by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Here’s a step-by-step instruction manual in writing a sky-is-falling ‘news’ story: First, find some seemingly scary datum. Second, extrapolate the trend to absurdity without ever once cracking a smile. Like this:

If present trends continue, the price of gasoline may someday hit $50 a gallon. The average worker could spend as much as 36 hours of his 40-hour work week to buy a tank of gas.

If you stipulate the premise, “if present trends continue,” the rest follows logically enough. The trouble is, present trends will not continue. The free market is dynamic, and no commodity is valuable irrespective of its relative cost. If we anticipate a steady increase in transportation costs (and the experience of history is all the other way, despite the nonsense you read in the newspapers), then we should also anticipate a decrease in the amount of transportation. This is already happening, not because of gasoline prices but because of time lost to commuting and convenience gained by working from home. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

As attendees at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show perused gadgets that could enhance their leisure time, their bosses were plotting to get them out of the office for good.

Members of a panel that delved into the world of technologies for home use said businesses are increasingly eyeing products that will enable employees to telecommute, or work from home.

“We’re seeing a huge trend in the business world to move consumers away from commutes,” said Alexander Ramia, director of product development for Innofone, an Internet consulting company in Santa Monica, Calif. “The person working at home doesn’t know when to quit, so companies get more work out of them, and time spent in cars commuting is lost productivity.”

The point applies to any economic good – most especially real estate – provided it is not monopolized by government. If people are free to choose among alternatives, and if vendors are free to provide those alternatives, buyers and sellers will arrive on their own at a mutually-satisfactory meeting-of-the-minds. This only happens millions of times a day, so it’s perfectly understandable that Chicken Little would fail to notice…

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Market-Basket homes jumped by an average of 1.73% for December 2005. More details here.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Say what?!?

The Valley ranks as the second-safest major metropolitan area in which to conduct business and avoid major natural disasters and terrorism.

So says the Business Journal of Phoenix, citing a survey by Risk & Insurance magazine.

Second-safest? Who’s number one?

Sacramento, California, believe it or not.

Surely this is a mistake. Note these important Sacramento defects:

• It freezes in Sacramento, several times a year
• It rains 18 inches a year, three times more than anyone should have to abide
• It’s only 17 feet above sea level, which can’t be good
• The population of the city is only 400,000–a little more than Mesa
• Worst of all: It’s in California!

But: There is no accounting for taste. Consider that San Diego, the beach-front suburb of Phoenix, rated no higher than eighth place.

I designed this billboard for New Orleans a few months ago:

Perhaps we need to post it in Sacramento as well…

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Mr. Western,

Regarding your New Year’s Resolution to improve the opinion pages of the Republic, is it possible to petition for a more balanced coverage of the forthcoming City of Phoenix bond issue?

From my point of view–and you probably disagree–the Republic is a tireless cheerleader for all of the–to me–insane boondoggles being effected Downtown. For example, nation-wide, all public transportation schemes are colossal failures from a cost-recovery standpoint, but the Republic publishes nothing but puff-pieces about the ValleyMetro Trolley–which stands an excellent chance of being the biggest failure of all. As far as I’m concerned, this is not news, not opinion, not even public relations. It is active, knowing mendacity, deliberately concealing facts, uncontested but largely undisclosed, for purposes of propaganda.

That notwithstanding, the tax-payers of Phoenix are about to be strapped with nearly a billion dollars of new debt, much of which–in my opinion–will be entirely wasted. It seems only reasonable to me that we have something resembling a debate on the issue. As much as PNI as a corporation or the Republic as a newspaper might favor the bonds and their proposed uses, it remains that the newspaper is the only remaining medium in which such a debate could take place.

Institutional criticism is usually futile. From a customer-oriented point-of-view, criticism is a great gift. It may tell you how to do better, but, at a minimum, it tells you how to stop doing badly. But the denizens of most institutions, when criticized, will instead circle the wagons, insisting on the rightness of their positions and the risible nature of anyone who would dare to challenge their expertise, experience and endless estimable qualities. Certainly this has been the case with the mainstream media, which never tires of ridiculing the alternative media and its audiences, bidding good riddance to every former cash customer. The auctioneer has a cure for this syndrome, but what does he know, anyway?

