We try not to disturb the tenants, requiring a signed contract before we permit inspections; this has worked pretty well, and it also has the effect of driving out the potential buyers who aren’t as serious or perhaps as experienced. Mostly the tenants are nice, and we arrange a mutually agreeable time when we can inspect, and that’s that. Every now and then, we have tenants who will not permit the inspection, and we have to serve a two day notice, and show up with a locksmith. It is rare, and in one instance we discovered that someone was illegally subletting the property. In another instance, the tenant was growing weed in the unit.

When we filed the notice to inspect, the tenant called me in a panic, now saying we are not allowed to go into two of the 3 bedrooms…. because he is growing a certain medicinal plant, all legal he says. And opening the doors will “damage” the plants.

I spoke with the department of Health and they say if he has a permit to grow them, then it is ok, the permit renews annually and if there is a dispensary within 25 miles then they won’t renew it. Oh and he can grow 12 of them. And if he is a care giver, for up to 5 other people and has care giver cards, then he can grow 12 for each of them, so up to 72 plants.

We recently had the forcible detainer hearing, and the tenant showed up with a pro-bono attorney who was actually well prepared. Our attorney, for reasons I do not understand, chose to file based on a violation of the crime free lease addendum which specifically states that the tenant will not do anything in violation of the federal controlled substances act. (Personally I would have just notified them based on an inability to inspect). 

Their attorney argued that this was a state eviction, a state matter, and if we were to evict based on a federal statute, that we should be in federal court. Our attorney argued that it is a simple contract dispute, because the tenant signed the crime free lease addendum and the landlord had an expectation that nothing illegal was going on in the unit, specifically addressing the federal statute explicitly named in the addendum.

There was lots of posturing but ultimately the judge ruled for us, and granted summary judgement, which they said they would appeal. So the story continues. I’ll write a future post detailing how this all works out.

-PLH

How can the City move forward the experiment? First, revise the Downtown Code to authorize for limited periods “pop-up” facilities to house small merchants. If food trucks can attract hundreds of customers living and visiting downtown, why should pop-up stores (without wheels) be less attractive? Merchants should be allowed to erect small shops in repurposed ISOs – cargo storage containers – on vacant lots and even on rooftops of buildings having strong flat roofs, such as city parking garages. What would be the result of having a pop-up group of stores on a few public garages downtown open at least during October through April when air conditioning doesn’t have to run 24 hours daily? (I’m not arguing that air conditioning isn’t needed during peak shopping hours where perishables are sold. Still, a merchant can supply a room-sized air conditioning unit to sufficiently cool the shop’s interior for a few hours daily.) The experiment would reveal the optimal permanent locations for these stores. LOT-EK is spearheading the use of a series of ‘incuboxes’ – re-purposed shipping containers that will be used as pop-up shops and concept stores – in the total makeover of Pier 57 in downtown Manhattan. New York’s City Council has backed the plan. The shops will reside topside of the redeveloped pier center. You can read about the concept and see renderings of the Pier 57 proposal at http://www.lot-ek.com/#UNIQLO-POP-UPS. Does using an insulated cargo storage container as a store on office rooftops or garage top floors sound nutty to you? Well, do you plan on parking on the exposed top floor of a public garage if you can avoid it? The uncovered rooftops of public garages generally are reachable by elevators; and they’re empty most of the time on weekends, evenings and otherwise most of the time when employees of public agencies have any choice at all over where they park.

The second city initiative is to promote City government as an “authority entrepreneur,” to borrow from Edward H. Ziegler. Let the City donate (or rent at nominal sums) sites to promote the experiment – sites turned over to merchants under temporary licenses with all necessary utilities lines installed for connection and otherwise ready for occupancy when the ISOs are anchored in some fashion to avoid adverse effects of occasional inclement weather and danger to shoppers. Indeed, the City could provide each merchant with a standardized “pre-wired and plumbed” ISO to move onto an available site. Since ISOs are fundamentally indestructible anyway (corrugated steel walls, floors and roofs, “compromised” only to the degree of openings cut for doors, windows and air conditioning units), the containers can be recycled and moved between locations when one license lapses and another commences. The City ought to make these units available to applicants for a retail license who can prove prior experience in retailing and the financial capacity to be able to cover its business expenses for a minimum period of one year. With a license and an ISO available, all the new downtown merchants need provide are staff, merchandise, floor and window coverings, food handling and other health/safety licenses and proof of liability and property insurance insuring themselves and the City. (Yes, of course it’s more complex, but this is the picture from 10 thousand feet aloft. Big ideas require one not to get lost in the minutiae at the moment of the idea’s inception.)

