What does that mean when the restaurants already are closed except for takeout and delivery, and many other non-essential businesses are closed because of Covid-19? Not a great deal, actually.

Governor Doug Ducey’s order essentially tells anyone not engaged in a critical activity (shopping for groceries, going to doctor’s appointment, etc.) to stay home. Public transportation remains open, and from what I hear it’s not hard staying six feet away from someone on the nearly empty light rail.

Yet … the state’s golf courses remain open because Ducey considers them to be an essential service. Hiking trails, busy on normal days and even more so no, remain open even though there’s no way to stay six feet away from someone walking down the mountain you’re walking up.

No one will have to provide proof that they are engaging in an essential or critical activity if seen by the authorities. In other words, stay home if you feel like it but if you want to get a quick nine holes in, go for it.

Will Arizona’s stay at home order help? Possibly, though most folks who are taking this seriously have been home as much as possible for a couple of weeks. As for those who aren’t …

In the Sun City area, the American Legion is closed but regulars have been having gatherings at their own home. Someone who is part of Sun City’s ironworking club decided to host a large barbecue at his home a week or two ago. He contracted coronavirus and lost his life.

There are countless more examples of this and we could take more about why some have decided to ignore the dozens and dozens of warnings that have been out since January.

But that’s besides the point. While Arizona’s stay at home order could be more robust than it is, the basic premise remains.

Stay at home. Stay safe. Keep your neighbors safe.

Yes, doctors offices are being discouraged from testing unless there is significant evidence of coronavirus symptoms. No, testing may not be necessary for those without symptoms (though, as Sen. Rand Paul proved this week, it’s possible to test positive and be asymptomatic. Though we hope most people have the sense to self-quarantine, unlike Paul.)

Odds are, if you call your doctor, they are going to screen you over the phone to determine whether you do or don’t have symptoms or recently traveled (though, right now, community spread has made that latter question nearly irrelevant.)

Here’s the key thing: DON’T JUST SHOW UP AT YOUR DOCTOR, URGENT CARE OR EVEN THE HOSPITAL. Call first so proper precautions can be taken ahead of your visit.

As for testing, there are set places where covid-19 testing in Arizona is available.

Aside from that … stay home, stay safe and make your community safer.

Wednesday, May 22

• Centennial High School – 1 p.m.
• Sunrise Mountain High School – 3 p.m.
• Raymond S. Kellis High School – 5 p.m.
• Ironwood High School – 7 p.m.

Thursday, May 23

• Peoria High School – 1 p.m.
• Liberty High School – 3 p.m.
• Cactus High School – 5 p.m.

Needless to say – PLAN ON CROWDS! The ceremonies run one after the next and are completed incredibly efficiently. One group enters through the east entrances before the ceremony and exits out the west afterward.

Another helpful hint – don’t try and meet your grads by the tall, red numbers designating the entrances. Why? Because everyone else is thinking the exact same thing. Choose a different location, one that can be found easily but less likely to draw the majority of the people there.

And lastly, enjoy the day. Your students worked hard to get there and, without a doubt, you were a large part of their success.

Congrats!

The Goodyear City Council in February approved a development agreement allowing Microsoft, the tech behemoth, to start construction on two buildings located on a 279-acre parcel the company owns near Goodyear Airport. And recent reports from KTAR indicate the company has purchased even more land, a 147-acre parcel near Citrus and Indian School, nine miles to the north and west of Goodyear airport.

Details still are sketchy – it’s unknown what type of work Microsoft will be performing here or the number of jobs the new buildings might be. Still, this could be another key to unlocking some of the West Valley’s real estate potential.

Westward population growth into Buckeye and beyond always had been tempered by the realities of the job market. For the most part, the bulk of the jobs in the Valley still are located far more centrally. And one drawback of purchasing in the far West Valley has been the inevitable commute down Interstate 10 and the joys of rush hour.

