I hope to visit DD and DSIL in the spring (early March?). If I get down there, maybe we can set up another Phoenix PF Bloggers meet ‘n’ greet. I’ll buy you the coffee if you’ll tell the stories.
Agree with everybody posting – and, you wouldn’t have to struggle with a swimming pool anymore!
This looks so promising. I would be interested in hearing what the monthly HOA fee is–whether there’s a required minimum to spend at the restaurant etc. The health club looks nice!
@ frugalscholar: The only one where they showed it said the HOA is about $585 a month. What that covers, however, is unknown. If it covers the exterior insurance and I can get renter’s insurance for my personal property, then the overall monthly unevadable costs might not be more than I’m paying here. Taxes are very low. It would depend on the cost of air-conditioning: these are early 1970s slump-block construction. In the 1960s and early 70s, power bills here were negligible, so of course details like insulation and air-tight, double-paned windows were neglected.
Note that the interior walls are slump-block: no drywall means no insulation. Those slump-block walls act like trombe walls: they heat up during the day and start releasing heat to the interior about 4:00 p.m., making the inside of the house uncomfortable and expensive to cool.
This looks like a snowbird roost. Probably most of the people who’ve bought those things over the years don’t live here during the summer. Unfortunately, a second home in cooler climes is out of the question for me.
For your HOA, though, you get 24-hour guard service — an improvement over the city cops who show up an hour after you dial 911 to report a man lurking outside your bedroom window — very nice grounds maintenance with actual GRASS (!!!!!), a large pool that you don’t have to take care of, an outside dining area, and that exercise gym. Plus it’s within walking distance of a trail that goes up the east side of Camelback mountain. The entire area is very walkable — you wouldn’t need to climb up a trail sprinkled with roller-bearing rock to get a nice daily hike, just in the neighborhood.
OMG!!!!
I just called the woman Scottsdale House lists as its real estate contact. Says she: “You do know, don’t you, that all of Scottsdale house is on leasehold land?”
“So…it’s an additional $700 or $800 a month for the land lease?”
“And more.”
“Bye.”
Makes a Ruger look like a bargain, doesn’t it?
Is that why it is listed by Sotheby’s Real Estate?
@s frugalscholar: Because by the time you pay a $600 HOA fee and an $800 land-lease fee and $875 annual property taxes (on land you don’t even own!!!) plus whatever mortgage you have, this is a VERY expensive piece of property. Sotheby’s sells expensive properties, and this is no exception.
What’s happening here is that large parts of lovely downtown Scottsdale are built on ranchland owned by the area’s original good ole boys: the Goldwaters and the Bimsons and the Kemper Marleys and the like. These guys engineered development here to guide upscale residential and business to the areas where they had banked land.
When the time came to build residential tracts, they sold not the land but just the right to build structures, roads, sewers, and electric service on it. They retained title to the ground itself, and rented out the right to live on the ground.
In some of these tracts, which are mostly very nice patio homes, your land-lease payment is a percentage of the purchase price of the house. So as real estate values rose, the land-lease income rose. In others, it’s whatever the landowner chooses to charge. From what I can tell, a typical land-lease bill is around $750 or $800.
And that’s why the sale prices of these little places are so low: no one in their right mind would buy there.
Whoa! What a major deal changer we have here. Townhome monthly fees here (in Mpls. area) range from $150-200 per month and you own your share of the land, no extra charge. Property taxes are roughly $1700-2200 per year. Now these are not palaces, but just normal places (1500-1800 square feet). I thought that these fees were high. I choked when I read yours. Maybe you can find a small, single family home without a pool in a better area for something close to affordable. My FIL used to winter there but he had a cheap rental deal going and so he never bought anything. It turned out to be for the better. Best wishes.
On second thought, are the HOA and land lease fees annual or monthly?
@ Barb: They’re monthly. So it would be about $580/month for the HOA and at least $800/month for the land lease, plus if you self-escrow the annual tax and not rip it out of retirement savings, another $71 a month. So you start at $1,451, and you have yet to pay the utilities. Or the homeowner’s insurance.
Assuming water and garbage are included in the HOA fee (a big assumption), you’d still have the electric bill. In a 1300-square foot slump-block structure that hasn’t been furred out, insulated, and drywalled, your power bill would range from around $150 in the winter to around $300 in the summer. Insurance: ????? Sometimes HOA fees cover the structure; in that case, renter’s insurance is pretty cheap — maybe $15 to $30 a month. So let’s say we look at the most expensive months (July, August, and September), since we know bills will never go down so we can’t rely on the winter bills as a budgeting benchmark: $1450 + $300 + 30 = $1,780.
That’s before anything breaks, and before you give tips and Christmas lagniappes to the gate guard, the gardeners, and those five staff members who hang around five days a week.
My present nondiscretionary budget is $1,250 a month. It needs to go up, because I’m not putting aside enough to cover the newly inflated taxes and insurance–maybe another $50 or $75 a month.
Sooo…. When you come right down to it, it really ISN”T that much more: it’s only a $480/month difference.
On the surface, that’s a lot. However, it buys 24-hour security — someone you can call in a pinch at any time of the day or night, which I sure can’t do when my son is a) at work and b) trying to sleep. And it frees one from the hassle of dealing with a yard guy. And it frees one from the pool hassle.
To hire someone to come cope with the pool would cost $400 a month — and that would bring him here only once a week. The summer monsoons do not blow on some pool guy’s schedule. If he shows up here on Monday morning, cleans out three bushels of devilpod leaves and seeds, and dumps in some chlorine, and then along about 9:00 p.m. another storm covers the bottom with dust dunes and devil pods, the first thing Tuesday morning I get to clean it all out again. Before long I’m not going to have the physical strength to keep working on that damn pool, and I’ll then have to hire someone. And then, voila! The cost of running my pretty little house on the edge of a gang-infested slum will be the same as the cost of an upgraded condo in the middle of a million-dollar neighborhood with a communal pool, a cocktail lounge and restaurant, a gym, actual grass landscaping, within walking distance of one of the fanciest shopping malls in the greater metropolitan area.