Phoenix will recoup some of its outlay to merchants by imposing a modest business license fee/tax on sales from temporary locations. Why should Phoenix make this investment? One, because it’s time for our City to be proactive, not simply reacting to downtown initiatives inspired from the private sector. Two, our citizens across the City (not just downtown) have everything to gain by an in-migration of skilled workers and members of the so-called “creative class” who want to live in a more vibrant downtown. Three, by enabling retailers other than hotels, bars and restaurants to succeed downtown, the City messages the development and mercantile communities that government is “on board,” welcoming commercial density that doesn’t diminish the pedestrian scale – which in turn will encourage other “big ideas” for making our city’s center livable, that is, eliminating the need to bust out of downtown to find the commodities of daily residential life.

After a few years of experimenting with various “pop-up” locations for specialty food shops and small groceries around downtown, consumers (both permanent dwellers and students in dorms) will tell downtown Phoenix where they want to buy their eggs, meat, dairy, paper products and baked goods. Perhaps the answer will be “Circle K,” if its business model is superior to those of small merchants. Maybe a few “micro-centers” will be identified downtown optimally serving the local population. Then, the city can determine where local public transportation ought to “daisy-chain,” delivering residents to and from those shopping nodes by jitney-style transportation, where there is a more or less fixed route, with occasional deviations for a special stop–like Houston is doing in its downtown. Let the experiment begin!

The problem for our city center has been that the “groceries” business downtown has been dominated by one player, Circle K, with its limited inventories for as long as most of the folks living and working downtown today can remember. When it comes to retail shopping, I’m libertarian. I think the market tells you where to build the market, so to speak. That’s the approach used by supermarket chains but their typical analysis is grounded in a rigid demographic matrix. Rooftops and houses under construction at the time of the analysis is what chains are interested in before vertical development of a store occurs. “Premature” opening of a supermarket is grounds to end a manager’s career in that business. So while a supermarket chain may purchase land, “banking” it for future development when a parcel lies in the path of eventual population growth, if the demographic analysis doesn’t deliver the arithmetic answer that enough middle class shoppers live within the desired radius, there’s no development. And that’s Robert’s paradox – he wants retail necessaries to be on offer, to spur downtown population in-migration; but supermarkets won’t participate in that “order of business.”

The notion that supermarket shopping is the only way to buy one’s necessaries is odd. If you travel in Europe, have you noticed that, even in the most capitalist societies, supermarkets are still relatively smaller players, and in some places the “supermarkets” are little more than bulked-up convenience stores? A 40-thousand square foot food store would be a large player in many major European cities. When I represented Fry’s during the 1990s, the template store was 62,000 square feet – and that was well before the “lifestyle” behemoths that you see among the major chains today in low-density areas. While Fresh & Easy failed in the U.S., Tesco’s failure wasn’t its modestly-sized stores. It was more the failure of misguided initiatives like (a) using self-service check-out stands that confused consumers accustomed to heavy “store-helper” presence; (b) eliminating vouchers and coupons, which turned off price-sensitive shoppers; and (c) pushing ready-made meals that were incompatible with local tastes. Tesco’s immediate competition came from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, chains with equally small footprints. Wal-Mart began experimenting with smaller stores after Tesco announced opening Fresh & Easy, making Tesco’s way a bit tougher. [Wal-Mart’s experiment has become a commitment of sorts; in 2013, Wal-Mart projects opening 125 “supercenters” but also 115 new stores of fewer than 60 thousand square feet of sales area.] Tesco’s other misperception was that American shopping habits were similar to European traits. I visited three Tesco stores in Ireland in March, two in Dublin. Any of those Tesco stores would have survived on pedestrian traffic alone. No Tesco store in Arizona or Nevada could have survived merely on pedestrian traffic shopping, due to uncooperative weather and ingrained shopping habits.

