Coffee heat rising

Phoenix

Small Town/Big City: A study in contrasts

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Payson ranger station

Yesterday VickyC and I finally made it up to Payson to visit our friends KJG and Mr. KJG in their beautiful, newly renovated home in the pines. It was wonderful to see them and to admire their lovely property.

KJG drove us around to some of her favorite haunts in Payson, a small ranching and tourist community perched at the top of the Mogollon Rim. The contrast between Phoenix’s toxic LA-style hectic traffic and the small-town vibe up there was amazing. Not once did anyone cut us off, park in the car’s blind spot, try to get-there-first, jerk around, or behave as though they were drunk, stoned, or demented. Nor did we, even once, run into a traffic jam occasioned by the city tearing up the roads.

We drove through a couple of districts where they’d looked at houses during their search for their dream house somewhere outside of the increasingly dystopic Valley of the Sun. There really are some lovely residential areas up there. And in some cases, the prices are not completely out of line. For about what I could get for my house, I could buy a nice place in town.

This, in sharp contrast with the experience of driving around lovely Phoenix on Wednesday:

I went up to the FedEx office, which is not very far from here. Really, if you didn’t have to traverse Gang Central, you could walk there from here.

First, though, I went to my favorite storefront mailboxes/xerox/notary public-type place, because a) they offer just about every service having to do with shipping, mailing, and minor office services you can dream up and b) I like those folks a lot and usually will try to give my money to people who have proven they can be nice to me. To get there, I have to cross the freeway. Main Drag South and Gangbanger’s Way are both fantastically dug up, creating backups that go halfway to Reno in one direction and halfway to Santa Fe in the other. So I figure I’ll go west across the freeway on Meth Lover’s Lane, the next main drag north of Gangbanger’s. The mail store is in a strip mall facing Meth Lover’s, westward across the freeway and on the north edge of the Ghost Mall (Gangbanger’s skirts this gigantic collection of vacancies along its south side). So it’s northward up Conduit of Blight Blvd toward Meth Lover’s, there to turn left and proceed west across the freeway.

Not. So. Much.

Every effing road in this city is torn up. Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here…and yesterday provided no exception to that rule.

At the intersection of Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s Lane, they’ve got the damn road shut down to one lane. No left effing turn.

Fortunately, I spot this situation from afar, and fortunately I’ve lived in Our Fair City for so long its road map is imprinted on my brain. I cut off a poor bastard in the outside lane, swerve into the two-way left-turn lane, and jerk across oncoming traffic into a light industrial area. Proceed west as far as this little street will go, dodging an 18-wheeler who’s stuck trying to turn around (thank you, God, for sparing me from having taken up that occupation!); amble to the end of the street, turn north, and follow that road up to its intersection with Meth Lover’s, figuring it’s gonna be a real bitch to turn left onto that thing. Rev up the aggressiveness hormones (drivers in Phoenix learn to control these bodily functions by sheer effort of will….), grit my teeth and…HALLELUJAH BROTHERS AND SISTERS, there’s a freaking signal at Meth Lover’s!

So I get back on my way without having to risk my life unduly. Or anyone else’s, come to think of it.

The mail store folks say they can only do UPS but they point out that I passed a FedEx store on my way there, right on Meth Lover’s Lane. Ah! I know that industrial park!

So I turn back onto Meth Lover’s, cross the freeway eastbound, come to the FedEx store, and have to turn north (left AGAIN!!!!) onto the little street that goes into the industrial park. Traffic northbound on this tiny road is SO THICK that I cannot turn left into the parking lot near the FedEx store. I figure that’s because other folks, southbound, are detouring through the industrial park to dodge the mess at Meth Lover’s Lane and Conduit of Blight. They’re all as mad as I am, and nary a one of them is about to give another motorist a break. So I proceed down Little Street till I find another driveway in the back end of the parking lot. Dart in there and then drive all the way back up to the front of the lot and get parked near the FedEx shop. No problem sending the computer off to Apple…that’s very nice.

Now I have to get home, once again circumventing the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Holy sh!t.

Noooo way of getting out of the parking lot the way I came in: cars are now backed up to Flagstaff. However, the next road to the west of Little Street is Office Complex Drive. This proceeds past the insurance company where my son works, past the former site of the branch office that the credit union so conveniently closed, and past a grassy flood-control park where I used to run my German shepherd when she was young and fierce. AND it happens to debouche onto Gangbanger’s way, which goes right past my neighborhood.

