According to a University of Arizona study from January of this year, the average American adds 474 pounds of food waste per year to landfills.

There are also increasing costs to transport fertilizers. According to beef magazine (a bastion of leftist thought), “During the 12 months ending in April 2008, nitrogen prices increased 32%, phosphate prices 93%, and potash prices 100%. This price surge in 2008 was due to strong domestic and global demand for fertilizers, low fertilizer inventories, and the inability of the U.S. fertilizer industry to adjust production levels.”

As the economy improves, these prices will go up with greater demand and with higher fuel prices.

So, here’s my point: if you want to use less foreign oil, emit less greenhouse gas and promote local, organic food, start composting.

All you need is clean kitchen and yard scraps (no cooked food, meet or breads), a good compost bin, a nice shady place and water.

Below  is my contribution to helping you find a method that makes composting easy. And, let’s face it. If it ain’t easy, we are not likely to do it for very long.

That’s why I gave up my hobby of collecting personally autographed postage stamps of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Surgeon General’s Waring: I am not a professional film-maker.

Jim McPhearson of the Downtown Voices Coalition pointed out this great article on what is needed to support economic growth downtown. This example is from Tempe.

One ingredient is lots of trees and shaded spaces for pedestrians, shoppers and casual diners. Let’s hope that the next General Plan takes that more seriously. We have 100 reasons to learn from Tucson and plant more desert-friendly shade trees, most important of which is the heat island effect.

The mornings stay cooler longer and the evenings cool down faster. And, while I respect the grandeur of palm trees and their place in Phoenix history, they just don’t cut it. A 30 foot tall lawn dart simply does not provide the shade that we need.

They do, however provide very attractive living quarters for cockroaches and pigeons.

Just because I’m a Realtor®, does not mean that I am willing to go along with everything the State or National Associations of Realtors says.

Typically, in Arizona, they have attempted to undermine rights residential users of solar energy. Nationally, they don’t typically support environmental laws that I support.

But I am ready to step out and say that we should not extend the $8,000 tax credit past the November 30th deadline. This is sacrilegious to some. Aren’t I undermining my own business? Aren’t I preventing people from buying houses?

Well, my personal business is not as important as the fate of the country. The program has cost the country $15 billion. The National Association of Realtors wants to increase the credit to $15,000 and remove the first time home buyer restriction. It will cost the general fund between $50 and $100 billion. And, over time, we will find all kinds of loopholes, so that will only grow.

We are looking at a bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security on the horizon, and we are supposed to expand this program? Unacceptable.

As for preventing people from buying houses, I simply don’t accept that the market will dry up.  We have record low home prices in America. The market will do better as the rest of the economy recovers. Further, banks still have many, many foreclosed homes that they have not released into the market (over 40,000 in Arizona). While we don’t want them to release them all at once, a steady stream of homes on the market can keep prices down.

For me, it is a simple equation: we needed the boost in the housing market, but it is not worth creating a permanent new hand-out when the result will just add to our staggering deficit and debt.

Now, here is another idea for you to ponder. It might be high time that we eliminate the tax deduction on the interest on your home. Or, at least we need to replace it with something that is more geared toward new home ownership. Now, that is sacrilege! I’m trying to find the article in my stack of old magazines. It was either in the Atlantic Monthly or the Economist, but this is not a new argument.

It goes like this: the interest deduction encourages people to buy houses that are unrealistically large for their income, it encourages sprawl, it is a huge drain on our general fund when we can’t afford it and it is used by people for second homes. Heck, my parents take an interest deduction on their stinkin’ RV because it is a second home!

Really? You gotta squint really hard and look sideways to call an RV a second home.

Regardless, if the goal is to get first time home buyers in to a home so that they can become stable, why give a credit for a second home? Why not offer a one-time $15,000 tax credit for your first home. After that, you are on your own.

I’ll find that article and link to it. This it a very touchy topic, so I’d love to see some debate on it.

As for this topic, check out a very good article on the issue, here.

You might recall from my previous post about anti-deficiency, that Arizona was just about to find itself in a baaaad place for home owners. Here is the recap:

• Arizona is traditionally an anti-deficiency state. I.e., if the bank takes back your property and sells it at a loss, they can’t come after you for the difference.

• A legislator (Republican Senator Steve Pierce, R-Prescott) attempted to change that law so that people who lost their homes to the banks within 6 months of purchasing (presumably investors), could be pursued by the banks.