Enough of Tesco; in addition to brand issues, there is the dilemma of accommodating parking and drives. Supermarkets promote the expectation of wide-open parking fields where shoppers navigate their hauls back to their SUVs in their carts. This means that even a modestly-sized (40,000 s.f. of sales area) supermarket with loading docks and 200 parking stalls “needs” a minimum of 7 to 8 acres of developable land. Phoenix has a number of vacant and underdeveloped lots downtown; but not too many of these are sufficiently large to support a conventional suburban-oriented supermarket. That fact explains why Circle Ks are numerous between 7th Avenue and 7th Street south of I-10, and supermarkets are not. But downtown Phoenix doesn’t require supermarkets and warehouse-shopping concepts to induce local dwellers to move into and shop downtown. In fact, there should be a big experiment, featuring Phoenix as one investor, in developing away from retail “Taj Mahals.” More on this in the next post.

Fulton Teachers College and Teach for America are combining forces to determine best practices in teacher education. Youth and energy for teaching (and a sense of mission) abounds in downtown Phoenix now, with the result that downtown is ripe for experimentation in school development along these lines: three new (or repurposed) schools for Kindergarten through 12th grade should be implanted downtown. The first should act as the “feeder” school for the other two, and it would be a primary school for grades K-4, inclusive. This primary school should be located as close to the ASU Teacher’s College as geography permits. This primary school should emphasize innovation, leveraging all that youth with drive and technology tools have to offer young pupils mentored by their energetic, up to date instructors. There are plenty of empty or underutilized buildings downtown available for repurposing with state of the art facilities for innovation. The primary facility should partner ASU with the City and those private sector believers like T. Denny Sanford, the entrepreneur who funded the Sanford Inspire Program. And those groups should rope into the mix of supporters major downtown employers like utilities companies who benefit directly and immediately from in-migration of employees committed to live where they work. If the City can donate land and invest $12 Million for the Arizona Center for Law and Society to induce ASU’s Law School to move downtown, it can repeat that type performance to promote public education in the lower grades.

Downtown needs to develop two schools for grades 5-12. One actually is underway, the ASU Preparatory Academy on 7th Street, offering instruction through grade 11. Unfortunately, the demand exceeds supply at the moment; a lottery determines whose children will attend. The demand is genuine; consider that each family who “wins” the lottery to enroll a child at the academy, is required to fulfill a minimum of 30 “credits” of service to ASU Prep each school year. (This seems to defy conventional wisdom saying that most public school parents can’t be cajoled to invest in their children’s education.) Obviously, ASU needs to expand the Prep Academy to accommodate increased interest. But a second school needs to be developed, one with severe admission requirements. I’m thinking of a school that, through graduation, demands intense application to studies in the pure and applied sciences, math and technology. This specialized high school would be in the mold of New York City’s specialized high schools: Bronx High School of Science; Brooklyn Technical High School; High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College; Queens High School for Sciences at York College; and Stuyvesant High School. In short, this new STEM academy should be built to become the best-known, most prestigious place to attend a public school in Arizona. Admission should be determined by a highly competitive entrance examination process among Phoenix students in the primary grades. (In New York City, students in grades 8 or 9 who wish to apply to New York City’s specialized high schools must take the Specialized High School Admissions Test in one 150-minute burst.)