Yes!

The only problem is turning right out of the FedEx parking lot onto Meth Lover’s (circumventing the light at LIttle Street) and then darting across the fast lane (“fast” is not the operative word here…) and into the two-way left-turn lane. But thanks to the signal holding up westbound traffic at Little Street, I manage to take advantage of a Fellow Homicidal Driver’s momentary lapse in attention and dart across in front of him to turn left onto Faceless Office Building Road…only because FOB Road also has a signal.

Proceed without incident down FOB Road and reach Gangbanger’s Way. Mercifully, there’s also a signal at that intersection, allowing me to turn left onto the 7-lane main drag that is Gangbanger’s.

wooo HOOOOO! I got home alive, one more time!

This is pretty much the story of any drive you make through this accursed city, no matter where it is that you think you want to go. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here: EVERY road is ripped up and blocked somewhere. Unless you know how to get around virtually any intersection in town, you are going to end up sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting in stalled traffic.

Later in the day, I had to make a 40-minute drive to meet a client at a Barnes and Noble over at Arrowhead Mall, way to Hell and gone on the west side. It was pushing 4 p.m. by the time this confab broke up. Rush hour here starts at 3:00 p.m. sharp.

Homeward bound, I decided to stop by the credit union on the Great Desert University’s west campus, so I could deposit the check without having to dork with scanning it and uploading two images. This entails driving east across Bell Road — one of the main drags into White Flight Country, now situated on the far west side — then veering south on 43rd Avenue to Thunderbird, and sliding onto the campus. Not too bad: since most of the rush-hour traffic consists of whiteys headed homeward — in the opposite direction from the way I had to go — this went smoothly enough. The transaction completed, now the choices are to continue east across Thunderbird to the freeway, take the freeway to Gangbanger’s, and trudge east to the ‘Hood, or else go all the way across Thunderbird to Conduit of Blight, go south several miles, and then turn east onto Gangbanger’s.

Well. You’re crazy to get on the freeway any time after 3 in the afternoon. And the alternative would take me right back to the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Luckily, though, I have that map imprinted inside the brain. So…back eastbound on Thunderbird to 35th, south toward Gangbanger’s way, and thence to the ‘Hood.

Again because this route was east- and southbound, running in the opposite direction of the blue-collar workers and cubicle-dwelling office workers who get off around 3:00 or 4:00 and head home to their styrofoam-and-stucco boxes on the west side, I escaped a lot of rush-hour congestion. But traffic coming in the opposite direction? Holeee mackerel! At the light on the east side of the freeway, westbound traffic on Gangbanger’s was backed up almost a mile. There was no incident stopping them. It was just too damn many cars for the road to handle. That is, yes, seven lanes (if you count the two-way left-turn lane as a traffic lane).

Ugh!

When I got home from this junket, I called up “real estate, Prescott” and looked at the offerings in that Californicated small town. It’s a pretty area, and my house is now worth so much that I could in fact afford to live there. And I did find a couple of cute houses…but in general, I just don’t see anything there that I sincerely would wanna live in. Problem is, my house is damn nice…you’d have to go some to beat it, or even to match it.

The other options are the Oro Valley in Tucson (think I’d ’druther live in Prescott, thank you) or Sun City. The latter would be much cheaper. But my god. Living in a mausoleum ought to be cheaper!

Payson is significantly cheaper than Prescott. However, it has a few disadvantages: it has few urban amenities such as top-rated hospitals, Costco, gourmet grocery stores or even Sprouts; little choice of veterinarians, dentists, doctors, or much of anything else. Those things, of course, are readily available in Phoenix: an hour and a half down the hill.

But… Do you really want to drive an hour and a half to get to one or the other of those?

KJG does it without a blink: she said she’d driven into the Valley to see the kids twice last week. But…she’s highly motivated.

So. I don’t know. Do I want to uproot myself to get away from the traffic, the crime, the drug-addicted transients, the heat, and the overall lunacy? Maybe. But do I really want to leave my son and all my friends? Hmmm…

View from Payson. By Doug Dolde at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain.

 

 

Ghost developments

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Inflation-adjusted housing prices in the United States by state, 1998–2006. Click on the image for a larger view.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon hanging out with my friend Kathy, who lives up against the White Tank Mountains that form the Valley’s western boundary.

