The Clark Report
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News, Culture, Self Deprecation
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Feb. 2009 |
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Get Your PHX
The first Get Your PHX was a smashing success. About 40 people came by. We ordered food from Pei Wei and brought it upstairs to Side Bar. I gotta say, my Pad Thai tasted surprisingly nice with a Bombay Sapphire martini. Thanks to Josh Parry for accommodating us. Please visit Side Bar. As promised, we are having our next Get Your PHX at Hanny's. Amazingly, it looks exactly like it did in this postcard from 60 years ago! Click on the picture for a little history. They've been open since November. But many of you have commented to me that you've not had a chance to see it. Well, now's your chance! They are giving us exclusive seating for this. So, Please RSVP to me or through Facebook so I can get an accurate count. If you missed the last one, don't miss this one! February Get Your PHXWednesday, February 18th from 5:30 to 7:30Hanny's40 N. First St, PhoenixPhoenix, AZ 85004I really enjoy their white pizza, brochette and pork loin sandwiches. It's also worth going to see the massive tongue couches and the restrooms, a la 2001 Space Odyssey.
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Downtown Venue Review
Tuck Shop2245 N. 12th St. It was so surreal to eat in this warm, comfy place that used to be a nondescript building across from a shady convenience store in the Coronado neighborhood. It was as if they took somebody's living room from circa 1977, sat us all down and fed us little nibbles of never-before-combined recipes. You certainly would not have seen these combinations in the heyday of leisure suits and Joe Namath. I had the Medjool dates stuffed with Schreiner's chorizo. It came with a pear dipping sauce that was light and unique. It went really well with the petite syrah. Now, there are eight words I'd never imagined I would ever string together. The Good: Just a really nice atmosphere and decor. They have come up with a very inventive and complementary taste palette. The Bad: I feel like they should rethink the gorgonzola grits, covered in butter. I think even Jiffy Lube offers a lighter blend for your car. The Ugly: Meals and two drinks for the three of us ran $90. That kinda hurt. The Brockway House506 E Portland St Phoenix  Greg Esser and Cindy Dach (of "Eye Lounge" and "Made" fame) took this
1913 house that was about to fall over like an undercooked meringue and
turned it into a home and event facility. It was slotted for demolition in 2003. Go here to download the step by step slide show of the progress. Beware it is in a 70MB PDF file. But if you geek-out on This Old House-style odysseys, this is for you. There is some interesting historical background on the original owner, Dr. Geo M. Brockway. I got a live tour a couple weeks ago. I'm a little late, as it was finished in 2007. Although Greg and Cindy would tell you that they have another year of detailing to do, I thought it was fantastic. They not only restored the home, but they modernized it without losing the original feel. We are talking about hosting a Get Your PHX here before the heat of the summer envelopes us. We just need to sort out how to feed and imbibe all of you who come. It is a full-service event facility, after all! Please watch for that.
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Real Estate
Want a good indicator of when the market will turn? Look at pending sales and inventory, not prices. Prices can turn on a dime, meaning that if you are waiting for the "bottom" of the market, you will only know it once it's too late. Highest number of pending sales in the Phoenix metro area in 2007 = 7,651, on Feb. 26th Highest number of pendings in 2008 = 7,738, on June 25th The January 2009 pendings = 7,837 Trend: Increasing "pendings" In other words, sales activity in the Phoenix metro area in 2009 is already stronger than in 2007 and in 2008.
The higher number of pending sales (in part due to investors and bargain
buyers) is keeping our inventory stabilized. But, those bargain buyers are starting to turn the market. Active listings are going down and sales are going up. December 2008 active listings was 59,000 January 14, 2009 active listing = 52,685 February 2, 2009 active listings = 51,555 Trend: shrinking inventoryJanuary 2008 sales = 2,907 January 2009 sales = 4,733 We could see 6,000 sales in February Trend: increasing salesSo, Econ 101 time. What happens when inventory goes down and scarcity increases? Price goes up. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next week. But soon. This is especially true for homes under $300,000. Notice the trend lines on the chart below. Inventory is steadily heading down. It won't start a bubble again. But as soon as people start to feel a little confident about the market, they will start buying and prices will go up. Houses that are pennies on the dollar today will go away.I'm no Stephen Dubner. I could be wrong. But I've done OK so far. Call me if you want to talk more about where the market is going. |
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Aural Fixation
By Greg Ensell
Indie music connoisseur Greg Ensell continues his reporting of promising new music.
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Hear more at
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A Little Stimulation
The federal Stimulus Package (which sounds a little dirty, frankly) could pump as much as $10.34 billion in to Arizona. Much of that will go to energy infrastructure development.