Problem: it would have encouraged more foreclosures and bankruptcies. Here is why: Arizona has a relatively short foreclosure period (90 days). If banks know that all they have to do is wait out an owner in order to foreclose and still be able to go after the deficiency, then they are more likely to do that. This will impact more than just people who are flipping homes. This could impact all kinds of buyers, not just “flippers.”

So, the Arizona Association of Realtors (AAR), who did not see the implications when the bill first passed, were successful in moving legislation to overturn the original bill  –with the help of the original author, who should consider thinking through legislation in the future.

Moral of the story:

1. Lawmakers need to think through things a little more thoroughly;

2. The AAR lobbyists might have been a little too busy helping the home builders undermine local cities’ ability to collect impact fees or improve energy efficiency of homes to catch this one early.

I’m just sayin’.

The same people who are making decisions today are some of the same people who fought against “The Man” in decades past. How do they feel about being the ones in power now? Are they happy with where we’ve come to?

I got to thinking about this when I went to the Cityscape topping off event downtown last month, which followed the news that Cityscape was going to have all locally owned establishments as tenants. This was great news for Arizona. Purchasing locally provides as much as 75% more tax revenue for our state.

It was a testament to the many people who communicated to the Cityscape planners to remind them that to support local businesses. I wonder if if Cityscape developers, Red Development, pushed for local tenants because their planned franchisees bailed on the project, or because they really wanted local ownership.

So, as I watched the proceedings and tried not to sweat too much, I got to thinking about all those folks who have been working at Phoenix redevelopment since the 1980s or before.

These folks got started in a time when politics in Phoenix was dominated by the mysterious “Phoenix 40,” only a few years after Don Boles was assassinated outside the Clarendon Hotel for exposing mob connections around town. (Read more about that group here.)

What was it like to “come up” in that time? What did they fight against? What are the parallels and lessons for today? Is the downtown they see today what they were hoping for almost 30 years ago?

Continue reading

The city of Phoenix is working on a new General Plan. They do a new plan every ten years. Their last one was adopted in 2001. See here for a little history.

City general plans were required under “Growing Smarter”. This was former Governor Hull’s very weak attempt in 1998 to pretend to think about actually preventing sprawl in Arizona.

Of course, she was forced in to this by all the pressure from the environmental community, which at the time had a public initiative that was going to limit sprawl. Growing Smarter was such a weak document, in large part, because of the strangle-hold that developers have on this state. But, I digress.

The City of Phoenix General Plan, while not preventing sprawl, is actually a good way for regular folk to have a say in the direction of our city over the next ten years.

The good folks at the Downtown Phoenix Journal and Radiate Phoenix put on an event this week at which the city’s planning office staff took thoughts and ideas about the General Plan, as they get ready for the process of passing the next plan. It was a really great event.

I want to share one suggestion and one challenge with you and I’m asking for your support on both.

1) Shade. The old City General Plan suggested that every new parking lot should have “at least 51% shade coverage at maturity of tree.” In other words, if you look at the parking lot from the air when the trees are fully grown, you should see a maximum of 49% of that space in asphalt. When I was on the Encanto Village Planning Committee, this was my constant mantra. It got quite repetitive. Ask Councilman Simplot. He was on that committee when I was.

However, the problem is that this is just a suggestion. There is no ordinance that requires this. So, here we sit with higher summer and overnight temperatures. People drive around longer, emitting carbon, so that they can find any little bit of shade outside the regional Wal-Mart Super-Country.

Nobody seemed to have the necessary intestinal fortitude to stand up to developers and tell them what they need to do to preserve some semblance of livability in the valley. That is why the suggestion never became an ordinance.

Before the next General Plan comes out, this needs to be an ordinance, not the city government equivalent of a courteous suggestion over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

2) Wiki General Plan. The General Plan is a huge document. It was over 200 pages, as I recall. I remember getting a massive binder and our Village Planning Committee broke it in to bits to read over.

Let’s update that process. Wikipedia mastered the use of “crowdsourcing” to allow millions of people to report, suggest and check each other’s work. Universities, private industry and the government all use wiki site, which are really inexpensive to build and maintain, to allow a crowd of thousands of people to build things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The City of Phoenix should demonstrate just how advanced it can be in this process. I guarantee that the city will get a much broader participation than it did in 2000, when only city staff and village planning committee members had the time to work on this.

The General Plan is perfect for this type of project. We can break it down in to its sections and subsections for review, comment and writing. The city can recruit volunteers to monitor each section’s postings to prevent spamming, etc.