The far west and east sides of the Valley were the scenes of the most frantic building campaigns during the late, great Real Estate Bubble, whose collapse has affected the Phoenix area possibly more than any other major metropolis in the country. Phoenix, like Las Vegas (another hard-hit town), has a typically Southwestern boom-and-bust economy. Based on nothing solid, our spates of prosperity evaporate into the dry desert air at the first breath of a hard wind.

The west side has been filled with toss-’em-up tracts, styrofoam-and-stick houses that go off like Roman candles if a fire starts somewhere in the structure, that split and fall apart as the poorly compacted clay beneath them settles, and that stand eave-to-eave, crammed so close together that you might as well be living in an apartment as in one of the laughably dubbed “single-family homes.” Even the most expensive housing there is built this way: people packed in like hens in a commercial chicken farm.

These tracts are half empty. As housing prices ran up, new housing sold for even more than existing housing, which itself was selling for far more than what it was worth. As buyers defaulted, builders went belly-up, leaving many developments only partially built out and many houses standing empty.

Because the frantic building took place on the edges of the sprawl (Phoenix’s City Parents carefully study Los Angeles so they can imitate everything L.A. did wrong), the bust has affected the new areas far more than the central parts of the city.

I was amazed at what we saw as we drove around: mile on mile on mile of shiny new strip shopping  malls, all of them empty. One mall had a single Italian restaurant in it. Another had housed a couple of businesses that had closed and cleared out their equipment, while other space evidently had never been leased.

In one development, an empty mall had a dusty sign next to an empty bank building: “Citibank: Coming Soon!”

We went by a shoe store we both like, because it sells European styles that look nice on your feet without crushing your bones.

Gone.

By and large, the surviving commerce consists of big box stores, beauty salons and supply houses, and a few chain restaurants. Everything else is absent.

It’s eerie to drive through a vast area and see swaths of empty buildings. The place looks like an empty movie set. Or like it had been evacuated and the residents never returned.

Kathy was surprised when I said that our part of town has no empty shopping malls, and in fact centrally located strip malls are being renovated and are fully occupied. She has seen these ghost strip malls for so long, she’s come to think of them as a normal part of the landscape.

What a landscape it is! Vast Potemkin villages of ghost neighborhoods and ghost shopping malls. If this is going on all across the country, America is in deep trouble.

Image: “United States Housing Bubble,” Wikipedia. GNU Free Documentation License.

Wow! Real estate update…

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The other day, as you may recall, I was ruminating about the wild range of prices for very similar houses in the tiny 1970s tract that is my immediate neighborhood. Asking prices just now range from $130,000 to $294,900. All the houses are similar in size, construction, and quality.

Well. The Mexican contractors who bought two houses just to the north of me and cherried them out with only the classiest of flair quietly put one of them on the market. La Maya spotted the selling price in the paper:

Three hundred and ten thousand dollah!

Holy mackerel! That’s what these houses were selling for at the height of the bubble!

They did do an exceptionally nice renovation. But still: no amount of style changes the fact that it’s just another aging three-bedroom tract house a block and a half away from the destruction that was once a light-rail project. Or that it is right next door to a run-down slummy shack that has been rented out for the past several years to an endless succession of down-at-the-heels men—often as many of six of them at a time. These guys use the front yard as a parking lot, so that one of them can use the garage to practice his drums. They have large barking dogs, and by way of making their neighbor Manny crazy occasionally shine lights directly into his yard.

I don’t know how the Contractors pulled that off, but whatever they did, it’s good for the neighborhood. As La Maya pointed out, it indicates that prices have held fairly steady here in spite of the crash.

And well they should have. Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour or so biking around the area, which surrounds a small park. It really is a beautiful neighborhood. Some of the houses are spectacular. Others are just very nice. Except for a few properties in my part of the ’hood and a few more in the tackier section just to the north, most houses are well maintained. The benefit of living in the low-rent section of a fancy neighborhood is you get to enjoy the swell ambience without having to pay upwards of a half-million dollars for the privilege.

I’m glad I didn’t panic and bolt to Sun City along with SDXB in the wake of the vandalism drama. And I hope I can hang onto my house in unemployment. This is a great place to live!