However, with Microsoft coming in and the tendency of businesses to follow each other’s lead, this could be a major piece of making the West Valley an even more popular destination for home buyers. Already, Fairlife and Coca-Cola are partnering in the area to build a $200 million facility to produce lactose-free milk beverages. (No comment from the hundreds of cows spread across the area’s dairy farms was available.)

Stay tuned.

In the interim, if you’d like to take a look at homes currently available in Goodyear, take a look at our Goodyear real estate page.

This was brought home to me this morning as I went into my youngest daughter’s room to put away some holiday decorations. The truth is, it’s no longer her room. Hasn’t been for a while. Her mom and I shared custody but, once she hit high school, weekdays and weekends at dad’s faded into the necessities of her schedule. Then she met a man, with whom she now lives, and her old bedroom has become a storage space.

Time passes us by, whether we wish it to or not.

That experience is an apt metaphor for this online space. I started AllPhoenixRealEstate.com over a dozen years ago and spent years nurturing it, feeding it, guiding it, watching it grow. (Ignoring the fact I kept wordpress’ default “hello world” slug.) The site was doing all I could have asked of it, so I let it be. The problem is, time passes us by.

Once upon a time

When I started, Zillow was just starting out, offering inaccurate Zestimates for home values. Now it is the 800-pound gorilla in the search reports, an unstoppable force. I still have not handed Zillow my own advertising dollars because its effectiveness there is intermittent at best.

Real estate commentary and real estate blogs were a new concept. We were writing for ourselves and our audience, not Google. Those days have passed as well. (And if my widget tells me one more time I’m in passive voice, I’m going to delete the thing.)

Somewhere around 2012, I realized I had said everything I wished to say about Phoenix real estate. Even now, seven years later, most of the eternal debates we REALTORS engage in are the same as those long past. Except, seven years later, there’s a new generation of buyers and sellers who may not have been paying attention then. Archives are nice, but still.

There are newer challenges these days. Buyers purchasing homes with an eye toward vacation rentals. First-time buyers who were in elementary school when the Phoenix real estate bubble expanded and burst. Those who look at the market today and don’t see the frayed edges because they don’t know their history.

Technologically, having fallen off the leading edge, it’s unlikely I’ll get back to the forefront. And that’s fine. Real estate is and always has been a people business. The only difference is how people search for their homes and their agents.

Time passes us by in many areas. In that one, the basics are eternal.

Stick around, let’s see what we can re-discover about real estate together.

Make no mistake, the Phoenix real estate market remains a strong seller’s market, particularly in the lower price ranges. But changes in the market are as perceptible as the belated changing of the season. (Yes, Virginia, 80-degree temperatures constitute early fall in Phoenix.)

What’s causing the change? There are any number of factors:

• Affordability – the constant rise in prices for the past couple years have priced some out of the market, much like what we saw in 2005 before the Phoenix real estate market crashed
• Interest rates – while I’d incorrectly expected rates to finish the year closer to six percent than five, barring some change in course from the Federal Reserve we will be seeing rates in the low fives before the year is out
• Uncertainty – while many are celebrating the strong economy both nationally and locally, those with longer memories are wondering how long the good times can last

Of course, everything here runs in cycles. If sales cool, rents will increase and we inevitably will end up back in a place where it absolutely makes more sense to buy than rent. (This can be debated right now, at least from an affordability standpoint.)

What ultimately will happen remains to be seen. But the headwinds, they are coming.

So as not to bury the lead, thousands of teachers walked out and hundreds of schools were closed as a result this morning. At issue are the ideas of teacher pay that ranks near the bottom of the nationally and per-student funding that ranks 49th out of 50 states. Yes, from a funding perspective Arizona now is Mississippi.

Some Republican legislators, like Lake Havasu’s ultra-conservative Paul Mosley, have said the entire RedforEd movement has been co-opted by Democrats and the left for their own nefarious purposes because, if one doesn’t agree with ultra-conservative philosophy, one clearly has no ability to think for themselves. Or so the theory seems to go. Surely it couldn’t be because Arizona ranked only 38th in per-student spending in 1990 and has dropped in the rankings since.