See the file I've uploaded here for a summary of the energy stimulus in the House version.
What's it going to? Well, for instance, we could build a lot more solar and wind energy generation if we had the power lines to transport the energy. So, we will subsidize that major infrastructure development.
Much of this money will come in the form of tax breaks and grants for infrastructure. There will also be small grants for research and energy efficiency in homes. Those grants will be directed through my old haunt, the Energy Office.
The Problem: The Energy Office sits in the very ineffective Department of Commerce and is a cash cow for that department. When I was there, over $120,000 per year went from the Energy Office's budget to pay for salaries of higher-ups in the Department of Commerce who did absolutely nothing related to energy. But they were really thankful for that money!
The Solution: Move the Energy Office out of Commerce. Make the Director a cabinet-level position in Arizona. Work to coordinate stakeholders in Arizona to maximize the money we are getting from the Feds so that Arizona can really move toward its renewable energy future. This must be a coordinated effort and we need to re-tool in order to make that happen.
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Suggested Reform #3.2 (the future)
This is part 3.2 of my now six-part series on things we can do to reform our legislature. Its been expanded a little. Have you ever known me to be brief?
Last month I gave you a little history on redistricting. This month: what we need to do to fix the process.
Looking from the outside, people have asked "There are about 34% Democrats, 40% Republicans and 20% Independents in the state. Why can't every district look like that?"
Three reasons: 1) minority-majority districts pull in more Democrats to assure minority control; 2) geographically, there are simply some areas of the state that are so dominated by one party that you could not make a compact district if you tried to make the district competitive (think Mojave County); 3) the political parties don't necessarily want it.
Party strategists on both sides exploit these factors to make as many "safe" districts as possible. But I would submit to you that they won't benefit the same as they have in the past by allowing the same distortion of the districts.
If Democrats want to super-pack some districts to assure that they will always have a few safe minority-majority districts, they are cutting themselves off at the knees. In a state that is increasingly diverse, the fear that some minority groups won't stand a chance in elections is less believable. In a country that elected Barack Obama and a state that increasingly elects minority leaders who are NOT in minority-majority districts, Democrats only hurt their chances over-all by draining loyal voters from other districts that they could win.
This is not to say that we should not have minority-majority districts. What it means is that we should not make them at the cost of gaining seats in competitive and increasingly diverse districts.
On the other side, remember how in previous redistricting efforts Republicans encouraged Dems to make even more super-packed minority-majority districts, knowing that it gave Republicans even more safe districts? If Republicans think that they are better off playing racial politics to get Democrats to make more districts that favor Republicans, they are ignoring the biggest lesson of 2008 -they need to reach out to a more diverse electorate. Republican-dominated districts that are primarily "white and right" only cater to a shrinking voting block.
In a great book called Whistling Past Dixie, Thomas Schaller makes the argument that the Republican Party has backed itself in to a corner where its campaigns primarily appeal to aging white, Christian, Southern conservatives -the last vestiges of Goldwater's Southern Strategy. You can't get to 51% when your voting base is a shrinking portion of the electorate.
If the GOP wants to get its message of smaller government out there, it has to carry that message to a more diverse audience.
More than any of this strategic stuff, the Founding Fathers were trying to design a meritocracy. If you represent the people better, if you make a better case, you should be in power. The end.
You can't do that if so many districts are safe from challengers. Further, lawmaking becomes less representative because people in safe districts don't need to compromise. They don't need to find solutions that meet more peoples' needs.
Demographic analysis that we did last year showed that Arizona could still have minority-majority districts and have as many as 10 out of 30 competitive seats in the legislature and 4 out of ten in Congress in 2012. Right now we have 4 out of 30 and 3 out of 8, respectively. (We will get two new congressional seats in 2012.)
So, given all of that, what are we supposed to do? (If you've read this far, you deserve an answer, I guess.)
Here is what we need to do: First, recognize that democracy works better with competition.
Second, change the language of the 2000 law so that it allows the definition of competition to balance out "communities of interest" and compactness, rather than being an after-thought. We can still have districts that respect communities of interest and that have logical boundaries while doing what the Founding Fathers wanted.
Third, we simply must find a way to choose commissioners without the conflict of interest presented by the leaders of the House and the Senate.
Until we fix this, we will continue to have a legislature that is unresponsive, ideological and unwilling to find common ground.
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Got any good downtown tips? Send 'em my way!
And, as always, I respect your right not to be bothered with annoying spam email. If you would like to be removed from my email list, just let me know. Thanks!
Sincerely,
Ken Clark
K. E. Clark Independent Consulting
  
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