Weekly Wrap Up

Data Point

While browsing the cycling site rapha.cc I came across an article about cycling the steepest streets of San Francisco and followed links to Data Pointed is the home of artist and scientist Stephen Von Worley's data visualization research; a journal of interesting information imagery and news from around the world; and a place where you can spend a few minutes, have a laugh or two, and discover something new."  31.5% and 29% grade.

There is a beautiful visual map of the U.S Census data for population growth from 2000 to 2010.

I spent alot of time on Data Point and learned a bunch too.

Market Trends

The Cromford Report has published the mid month report in which, amongst others, they note,

This TED talk features Alain de Botton, a writer and philosopher: his main focus is everyday life. In this video he studies our society’s ideas of success and failure, covering a variety of topics including envy, career snobbery and meritocracy.

When you don't own your owner success, you become a victim of societies pressures and even more importantly it's rules. I think this is part of the reason low income people are against raising taxes even for the rich, because despite the reality that it's not going to happen, people believe they will be rich and don't want to be subjected to higher taxes should they be in that position.

Visit Poland

I'm Polish and love both the U.S.A and Poland so I want to share with you this promotional…

Arizona's Centennial is coming up. Yip the state will be a whopping Century old or this is how young it is. There are people living here that are older then this state, that's how young it is.

John Talon, not one to leave stones unturned in 'Centenial blues' where he notes,

"We did build light rail, to tremendous success, and the Convention Center, Sheraton, beginnings of the downtown ASU campus, and City Scape, which is nearing full leasing. But it was not enough. Most of the center city remains a wasteland of blighted, banked empty land. Meds-and-eds was stillborn. The underclass grows. An economic depression will not abate."

When I saw so much activity in Downtown Phoenix over the last decade it was very exciting to see and exhilarating to…

This week as every week has been interesting. There has never been a time when we did not live in interesting times. We have news and information from around the world accessible immediately. It's quite extraordinary yet overwhelming. It's good to have access to it, but do we need it, do we have to be tuned in all the time? There was an interesting show on this over the weekend on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

It's the same in real estate. The information is available to all buyers and sellers: you don't need Realtors for the information, you don't really need them to find the homes, but we are here to help disseminate the information to put it together for clients to help you make sense of it, to make a decision on the right information.

And speaking…

Revitalizing The Private Mortgage Market: 'Skin In The Game' And The Consequences for Home Buyers

"Currently, more than 90% of new U.S. mortgages are backed by the government entities Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration, but almost no one wants the government to continue to be the prime source of mortgage securitization."

Jon Talon writes about Amtrak at 40 and how much of a wasted opportunity the death of rail was. This is relevant to Phoenix.

Then Jon writes about our sheriff who no one seems to like, but everyone votes for in, Why isn't Joe Arpaio in jail?

On the economic front, home builders remain bearish with the progress and near future outlook of the real estate market. That's not surprising considering…

Since this is the first of what I meant to do for a while, it will probably be longer then future posts, but it always depends on my mood at the time of writing. I may be in a hurry, busy or my brain may be slower due to excessive heat, which will probably happen often in the summer. Each week, more or less on Monday, I'll publish collection of at least a few of the hundreds of articles I read or scan through via my RSS reader each week. 

You'll see me noting articles by John Talon a lot here. His writing is eloquent, smart and accessible and he always has strong opinions not to mention a lot of useful, educational and relevant information about the valley, more that it's not only a history lesson, it's what it means to us now that matters.  One of…