Developing this school is achievable by tapping the “science research hub” in downtown Phoenix, leveraging the assets of the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative– the last a joint research venture of the UA, ASU and NAU. The mentoring and internship opportunities that are available from such institutions, added to the resources of ASU’s Colleges of Nursing & Health Innovation and Health Solutions, the Phoenix Biotechnology Accelerator and the Arizona Science Center, render downtown the most logical place to develop such a school for advanced preparation in the entire state. Will these research hub players participate? Imagine you’re a scientist, and you know that the brightest minds among a population, youth that will choose careers in the theoretical and applied sciences and engineering percolated across the street, wouldn’t you want to be part of those minds’ development process? Would your answer be influenced, knowing the parents of these really smart kids, themselves astute potential employees of your organization, would relocate downtown for the convenience of school attendance? Will universities participate? Well, isn’t “upping” educational opportunity the core business of higher learning institutions? Wouldn’t such a school provide a recruiting advantage to get some of the best young teachers-in-training to Fulton? Sure, some initial “promotion” is involved, but the outcome inevitably will be to open the school. That’ll get some creative class types moving into housing downtown, Robert!

(I’d turn over the Mercado facilities to this STEM middle and high school powerhouse; it’s located within two minutes’ walk of all the science and technology resources, enabling scientists and students to “commute” for education and internship purposes back and forth across Van Buren Street. Besides, that location enables sharing athletic and open spaces with Phoenix Preparatory Academy, a few blocks distant.)

Since the program was styled to be about the arts as a trigger to downtown’s resurgence, I was amused that Robert didn’t nod toward the Arizona School of the Arts, which is headquartered at 1410 North 3rd Street, at McDowell Road. ASA seems to be doing just fine for its 800 students in grades 5 through 12, see goasa.org/about/2012ataglance.pdf. Perhaps the solution to Robert’s paradox on the schools front is to double the enrollment of ASA to admit additional children of adults inmigrating downtown. On the other hand, perhaps Robert’s issue is that 3rd Street and McDowell isn’t “downtown enough,” since McDowell Road is a full mile away from Van Buren and it’s north of I-10, a sort of Maginot line. (I can’t say where his attitude lies, since I didn’t ask.) In that case, however, I assume that Pela would acknowledge that ASU Preparatory Academy at 7th & Fillmore, which is K-11 (until next year, when 12th grade is added), is downtown enough. However, that school requires parents to win a “lottery” to enroll their students in grades 1-8 at the present time. Not exactly an open enrollment proposition; thus, the diciness of whether a parent could enroll his/her child would impair that parent’s secure feeling that the child would be able to live, shop for necessaries and be schooled downtown.

Since this is the era of envisioning downtown Phoenix, given the pending text amendment to the Downtown Code, a document in place since April 2010, I thought it would be fun to imagine ways to address Pela’s paradox, that shopping and education infrastructure (and the connectivity of transportation to these venues) must first exist in order to lure in greater residential density. It’s a paradox because those providers don’t typically spend for new construction until the rooftop numbers support development. First, however, I must identify “downtown” for the sake of reader orientation. So, I’ve artificially decided on these boundaries to accommodate Will Bruder’s desire for a 20-minute city. My downtown’s boundaries are Margaret T. Hance Park’s alignment on the North, Jackson Street on the South, 3rd Avenue on the West and 250 feet east of the eastern right of way of 7th Street on the East. I think that a person who is able bodied ought to be able to ride a bicycle or skate-board from one edge of this downtown to the other in 20 minutes or less, and to walk from the center of this rectangle (Van Buren Street, more or less) to either Hance Park or Jackson Street in that same time allotment. For the less able, 20 minutes ought to get one by light rail or the Nos. 0 or 7 bus lines from one edge to the other, north and south and via a bus east and west, including by a circulator-type route. McDowell will not be recognized as part of downtown Phoenix for purposes of these posts. The few following posts will address how Mr. Pela’s “essential ingredients” for downtown flourishing can be the subject of attainable and productive experimentation for City leaders.

Still, don’t Boston’s citizens get to decide whether to celebrate Patriot’s Day in the atmosphere of triumph over adversity that it has observed for more than a century of the running of this race? Wouldn’t a valid response be for 30 thousand Americans to turn out as participants next April on Boston’s streets?

I seem to recall that Bostonians turned out more than 200 years ago to say “no” to the actions of persons who sought to keep colonials in their proper political place. The American spirit is to celebrate, publicly, the heroics of citizens who respond to adversity with their best physical and mental efforts. We threw off the oppression of fear and uncertainty in the 18th Century. Our resolve should be just as stern here. Of course some caution in the future of the Marathon is merited; but we need not knuckle under to a generalized fear of what is possible. Buckle down, Massachusetts. We’re behind you.

