2013 in my Neighborhood

It’s end of the year time---you know, time for the year in review, lists and retrospectives. So I thought I’d check in with my favorite topic for hand-wringing: real estate.

Last year, in November 2012, I wrote an essay about Mott Park where I contrasted the calamitous real estate decline with the pleasures of an energetic neighborhood community.  [“Feeling a little subprime” at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/en/essays5/18749-essay-feeling-a-little-subprime].
 

An NPR blog in late October alerted me.  The national real estate picture has improved---measured by home prices through the first half of the year 2013. August 2013 was better than August 2012.  According to economist David Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee, S&P Dow Jones Indices, the

monthly percentage changes for the 20-city composite show the peak rate of gain in home prices was last April [ . . . ].  Since then home prices continued to rise, but at a slower pace each month. This month [October 2013] 16 cities reported smaller gains in August compared to July. Recent increases in mortgage rates and fewer mortgage applications are two factors in these shifts.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/29/241594756/consumer-confidence-fell-sharply-this-month-shutdown-blamed.  (Accessed Oct. 29, 2013).

Detroit is in that 20-city composite list.  So is Las Vegas.  Two cities, one old and one new, with enormous real estate problems. If you like charts, see https://www.spice-indices.com/idpfiles/spice-assets/resources/public/documents/53129_cshomeprice-release-0924.pdf?force_download=true.

So how is my neighborhood, Mott Park, doing?

 “It’s true, the real estate market has improved over all, but while prices are still on the rise, there has been some slowing in the pace,” says my neighbor Ginny. 

A realtor with decades of experience, Ginny has sold a lot of real estate, both in Mott Park and throughout Genesee County.  She knows her stuff. We met on Sunday walks in the neighborhood. Organized by real runners, the Sunday walks get some of us less fit off the couch for an hour or so.  I pulled out some old track pants and got new shoes.  Some walkers take pictures for the neighborhood Facebook page.  Others pick up litter as we go. We learned how to roll plastic grocery bags so small and tight we could carry dozens in our parka pockets for litter pick up.  It is ground level struggle with neighborhood decline.

Ginny says the Mott Park real estate market is getting a little better, but slowly.  Foreclosures continue, but are fewer than before. Prices in the neighborhood have risen slightly.  And sales are moving faster.  

But it’s Genesee County that really looks better.  The average sale price is up---15 to 16 percent at the end of October 2013.  Real estate charts on Grand Blanc, Goodrich, or the fabulous Fenton are trending upward.  Areas with better school districts than city of Flint can be cautiously optimistic.  Genesee County has 31 school districts; buyers have choices.  

Mott Park loses in the school district sweepstakes, although it has two excellent private elementary schools: the Catholic St. John Vianney and St. Paul Lutheran. Ironically, families from better city neighborhoods drive their kids in.  

And another irony. This slowly rising market can mean frustration for buyers with cash in hand seeking to close on a bargain.  Banks calculate that it’s in their interest to move slowly and wait for the market to rise.  So short sale approvals remain in limbo; details about the sale pass from one asset manager to another, each supposedly checking some aspect of the sale.  Buyers wait and wait.

“It’s like the ‘Circumlocution Office’,” says Ginny. “You know, in Little Dorrit on Masterpiece.”  Little Dorrit is a Dickens skewer job on the economics and social safety net of Victorian England.   Two families illustrate who has fallen victim in the market place and who has profited.  The Dorrit family languishes in debtors’ prison; the Clenham family hoards a fortune made in textile imports.  Amy Dorrit (“Little Dorrit”) struggles with her father’s fate in prison---only a windfall gift can buy his freedom.  Arthur Clenham, scion of his family wealth, seeks to pay old Dorrit’s debt.  Arthur inquires at the Circumlocution Office about what Mr. Dorrit’s debt is. But the Circumlocution Office never answers any question directly.  Kind of like the banks.

As of mid-December, 17 properties in Mott Park are bank-owned.

Nevertheless, over sixty properties sold in Mott Park in 2013; a lot of movement in the ‘hood.  The picture is mixed. Buyers can be absentee landlords---uninterested, unscrupulous. Picking up properties sold as a package. But some are local investors, even neighborhood residents. A young couple on my block bought the house next door, provided a rental for an old buddy and guaranteed upkeep of the parcel next to them.  Good for summertime parties too. 