A couple of weeks ago, I had thought to write to you to offer to elucidate my objections to the Downtown boondoggles, and the course of municipal government in general in the Valley. My working title was Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

The political philosophy we call Goldwater Republicanism–low taxes, limited regulation, strong defense, mind your own business–is a lot older than Barry Goldwater. It was the core philosophy of the Frontier West, of course. Phoenix is regarded as its spiritual capital because of Eugene Pulliam, for many decades the owner and publisher of the Arizona Republic. That paper was bought by Gannett a dozen years ago, and since then it has been in a downhill slide of progressive irrelevance. About all that remains in the Republic of the Pulliam spirit of Goldwater Republicanism is Doug MacEachern–one of about a billion editorial writers, most of whom are doe-eyed stenographers for the people cannibalizing what little is left of the frontier character of the West. Note that I am not endorsing a political party–I hate them all–just the economic freedom that made Phoenix great. This is MacEachern on the Lilliputian enemies of that liberty, who work tirelessly to tie-down this giant Thunderbird:

Get a grip on the growing tyranny of politically adept neighborhood groups.

The flip side of all those aggrieved neighbors who opposed building the so-called Trump high-rise (it was neither The Donald’s own project nor a “high-rise” in any serious sense of the term) is that there were plenty of others in the neighborhood who supported the project. I’ve met with them. Talked with them. Looked at the bullying, browbeating lawyer letters that the anti-Trump activists had sent to them.

I could gripe about all the undeserved nobility assigned to the opponents of development in the East Camelback area, but, really, they acted no different from countless other neighborhood groups that have come before them. Their power is in opposing. And in their growing effectiveness, they are giving us all a textbook lesson in the perils of direct democracy.

Phoenix is in a precarious position. The outlying cities are growing, including their commercial centers. If Phoenix is to keep pace at all, much less thrive, it must tend its commercial gardens. By placating activist “neighbors,” many of whom don’t even live in the affected 26th Street subdivision, the Phoenix council is putting at risk one of Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

From the New York Times (registration required:

Despite a widespread sense that real estate has never been more expensive, families in the vast majority of the country can still buy a house for a smaller share of their income than they could have a generation ago.

A sharp fall in mortgage rates since the early 1980’s, a decline in mortgage fees and a rise in incomes have more than made up for rising house prices in almost every place outside of New York, Washington, Miami and along the coast in California. These often-overlooked changes are a major reason that most economists do not expect a broad drop in prices in 2006, even though many once-booming markets on the coasts have started weakening.

The long-term decline in housing costs also helps explain why the homeownership rate remains near a record of almost 69 percent, up from 65 percent a decade ago.

Actually, it would be interesting to compare square-footage-per-occupant with the percentage of income needed to pay for a home. Homes are a lot larger than they used to be, with fewer full time residents. Anyone who pays attention to reality and not the news media knows that virtually everything is better and cheaper–expressed in work-effort-expended-to-obtain–than it was twenty years ago, and there is no reason I can think of that housing should be any different.

But-but-but!–the “affordable housing” campaigners will exclaim–home-ownership in the Phoenix-area is below the national average! This is true. The national average is 69%, where the Valley of the Sun trundles along at a lowly–wait for it–68%. If you subtract our incompletely-documented residents, we are well above the national average.

But-but-but! People in Phoenix pay more than the national average for housing, expressed as a percentage of their income! This is also a case where subtracting the hard-working folks who live under the radar yields radically different results.

“Affordable housing” is a scam. There is no one with a decent income, good credit and well-managed debt who cannot purchase a home in the Valley. We prove this thousands of times a month. Creating a vast new government program to give the illusion of ownership to Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

The newspaper accidentally tells the truth about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to ram the Downtown bond issue down voters’ throats.

While it remains unclear who will emerge as winners or losers when neighborhood leaders and developers begin hashing out future building heights in the Camelback Corridor, one thing is certain: supporters of Phoenix’s upcoming bond election are breathing a sigh of relief.

When Phoenix City Council members decided last week to overturn their decision to allow more high-rises in the corridor to avoid a referendum, they managed to keep the issue off the March 14 ballot, the election in which voters will decide whether the city can sell almost $880 million in bonds for citywide capital improvements.

“Keeping the referendum off the same ballot is one less reason you have for people to vote no,” said Jason Rose, a Valley political consultant. “Elections are highly uncertain events to begin with, and with the Trump dynamic, it created more uncertainty, more doubt. And at the end of the day, people didn’t want to risk downtown getting trumped just like 24th Street and Camelback did.”

In other words, the City wants to limit votes on the referendum to people who stand to prosper from it, with everyone else getting bilked. Everything that was ever done for any of the Downtown cargo cults was done this way. It’s just rare for anyone to admit it.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Interest rates are down, Gas prices are down, housing starts nationwide are up, and home prices in the Valley are up, so you know what that means. Yup, the sky is falling yet again.

Affordable homes are vanishing. Vanishing! It must be the Grinch, slinking around with a bottomless bag full of affordable homes. And all the poor Whos down in Whoville–er, Phoenix–are rapidly becoming impoverished by their incredible real estate wealth.