Greener Grass? To move or not to move

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La Maya and La Bethulia have made up their minds to sell their beautiful, hacienda-like house down here in the Valley and move to Prescott, a more or less historic town in the cool upland parts of the Colorado Plateau. The redoubtable La B is applying for jobs there, and if she lands one (a foregone conclusion!), the house goes on the market forthwith.

So La Maya invited me on a real-estate expedition to Prescott in the near future. That should be entertaining. She’s already spotted a couple of houses online that she wants to see.

Cottonwood tree in fall
Cottonwood tree in fall

I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to Prescott myself, and with two of my best friends about to make the leap, it’s something to consider again. Summers here are getting really obnoxious. Temps of 110 degrees are tolerable, but when it gets up to 115 (or higher) and stays there, day after endless day, it’s just not livable. And whether or not you believe in global warming, it looks like what used to be a fluke is settling into the routine now: these extreme temperatures have happened for the past several years.

After the recent astronomical power bill, I turned the thermostat up to 85 degrees. Eighty-five is balmy enough when you’re outdoors in the open air, or when you can open up the house and let the outside air flow through. But when you’re cooped up in a boxful of stale air, 85 degrees is just plain hot. The house felt hot when I came in the back door from work, and it feels hot now. Most of the rooms, including the office where I’m writing this post with two fans blasting on me, really are uncomfortable.

And of course, there’s the ongoing drudgery (and cost) of pool maintenance.

Just imagine living someplace where it’s always cool enough to sleep at night! Where the locals think a 90-degree day is pretty darned hot.

Dang. With retirement coming up and GDU beside itself with joy at the very thought of farming out online scams courses to underpaid adjuncts, MOVE TO PRESCOTT oughta be a no-brainer. But being myself, of course I have to chew over all the possibilities.

Number One issue: What, really, is it gunna cost to move up there?

The last move I made took me across all of a block and a half. It cost about a thousand dollars. On the same day, a dear friend moved about five miles across the city. She paid two thousand dollars, and the difference in outcomes proved that my choice was radically penny-wise and pound-foolish. I won’t go into detail about the cocaine-snorting movers whose discarded baggy clogged the toilet, causing it to overflow  at exactly the moment my Realtor called to say the buyer was on her way over for the walk-through… Suffice it to say that it was The Move from Hell. After this, Funny ponies up enough to hire a decent moving company.

Average cost: about $100 an hour.

Well. To move my belongings a block and a half, the cut-rate chuckleheads I hired had to make two trips. Assuming I hire a major cross-country carrier, presumably they’ll bring a truck big enough to hold everything. Even so, it will take the better part of a day to load the contents of a four-bedroom house, and then it’s a two-hour drive to from here to Prescott.

Let’s give them ten hours for the first day; they stay overnight (do I pay for their time in a Prescott motel?); then they spend the better part of another day unloading.

If I don’t have to pay for their down time while they overnight in Prescott, then we’re looking at about $2,000. If they get paid $100 an hour for sleeping in a motel, dining, and eating breakfast, we can add another $1,000 to that. I’ll bet about $3,000 is conservative for a city-to-city move.

Now we have the cost of selling this house and buying a new one. Guess who gets stuck with all the closing costs? These days, sellers routinely are being asked to pay for the buyer’s closing costs, meaning to unload this place I’ll probably have to pay more than just the Realtor’s 6 to 8 percent fee (on $270,000, that will come to $16,200 to $21,600!). And how likely is it, really, that a Realtor who is invested in getting me to buy a house in Prescott is going to press for a seller to cover an out-of-towner’s costs, especially if that out-of-towner has sold her own home and now has no place to live?

We’re looking at a bare minimum of  $19,200 in selling and moving costs…and that’s before we learn that the water heater is crapping out, the dishwasher doesn’t work, the refrigerator leaks, and the wiring is not to code! Add the usual three percent of purchase price for the inevitable fix-up and nasty surprises: since I’ll only be able to afford about $250,000 for the Prescott dwelling, that will tote up to a mere $7,500 in first-year costs.

So: this proposed move could easily take $26,700 out of my pocket. Or more.

Compared to a $50 increase in summer power bills…uhm… Does that compute?

Number Two issue: Once I get there, then what?

Well, I’ll have two, count ’em, two friends: La Maya and La Bethulia. My son will still be here.

I kinda like being able to see M’hijito now and again. Sometimes he even drops by on the way home from work! If I lived in Prescott, I’d be lucky to see him three or four times a year.