Renters are a mixed picture. Some are transient, bringing socio-economic challenges for Mott Park.   Others join the neighborhood Facebook page.  Their needs---from furniture, appliances, and children’s clothes to a Christmas tree---are shared on the page. They look for rentals for friends, post alerts about job openings, say farewell when they move out of state for work.     

The indefatigable Neighborhood Association elected new officers in December 2013, all women and two are new to the neighborhood.   A separate non-profit golf course group maintains the clubhouse and gets the course grass mowed in summer. Neighborhood gardeners maintain the flowerbeds.  In last year’s essay I concluded that despite the real estate challenges, the neighborhood was worth my living there.  

I still think so and I’m ready for 2014 in Mott Park.

Read more essays like this one in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Good phone

It’s 9 AM and Dennis is on the phone.  Or rather, the phone is on Dennis---he uses lightweight, professional headphones and looks like a telemarketer.  He walks around the house with the headphones on, opens the windows, feeds the cat. The headphones fold up and can go into his pocket when not in use. A collapsible black plastic halo. 

Dennis is not telephone-phobic. Unlike me, he does not clench his teeth when the phone rings.  The phone rarely ruins his concentration.  As a rule, he picks up the receiver happily---he’s a marketing rep, a salesman.  He can talk to anyone.  

His talent emerged early.  He sold walnuts door to door when he was about eight years old. He pulled along his stock of unshelled walnuts (packaged in 1 pound bags) in his Radio Flyer wagon.  Regular customers developed; he had a route. The family dog, a wire hair mix named Dusty, learned to eat walnuts---she cracked them open with her teeth.

Until, that is, she discovered a hammer. But that’s another story. 

For Dennis, the phone means money.  The damn thing rings all day long; unfathomable strings of numbers fill the entire caller ID screen.  A pause and then---crunch, crunch, crunch.  Sales orders inch their way through his printer cum-fax machine.  Orders pile up in the paper tray, interspersed with the daily Sudoku puzzle. Money plus entertainment. 

What makes all of this possible, aside from Dennis’s skills and energy, is that marvel of contemporary life, the computer printer.  It’s an HP Pro, model number 8600.  It prints in colors and on both sides of the page.  It copies, scans and faxes.  It has an embedded web server. 

But this morning all is not well. The HP marvel is silent.  No chug-chug-chug. No orders and no Sudoku. Today it will not fax or print. It will not scan or copy. You know what that means; time to call tech support.  

For me, a calling tech support means personal drama.  Stomach-churning equivocation. Kishka-twisting indecision. To pick up the phone and call my trusted campus IT guy, I struggle for an hour. And this is a guy I know---whose voice exudes confidence and sympathy.  Who makes house calls and once arrived on a motorcycle during his lunch hour. For whose expertise I have gladly shelled out the bucks for many years.  

But toll-free help on the phone? I am more than averse; I am a petulant child who refuses reason.  A highly educated professional with decades of work experience, I revert to infantilism.

Dennis belongs to another species.  He embraces phones and automated phone systems. He knows their tricks.  And he is fast. When the automated system asks questions about his printer model, he has all the numbers ready. Then he energetically presses zero for a human voice.  On occasion, he just says “wah, wah, wah”---with much rising and falling intonation---into the receiver.  Any sound pushes the system forward to the next option.  

(“Wah, wah, wah” also works when calling Delta airlines, by the way).

Once contact has been made, Dennis remembers precisely what he did on his first attempt to get the printer to work; he also remembers everything he tried afterward, up to the point when he dialed to tech support.  He recounts his sad story efficiently---without fury, indignation, pathos (that’s my specialty).

This particular morning, tech support seems to think that the shift to Windows 8 is the root of the current fax and printer problem.  Various fixes deep inside the system are tried.  The correct driver has been found online.  The printer has been uninstalled and re-installed. Two test pages have been run. All signs are positive and I am on my second cup of coffee. Some ten minutes have passed.

But Dennis is still talking on headset. The good part has arrived at last:  the chit chat and laughter of what Dennis calls “good phone.”   “Where are you?” Dennis asks.  “Ah, Manila,” he repeats with satisfaction. “How’s the weather?” I’ve learned that location and weather are first two conversational gambits of professional phone people.  

The weather topic is rich for exploration, since anywhere on the globe there’s more variety than in temperate Los Angeles, especially near LAX where Dennis lives.  Tech support is saying something about rain (in the Philippines, about 86 inches annually) and heat (average temperature of 88 degrees).  Dennis is laughing---LA has 15 inches of rain in a good year and the temperature at the airport ranges between 65 and 70 degrees. Earthquakes?  It seems the Philippines has them too.  