For seller finaning, the requirement that the originator be licensed is waived, for up to a certain number of transactions per year. So a seller can still do seller financing, to a point. But the days of selling a property to someone who can’t qualify, at a high interest rate, are likely over. The requirement that the lender must document the borrower’s ability to pay puts a stop to that. The law requires looking at credit scores, debt to income ratios, and other factors.

What about hard money?

I spoke with several hard money lenders, and their attorneys, they claim, advised them that the law does not apply to property flips. I think this is true, because it looks like the law talks about “owner occupied” dwellings in all these requirements. Most property investors use hard money to hold and rehab the property, not move into it. So hard money is still alive. Even seller financing, as long as you are financing someone who is flipping and does not plan to live in the property, still works.

So I suppose overall,this part of the law is good and bad. No more taking advantage of people who can’t qualify; but then, people who have a foreclosure or short sale and can’t qualify may have a hard time even with seller financing, where in the past they might have been able to buy a home.

–PLH

And the big thing lately, though it is pretty quiet, is DVRs, and web-enabled TV sets. Most of us would like to surf the web from the couch and watch online videos; many DVRs like TiVo and others allow us to watch online video, such as YouTube, Netflix, and other services. The very best thing about TiVo and many other DVRs is that we can watch TV and skip all the ads. This is wonderful, to me, because I want to strictly control the stuff that goes in my head, and the advertisers are so canny, so smart, that they can craft ads that will really get into our brains.

Of course, the advertisers know that we want to skip ads, and they want to stop it. So how might this occur? First, if you end up with a future DVR that you rent from the cable company, it is likely that such a device will prevent ad skipping. Paying the full price for a TiVo might be the only way to stay ad-free (or at least ad-skipped) in the future. Current shows are available on the various websites (CBS, NBC, etc.) and you cannot skip the ads. This same technology is likely to wind up in most DVRs, because the advertising dollars are there. Maybe the network websites will have a membership option so if you pay a monthly fee, you can watch the show the same night it airs, and skip the ads.

With web-enabled TVs, if you are trying to watch a video from, say, NBC from their website, you don’t get to skip the ads — and you can’t record it to your DVR for later, why would you need to? You can get it from the website anytime (with the batch of then-current ads).

So enjoy your ad skipping DVRs while you can… I do not think it is going to last.

-PLH

Each Valentine’s day, I think about relationships — I think about them lots, really, but about romantic ones in particular on this day.

I have a wonderful relationship with my dog. I suppose I should really say “our” dog, because it was my wife’s strong desire to have a new dog after the old one wore out. I like dogs, generally other people’s dogs, because then they are not in my house and I don’t have to deal with them. When I got married, my wife Lisa had a couple of dogs, and while I got along with them alright, they were not ever “my” dogs, and there was not a strong bond.

Then we got Fiona, a really cure Boston Terrier that you just can’t help but like. And as with most people’s dogs, because that is how dogs are, if you leave for 5 minutes and then come back in the door, Fiona acts like she has just been reunited with her long lost cousin from Topeka. She greets my wife, and me, with great enthusiasm each time we get home, and she is a little mopey when  she figures out we are leaving.

It isn’t just the dog. We adopted a cat recently, and the cat has also bonded to Fiona, so much that when we let Fiona outside, the cat (which is strictly an indoor cat) sits at the door and cries because her dog is gone. Then when Fiona comes back inside, the cat chases her and greets her… like she is a long lost cousin from Topeka.

What has this got to do with relationships, and Valentine’s day?

What would it be like if your relationship with your love interest was like what Fiona feels for us, or what the cat feels for Fiona? What if, whenever you heard the garage door open and knew your mate was home, you got up and ran to greet them at the door, help unload the car — no matter what you were doing? Or maybe when you get home, immediately, without doing anything else, find your mate in the house and greet them — as enthusiastically as if it was your long lost Topekan cousin?

It probably will seem pretty silly at first. What if you make it a ritual? It could be really fun — and there is lots of opportunity to mix it up and do different things.