Hey, maybe out of all of this we will create even stronger and broader connections in our community.

What do you think?

Call your city Councilman.

If you missed it on my F.B. Fan Page, please have a look at this invite for the League of Conservation Voters new office opening.

If you did not miss it, this is your reminder. I really hope you can make it!

The League has recently moved its offices from Tempe to downtown Phoenix; specifically to 3rd Ave and Roosevelt.

We are proud of our new office as it stands as a symbol to the importance of dense growth as a way to conserve that which we have for so long neglected.

So, I am hosting a reception on August 27th to welcome our new Executive Director, Steve Arnquist and officially open our new office.

We are going to have some help from a very special guest on that day. Phillip Allsopp, the immediate past President and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will discuss the interplay between architecture, density, growth and society health, something he calls Transpolis.

Far from being an academic discussion alone, this is an event that I hope will stimulate discussion among those of us who are working so hard to define how Phoenix will look in the next 50 years.

There is an intriguing situation playing out at the legislature, and I’m not talking about the budget.

A little background: In AZ, if you go in to foreclosure,  the bank takes back your property and sells it at a loss, they can’t come after you for the difference. The act of coming after you for the difference is called “deficiency.” Therefore, Arizona is an “anti-deficiency” state.

In other words, let’s say you bought a house for $200,000, but could not make the payments and the bank forecloses. They can only sell it for $150,000. They can’t come after you for the balance of $50,000.

That is why Arizona is such a great place to get a fresh start. We’ve been that way for a while. Banks don’t like it, but people do.

So, along comes freshman Republican Senator Steve Pierce, R-Prescott. He passes a bill that makes Arizona a deficiency state, so that banks can come get the balance from people. Well, actually, the bill allows deficiency only in those cases where the owner has owned the property for less than 6 months. He was trying to target people who flip houses.

Well, the bill has caused quite a few problems. Most importantly, it will encourage more foreclosures and bankruptcies. Here is why: Arizona has a relatively short foreclosure period (90 days). If banks know that all they have to do is wait out an owner in order to foreclose and still be able to go after the deficiency, then they are more likely to do that. This will impact more than just people who are flipping homes. This could impact all kinds of buyers, not just “flippers.”

So, the Arizona Association of Realtors (AAR), who did not see the implications when the bill first passed, have jumped in to action. They asked the governor to put the topic in the call for special session (which we are in now). They also convinced the original bill sponsor to advocate for the repeal of his own bill –a pretty impressive feat, if you ask me.  See the letter to the governor here.

So, now we are in a real pickle. The original bill goes in to effect on Sept. 30th of this year. Yet, despite several attempts, the AAR has not been able to get the repeal through the legislature. See the Arizona Republic article here.

What does this mean for you? Well, if the repeal does not go through, watch for more foreclosures starting in about December. I don’t expect a dramatic increase in foreclosures, but this will add to the mix. There will also be a suppression of investment purchases.

In my opinion, we’ve done well with anti-deficiency in Arizona. Sure, there are folks who should not be lending money. But, perhaps the banks should look inward to consider why they keep lending to people who default within six months of purchasing a property.

I encourage you to call your legislator and ask them to support a return to our traditional anti-deficiency status.

Stay tuned.

The Advocacy Institute for Behavioral Health is accepting applications for the 2009 Eric Gilbertson Advocacy Institute for Behavioral Health.

The Training can help you broaden your skills in the area of behavioral health advocacy. There are 6 training days starting in September.

Learn more at the Foundation’s Website.

Friday night was Night Rail, a last-minute, all social network-driven, flash mob-style effort to show support for later light rail hours.

See the Thursday post for all of the great organizers of this event.

By Midnight, we had almost 60 people standing at the Roosevelt and Central Metro station, with more on the way.

My close friends and I started at Monti’s in Tempe. Nick Bastain of Rail Life was there, along with about 20 others. Michael Monti of Monti’s was with us and laid out the long and sometimes sordid history of Monti’s. (Did you know it used to be a brothel?)

We worked our way back to Central. Unfortunately, Portland’s was not open by the time we got there. I think they would have had some good business, had they been open. After our rally, we all dispersed, ending up at the Roosevelt, Carly’s and other places in-between.

In the future, we will communicate more with businesses along the light rail to encourage them to get involved. In the end, this was a test. It was only a test. We now know that we have the ability to get the word out about Night Rail. Our next phase will be to grow the event through business participation, live music and the help of people like you!