Other legislators are bemoaning the impact the walkout will have on students in less-affluent areas – the kinds of students that many legislators routinely ignore when they make the annual cuts to education in this state.

Fox 10’s Kari Lake first tweeted then deleted her opinion that RedforEd was a veiled attempt to get marijuana legalized in Arizona because there has been some discussion of using taxes on the sales to go toward education. Reality is that whatever the voters earmark, the legislature will find a way to circumvent. There’s a reason there’s a long-standing lawsuit regarding the state’s cuts to education starting in 2009.

RedforEd also has brought out the trolls, with alt-right radio hosts now blasting away at the teenagers who dare support the walkout. (The trolling isn’t one sided – currently on Twitter, a student is being bashed for his concern over losing days in his AP classes when his AP tests can’t be rescheduled.) Not sure what needs to happen in one’s life to start slandering kids, but there it is.

What will come of this is anybody’s guess. Legislators are loathe to take action and are still upset that Governor Ducey vetoed 10 bills last week with identical veto messages asking for a budget with the 20% raise in teacher’s salary he has proposed. (Mosley, who recently ran a bill for a Colorado company without input from any stakeholder in Arizona, somewhat ironically said Ducey is running the state like a CEO and doesn’t understand he needs to talk to others.)

In the interim, the Phoenix New Times has running updates on this page. Stay tuned.

Photo credit: North Phoenix News, which also has a great RedforEd FAQ page.

The reality is this isn’t an issue that sprang up overnight. It has been festering for more than 25 years.

Property taxes in Arizona

Property taxes in Arizona are low. Ridiculously low, when compared to the rest of the country. According to WalletHub, Arizona ranks 15th for the lowest effective tax rate. Needless to say, that’s an extremely attractive fact for those buying real estate here.

Arizona also has the 11th-lowest income tax burden in the United States per WalletHub. This I saw first hand in the mid-1990’s while working as a reporter at the Arizona Capitol Times. Faced with a surplus, the legislature decided to cut income-tax rates and vehicle taxes. Cutting taxes always has been the default decision in the state’s Republican legislature. (Except sales taxes – that remains a large part of the state’s tax income.)

The other hallmark of Arizona budgeting is, when in doubt, slash funding for education.

Enter #RedforEd

It only was a handful of years ago that legislative cuts to funding left districts trying to find creative solutions to keep the bills paid. Depending on who is doing the figuring, roughly $1 billion has been chopped from the state’s school system over the past decade. And this is happening at the same time that corporate tax rates have been slashed as part of the continuing effort to make trickle-down economics work. Which it doesn’t.

In an era of protests, it was inevitable that educators would join the mix. The #RedforEd movement which started elsewhere took fire in Arizona and, while the focus has been the abysmal state of teacher pay, there also is a focus on the need for capital funding.

Legislative leadership is unsure how to fund Ducey’s plan without raising taxes but, truthfully, that’s exactly the point. The tax cuts made to date have been a primary reason why there is such a deficit of per-student spending in Arizona. For decades, the solution to any budget-balancing issue has been to rob from education and then decry the standards of education afterward.

Thursday’s teacher walkout

The walkout is a risky gambit, especially given any days missed will need to be made up after Memorial Day, the normal drop-dead end date in the school calendaring process. But it’s necessary, if only to bring more focus and hopefully pressure on the legislature to take legitimate action instead of sloughing off the needs of education while examining how best to ease the already low burden on Arizona corporations.

This isn’t a single-year phenomenon. This is the cumulation of decades of neglect of the state’s education system. In lesser areas, say schools’ arts program, the impact clearly is visible. Go to a State Marching Festival and see high school bands that once had more than a hundred members now struggle along with 30 or 40. Why? Because the funding’s gone and the financial impact fully rests on the parents.