Truly, these are Trying Times…

Here, by way of a metaphor, is a way of understanding real estate reporting as it is practiced in the Valley of the Sun:

The rains in Phoenix are torrential! When a big storm is coming, the clouds will gather all afternoon, piling up hundreds of feet high. You’ll look off to the southeast, and it looks like the entire island of Manhattan is about to crash land onto the Valley. But first comes the dust, a thick carpet of brown grit propelled by sixty-mile-an-hour winds. And the first hint of precipitation may not even be rain: Golf-ball size hail is a common precursor. By now the winds will be entirely untamed, ripping away branches and uprooting whole trees, blasting picture windows right out of their frames, even tearing the roofs off of older homes. When the rain finally comes, it drenches, dumping inches of rainfall in a few short minutes. Flood retention ponds overflow. Sewers back up. The washes and floodways rush like rivers gone mad. If you are foolish enough to get caught in the path of the water, your car may be pushed hundreds of yards downstream–or totally submerged. A storm in Phoenix is like a storm nowhere else.

Every bit of that is true, and none of it is relevant. We have three or four storms like that every year, almost always in the late Summer. They’re over in a couple of hours and life goes on. Rain is interesting in Phoenix, but one of the things that makes it interesting is that it is extremely rare.

So: Is it possible that a homeowner could live through a 60% run-up in the value of his home Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Hubble Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal documents a trend you have to pledge to ignore if you want to write about real estate for a newspaper in Phoenix:

A new market segment of homeowners called “splitters,” people who split time between two homes, are helping to fuel not only the home-building industry, but other industries as well, a survey from Florida-based WCI Communities found.

Splitters evolved from post-World War II migratory trends in the United States. How many places have they lived since birth? How many of their extended family still live in the same town?

These are among the 35 questions that were asked of 12,000 people in the survey, which required respondents to live east of the Mississippi River and be a homeowner. Of the 1,743 respondents, 408 qualified as splitters.

About 70 percent of splitters own a second home and 20 percent, identified as “super splitters,” own three homes.

“Americans no longer expect to experience birth, life and death in the same city or town where they grew up, or even where their families currently live,” WCI spokesman Kyle Reinson said.

He said the survey was commissioned to develop a better understanding of emerging American cultural and economic trends of second-home ownership.

A recent study from the National Association of Realtors projects a twofold increase in second homes by 2009, which would account for nearly 12 million homes by the end of the decade.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

This just in:

The Phoenix City Council yielded to pressure from residents Wednesday and decided to reverse its decision to allow more high-rises in the upscale Camelback Corridor.

The action effectively kills several projects, most notably the $200 million condominium/hotel development proposed by Donald Trump and development partner Bayrock Group near 26th Street and Camelback Road and sends them all back to the drawing board.

This is the last, best hope for Phoenix to have something like a Downtown–a Central Business District, composed mostly of actual free-market businesses–within the borders of Phoenix.

Of course, the City Council will continue to push for its dream of a fake Downtown–composed almost entirely of tax-payer funded structures–further south. This was the reason for their voting against the planned towers after they had already voted for them: The alternative was to have the issue as a ballot question at the same time Phoenix voters will be asked to saddle themselves with nearly a billion dollars of new debt to build a redundant campus for ASU and a redundant medical school for UA in the all-new fake Downtown. If you’re wondering why the City’s tax-payers should pay for State universities, the City Council doesn’t want you to vote–no matter where you stand on the Biltmore towers.

In any case, the real action will move east, to Downtown Tempe. This is already as close as The Valley of the Sun gets to a Downtown out-of-towners can understand. Tempe has been land-locked for years, so its politicians, marginally less venal, understand that the only way the city can grow is up.

It still won’t be a Central Business District–the Biltmore site was the only hope for that–but it will be alive and vibrant and dynamic, where Downtown Phoenix will always be just one Grand Tax-payer Boondoggle after another–all of them failures, all of them declaimed as great successes, the hails of elaborate praise echoing through the canyons of perpetually empty streets.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

This is from an article about the planned SR-202 South Mountain Freeway:

“How would you like it if you owned a house or a business and the state came to you and said, ‘You know what, we’re not going to buy this piece of land … and in the meantime, you can’t do anything with your land?’ ” said Cochran of Calabrea Development. “It’s just wrong. It’s totally against property rights and what this country is built on. You can’t control someone’s land without owning it.”

This idea evidently hasn’t made it to City Hall…

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

We’re really not much of a protesting city. I think that’s a good thing. It argues, first, that people have better things to do with their time, and, second, that they think that doing those other things is more valuable to them than fighting over choice cuts of filleted tax-payer Downtown. As bad as the City government of Phoenix might be, it’s not so bad that it can draw a crowd of enraged spoils-seekers. How lucky for us.