Here’s the important part: Do it enthusiastically whether you feel the enthusiasm or not. “Fake it until you make it” is real and works. Over time, as this _enthusiastic_ greeting becomes a ritual, you will find that you _are_ enthusiastic about it. And this is the key, it will program your unconscious minds to be excited whenever you get together with your mate after an absence.

There are lots of other little things you can do, too. Each month over this coming year I’ll post another interesting tidbit about making an average relationship excellent, or making an excellent one outstanding! For now — be enthusiastic like a dog!

-PLH

By Arizona state statute (A.R.S. §9-461.06) a city is required to revise and obtain citizen approval of its general planning instrument at least every 10 years. (A city may petition the state for additional time to modify its plan.) In the case of Scottsdale, because its General Plan update failed in the March, 2012, election, the city’s 2001 General Plan version remains effective until an update is ratified (if at all) by its citizens. Scottsdale retained the services of the Arizona Town Hall (after a competitive bidding process) to maintain impartiality, separating City Hall from the citizens for this exercise, attempting to avoiding the feel of impropriety while encouraging “effective and continuous public participation” in the major amendment of the city’s General Plan, which is what the state statute requires.

One criticism that resurfaces repeatedly on the Internet in other states where there is General Plan citizen input (especially in California, it seems) is that real citizen participation is marginalized and that the process is “rigged,” meaning the city administration’s point of view on land use is imposed, unwillingly or unwittingly, upon its citizens. Complaints range from allegations that the composition of citizen “panels” participating in a general plan’s amendment process are skewed by selecting persons who share the administration’s point of view to charges that the questions posed for citizen input are slanted to cause the engaged citizens to reinforce a city’s administration and planning staff’s views.

The most adamant critics of a “town hall” process such as what Scottsdale leaders organized this month claim that it’s a form of community mind-control. In Scottsdale’s case, however, logic doesn’t support this point of view. First of all, the 100 participants chosen (out of about 300 applicants) to comprise the citizen panels meeting in smaller groups and ultimately in a final plenary session were all selected based upon applications submitted to the Arizona Town Hall for selection. In other words, the city staff and administrators did not determine which persons were selected to make up the 100 – person representative body. The citizens selected come from the far north to the far south regions of the city. Furthermore, the open-ended questions under consideration in panel and plenary discussions over these three days were not prepared by city personnel. While the city government advised the Arizona Town Hall that it wished to have the 100 – person group create a vision statement to undergird the modified General Plan, the city did not tell Town Hall volunteers either what the vision statement must say or what any ingredient within the vision statement ought to be. Therefore, the citizen body assembled will itself determine a vision of what planning and development should look like for Scottsdale during the next 10-year (or so) period. No city employee or elected official leads or otherwise controls the live sessions, led by Arizona Town Hall volunteers, none of whom lives in Scottsdale or works for the city government. Finally, while the working group consists of 100 persons invested in Scottsdale’s future, spectators are welcome at this Town Hall. So, while you may hear that “Visioning Scottsdale” Town Hall is a city – contrived and contained process with predetermined outcomes, don’t believe it, at least not until you’ve sat in on a session or the whole shebang.

The Arizona Town Hall traditionally uses a version of a “policy Delphi method” for addressing thorny public issues. Philosophically, however, it is not the ultimate goal of a standard Delphi process to force consensus. The process intends instead to explore policy alternatives in a civilized, thoughtful manner, allowing those engaged to figure out if, minimally, there are some issues and values where attendees agree. The Town Hall process is not, therefore, a failure if some strongly – expressed “minority” points of view emerge from the assembly. Of course, to the extent consensus emerges, the final written product of the conferees is more easily communicated to those Scottsdale residents who will vote on the revised plan. Scottsdale is savvy enough to consider minority points of view in an ultimate statement of citizens’ vision, as some text will be vetted by voters again in 2014. One hopes Scottsdale’s adult assembly in the main matches the good work done by a body of Scottsdale youth assembled during January. As should have been so, the Scottsdale Republic complemented the attendees at their separate conference on the General Plan for their input and mutual civility.