All Things Considered In Phoenix - Two

A Grocery Store In Downtown Phoenix

Finally something similar to a grocery store, though not quite is opening in Downtown Phoenix. 

"Napa Valley-born Oakville Grocery, will keep hours of 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday – Saturday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

If you follow Oakville on Facebook you’ve been privy to some leaked photos recently teasing everything from the store’s wide selection of Arizona-made wines to bathroom tissue (complete with the laugh-out-loud caption, “We’ve got TOILET PAPER! oooooo ahhhhhhh!!!!!” Hilarious. (Downtown Phoenix)

Portland Place Condos

Portland Place Condos in the Roosevelt historic district.  

"The developers behind that project, Tim Sprague and Feliciano Vera of Habitat Metro, recently hosted a RadiatePHXevent (the monthly salon series hosted by Urban Affair, publishers of DPJ) and shared the story of that project and the future of the Lexington Hotel."  → Downtown Phoenix Journal

Follow the links to see the video which I had a hard time embedding here. RadiatePHX: A Phoenix Developer's Story from Downtown Phoenix Journal on Vimeo.

The Fate of Phoenix in Climate Change

A quote from 'Back to the Future - A roadmap for tomorow's cities' by James Howard Kustler in The Orion Magazine via The Rogue Columnist. 

"Some newer U.S. cities occupy unfavorable sites, and they will simply go out of business. Phoenix’s fate is sealed: without mass motoring and cheap air conditioning, it will collapse. You can’t grow food in the desert without heroic irrigation, and all their water comes from elsewhere and at great expense."

Aphorism For The Week

"Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet."

From: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Reading this aphorism results in a mix of feelings in me. On the one had 'progress' is bringing a lot of good to a lot of people: mainly freedom of choice, but on the other hand freedom is followed by popular culture, sameness and commercial propaganda. Throughout the work people have the same stuff, watch similar shows, go to similar looking and tasking places. Take the plague of pop food like Starbucks which can be seen just as often in Phoenix as near the historic Viennese streets. What's so bad about that? Differences get diluted, the world becomes the same everywhere you go: it's mindless and boring, especially considering the dominance of commercialism.

Phoenix Housing Market

We published two reports this week about the Phoenix housing market.

A review of the June 2011 Residential Sales in Greater Phoenix - which you'll see show some good numbers with lots of demand and low supply. Though prices are still holding steady.

The second report is about seasonality in the Phoenix housing market, specifically when do sales peak and dip throughout the year.  If you don't want to see the graph, I'll tell you that you just missed the peak.