So there are three signal outcomes from the battle over the mostly free-market hotel that threatened the structural integrity of an antique warehouse Downtown:

First, the planned protest drew about 150 marchers out of a Valley population of more than three million.

Second, the mostly-entrepreneurs are free to proceed with their project, provided they are willing to throw a couple of bones to the 150 marchers, who vow to be dissatisfied no matter what.

Third, the mostly free-market hotel is going to look like this:

It will be built out of all-white Legos and will be erected in the lower-left-hand corner of the cover of a science-fiction novel.

Seriously, there’s no accounting for taste, and I think we can be pretty sure the building won’t actually look like this in any case.

But: Yikes!

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Despite my expecations, the news is no-news in the Republic:

Metropolitan Phoenix’s resale housing market slowed to a more sedate pace in November, although the price for a typical house bounced a few thousand dollars higher.

This is pretty underwhelming considering all the hysterical build-up, but at least we don’t have sob stories about innocent vicitms who can’t afford surgery for their cat because they only got a 750% return-on-investment when their home sold.

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

The Business Journal of Phoenix is first with the news of November’s overall appreciation numbers:

[T]he median home price is back on the rise. After a decline in October to $259,900, the price returned to the record level of $263,000 set in September.

The Business Journal is a boring old just-the-facts kind of paper, so we’ll have to wait for the Arizona Republic to discover a cloud wrapped around the silver lining. We already know from the Bloodhound Market-Basket of Homes that the price news that actually matters is relatively good. And for reasons unknown, the seemingly unfounded claim By Dr. Jay Butler of ASU that some huge proportion of currently offered homes are investor-owned does not appear in this report. It will be interesting to see how the Republic handles this, too.

That fact that the news is very good–prices are holding and we’ve set a record pace for the year–calls even greater attention to the amazing number of doom and gloom stories that have appeared lately. The Federal Reserve Bank raised its interest rates again yesterday, so presumably we can look forward to more misinformation about how this relates to mortgage rates. Sellers are having to wait quite a bit longer to reap their windfalls of 50%-100%, so maybe that will be the flavor-of-the-month outrageous tragedy to turn good news into bad.

It’s all one, really. Either you can see the sky with your own eyes or you are doomed to take someone’s word about it. I don’t look for clouds to whine about in the clear Arizona skies, but I don’t encourage anyone to trust my testimony, either. I work from facts and reasonable–meaning pessimistic–inferences based on those facts. I’m happy enough to tell you what I think, but I can’t think for you. In any case, I am not a Pollyanna. I don’t care for the despair-mongering and sky-is-falling predictions that appear in the public prints, but only because these are contrary to the actual, uncontested evidence of experience in the Phoenix-area market.

So here’s some really good news from RealEstateJournal.com: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is about to start a Real Estate Read more

by Odysseus

Big, Beautiful Bloodhound

Author website

Jonathan Higuera in the Arizona Republic asks: “Are home costs scaring firms off?” The article consists of the dutiful transcription of the unfounded fears of “Barry Broome, president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.”

If you are intrepid enough to read the article all the way to the penultimate paragraph, you will discover the answer to Higuera’s question: No.

[N]o GPEC client has actually said they were not coming because of high housing costs[.]

It’s annoying to have to issue all the usual caveats, but not as annoying as all these sky-is-falling ‘news’ stories.

For the record:

• Phoenix homes are very cheap in comparison to the real estate markets from which established businesses might move.
• The repeated incantation that Phoenix homes sell for 20% above the national median is meaningless; we’re not competing with Iowa.
• While potential home buyers might cast a wary eye at our recent appreciation boom, they are going to be much more interested in our future appreciation prospects in order to reap a windfall of unearned increment for themselves–an unlikely prospect in many real estate markets.
• Our future appreciation prospects are excellent: 1. It’s always snowing and freezing in the Great Lakes states, from which we draw thousands of newcomers every year. 2. Housing prices are between two and four times higher in California, from which we draw thousands of newcomers every year. 3. Hundreds of thousands of house-rich baby-boomers are looking for a warm place for their retirement homes. 4. The states along the Gulf of Mexico have proved themselves to be unacceptably hazardous.
• We have a large, educated, money-hungry work force.

The fact is that Phoenix is still the most affordable big city in the Western United States, and it is among the most affordable of the biggest cities in the United States as a whole.

It seems likely to me that the best way to attract the kinds of businesses Mr. Broome might hope to entertain is to offer them the usual Christmas Tree packages of tax-abatements. The best way to attract real entrepreneurs, not corporate welfare cases, is to cut taxes, cut regulation, cut red tape, eliminate zoning and building-permit hassles, etc.

For example, Higuera Read more