Then, if seeing my pal who lives in Waddell takes an Act of Congress and logistics like those required to move the Continental Army, how likely is it that I’ll ever see her again? Or VickyC, whose social life is so vibrant she has to be trapped with a butterfly net to get her into my slow-moving orbit?

And then we have the choir. Ah, yes. The choir. Prescott undoubtedly has ladies who sing in church. But I can tell you for sher: it doesn’t have a choir anchored by a half-dozen professional singers, nor is it likely that any choir directors up there are engineering a lot of performances by members of the fifth-largest city in the nation’s symphony. Betcha no one up there has a multimillion-dollar organ and a church designed to accommodate it, either… Do I really want to walk away from that, now that the director has agreed to let me come back?

Number Three issue: What if I don’t like it?

Another friend, having served on her homeowner’s association board during a difficult time and felt alarmed about the wackos who rose out of the swamp to threaten board members, decamped to Cottonwood, the blue-collar suburb (as it were) of Californicated Prescott. Her son lived there, where he worked with his father building upscale housing for wealthy California expatriates.

She was sadly mistaken in imagining her son would welcome her presence. He and his second wife decided her highest and best use was to babysit their brats. She was in a wheelchair; they lived in a two-story house. You see the mentality, eh?

Before the car wreck that landed her in the wheelchair, she had been a high-powered corporate executive. Child care was, shall we say, not her forté.

On top of this depressing turn of events, she found herself in a place where she had no friends, no social infrastructure, and nothing to do. She hated it. But because it had cost her a lot of money to move, she was pretty much stuck. And that’s where she resides, unhappily, to this day.

Well. If I can’t afford $26,700 to move up to Prescott (and I surely can’t!), as you might imagine, I won’t be able to afford a similar hit to move back into Phoenix. Or anywhere else. Once I’m there, I’m there. And the prospect of ending up in my friend’s predicament does not appeal.

And finally…

Number Four issue: Is the grass really greener on the other side of that fence?

The lawn is already showing the effects of a certain amount of blow-torching, wouldn’t you say? But the above three matters aside, it’s not altogether clear to me that, other than slightly more clement weather during two or three summer months, Prescott has $26,700 worth of advantages to offer.

Trade-off for a warm summer? Cold winters! It snows in Prescott. Rarely does the snow stick on the ground, but what does stick on the ground is ice. I personally am not fond of driving on ice. And while I think 60 degrees is fine for sleeping, 30 degrees does not seem like the ideal snoozing temp. During the winter, Prescott’s lows drop into the teens.

Brrrr, I say to that!

Then it must be remembered that Prescott is a small town. I am a city girl. Not only that, but I’m a raving bitch. Make one enemy in a small town, and you might as well start wearing a red letter on your bodice. I know: I’ve lived in a small town. They can be even worse than homeowner’s associations.

The past few mornings, Cassie the Corgi and I have awakened to 70-degree mornings. These days have been truly lovely until 10:00 or so…and we’re still in early August. Temperatures were tolerable enough, if warm, until the middle of June. So we’re really only talking about maybe six or eight weeks of really awful weather. The rest of the time, this is a gorgeous place to live.

And a lot of stuff goes on here. In a couple of weeks, Kathy and I will go to an evening of jazz to benefit a charity that VickyC supports. Recently we attended a very fine chamber music concert in the Phoenix Art Museum. And, for that matter, every Sunday is chamber music morning down at the church meetin’ hall.

Furthermore, the Valley hosts the largest community college district in the country. As long as I live here, there’ll always be teaching gigs for me. Not my favorite work, but better than driving the zoo train or selling cosmetics at Walgreen’s. Prescott  has only three institutions of higher ed: an aeronautical school; a junior college, and a small, rather eccentric private liberal-arts college. None of these will pay as much as the Maricopa County College District, which itself is presently offering adjuncts about $500/course less than the Great Desert University pays, nor will they have as many openings. And while it’s true that GDU offers many online courses, a) there’s no guarantee enough courses will be available to keep me going; b) if you’re not physically present to remind departmental chairs that you exist, you soon will be superceded by someone who is present; and c) I have some ethical issues with online instruction, which I regard as passing fraudulent.

Maybe if La Maya and La Bethulia make their way to Prescott, I can have my cake and eat it too: stay here, save 30 grand or so, and visit them when the weather’s hot here!

Image: Mike Pedroncelli, Wikipedia Creative Commons