Arizona education funding is a problem that must be fixed, sooner rather than later. And the reason I write about it here is because there is an impact that rolls into the real estate market. Families aren’t going to move to areas where there children are going to be disadvantaged by the education they receive. One of the first question such buyers ask is about the quality of the schools. There are good districts and not-so-good districts but all could be so much better if the Legislature simply would make education a priority.

Then again, if education had been a priority this whole time, the legislators wouldn’t have such a hard time understanding why it’s important.

Mortgage Interest Deduction

Currently, homeowners can fully deduct interest on up to $1 million in real estate mortgage loans. The GOP Tax Bill is reducing that cap to the first $750,000. Will this change have any impact on the average homeowner? Despite the warnings of doom from the National Association of REALTORS, the answer is not really. The vast majority of homes in the Phoenix real estate market fall below the $750,000 mortgage level. (Assuming a 20 percent down payment, a $750,000 mortgage means a $937,500 sales price.) Where this will have an impact is on homes in the upper price points of the market and real estate investors who have leveraged more than the $750,000 across multiple properties.

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Property Tax Deduction

Currently, the so-called SALT deduction – state and local taxes – for local property taxes is unlimited. Under the GOP Tax Bill, the SALT now will be capped at $10,000. (Insert low-sodium joke here is you choose. I’ll wait.) By and large, this is going to be a non-starter for most homeowners in the Phoenix real estate market because we are a ridiculously low property tax state. Much of the talk has talked about California, New York and New Jersey but I’ve had clients from Nebraska shaking their heads at how low property taxes are here. Like the mortgage interest deduction, the property tax deduction reduction will impact mostly higher price points and real estate investors.

Other Changes in the GOP Tax Bill

Truthfully, as I’m not a tax expert, I’m going to stay out of the weeds here. The personal exemption is going up, which for some could offset the caps on the above deductions based on their own specific tax situation. There also is a change in pass-through taxation for LLCs – again, this is a conversation best had with your accountant or tax attorney.

On the specifically real estate side of life, though, the GOP Tax Bill doesn’t look like it will have a major impact in the Phoenix real estate market.

Enter the Big Blue Van

If you’re not a big fan of hefeweisens, you probably can stop reading here. If you are, however, this story begins at BJ’s Brewhouse in Peoria – a large chain restaurant, yes, but one that carries local micro-brews at different times. Which is how I met the Big Blue Van, brewed in Lake Havasu at the College Street Brewery. From a flavor standpoint, take a basic Shocktop or Blue Moon and infuse the beer with a non-sweet blueberry flavor. Put another way, take the Abita Purple Haze and sub blueberry for raspberry. Whichever method you prefer, the end result was a love affair.

Last November, my wife and I drove up to Laughlin and decided to come home through Lake Havasu. For her, the trip was about London Bridge. For me, it was about drinking the Big Blue Van in its natural habitat, as it were. College Street sells six-packs of the stuff, and I’m reasonably certain it can be found at Bevmo, but we all know beer tastes better from the tap. One thing that makes the presentation in Lake Havasu entirely unique: just as Blue Moon or Shocktop often is served with an orange slice, College Street will serve its Big Blue Van with blueberries floating on the surface. Odd at first, but a nice twist.

Where to Find It

As of the moment, there are four restaurants I’ve found that carry Big Blue Van. There is the aforementioned BJ’s at Park West, Northern Avenue just west of the 101. Then there are three locally-owned restaurants – Heroes Grill at 59th Avenue and Union Hills, Il Primo at 67th Avenue and Bell (and presumably at the other half-dozen or so locations) and Headquarters, just east of Harkins Arrowhead west of 83rd Avenue.

As much as I wish I were receiving free beer for this plug, I’m not. But if you’re in the mood for something different brewed here in the great state of Arizona, the Big Blue Van is an excellent way to go.