Location and weather covered, the conversation’s moves on.  Dennis is telling about his time on a Navy carrier, the USS Coral Sea, during the Vietnam War.  About being stationed at Olongapo where the US Naval base had an “R and R” center.  About shore leave and water skiing off the base in Subic Bay.  The Navy had great speed boats.

The tech guy wasn’t even born then.  His parents weren’t even born then.  

But enough of the past.  Dennis has progressed to health care.  He once had a great experience with national health care in New Zealand.  “What’s it like in the Philippines?” he asks.  From Dennis’s end of the conversation, I learn that the Philippines have universal health care and national insurance; no tech guy opinion about its quality, however. 

Dennis explains that the United States is way behind; somehow the name Franklin Roosevelt has entered.  Does the tech guy know what the Tea Party is?  New friend across the sea breaks in to ask if Dennis will fill out a customer service report.  “Sure, happy to do it,” says Dennis.  Everybody’s happy now.  That’s what Dennis calls giving “good phone.”

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

On the hunt for words

“We were staying in a remote part of Scotland and in the evenings we read aloud to each other as our entertainment.”  So recounts journalist and fiction writer Annalena McAfee.  She’s speaking in a video interview posted on Amazon, recalling how she began writing her novel, “The Spoiler.”  The kicker is that her evening reading partner and husband is novelist Ian McEwan.  Maybe they read the dictionary together too?  Evenings in remote Scotland might drive you to it. 

I read “The Spoiler” this summer and it was a page turner.  Aging, former wartime journalist named “Honor” (one of the “virtue names,” so English) confronts a young and brash interviewer, a tabloid writer named Tamara.  Think Ernest Hemingway’s Martha Gellhorn in loose slacks meets Rupert Murdoch’s Rebekah Brooks in frizzy red hair.
 

Nicknamed “the Marlene Dietrich of the newsroom”, Honor lives in her glamorous past.  Her heyday was adventure journalism, going to dangerous places to “get the story” behind historic events. The Spanish Civil War to Mao’s Long March.  But now---the 1990s---the trashy tabloids pass for newspapers.  A young, brash climber named Tamara gets to interview Honor by a mistake.  Turning an error to career advantage, the ignorant Tamara instinctively pursues the aging legend.  Secrets of a distinguished past emerge. A bloody last battle in the decade before both worlds of print---serious and tabloid---succumb to the electronic.

Annalena McAfee’s sentences were a pleasure of clarity and syntax.  But the diction---the words.  At first I thought these were just British expressions, surely I could easily intuit their meaning from the context.  But as the novel progressed, I encountered more and more of them. 

I was reading on a Kindle, my trusty travel companion.  Its electronic screen a fitting page while in the sky on the way to California.  Four and a half hours to read with no interruptions; a Bombay Sapphire on the credit card. But a bit tricky to highlight and flick to the e-reader dictionary.  A few bumps and bounces over the Rockies could threaten this fragile set up. Sketchy Delta service can’t be trusted for prompt replacement of gin. So I took to making a paper list.  Here it is:

Otiose, fug, blethering, oleaginous, titivating, gazump (ed), gawp, mote, boffin, poiumenon, japes, bint,  hared about, compère, banjaxed, susurration, poncey, duff, swots, suppurating, chthonic,  panjandrum, cumbrous, uncumber, oubliette, juju, juddering, gawpers, deliquescence, shambolic, chomolungma.

High school Latin helped with some of these; ditto college French.   There is a least on biblical term (mote), and some anthropology (chthonic). But “swot” and “poncy”?  Is this public school banter?  “Panjandrum”? Are we in Indja with the Raj?  

I am utterly banjaxed.  

So what is husband Ian McEwan’s vocabulary like?  I hadn’t recalled from the two novels I’d read long ago, but courtesy of the Kindle, I opened his most recent novel, Sweet Tooth. A month ago I’d breezed through it without issues, I thought.  Sure enough, out popped: squit, orotund, moue, canting, pargeted, plumminess, pollarded wood.

Most of my life people have remarked on my vocabulary.  The sole offspring of educated and somewhat intellectual parents, I was the child audience of adult debates that were better than TV. Especially 50’s TV.  Family friends often commented on my advanced vocabulary.  I secretly relished this distinction from grown-ups.  OK. I was pridefully complicit in appearing to be an amateur prodigy. But I was observant. Quick to mimic sounds, to move verbally in pace with my elders. Alert to the significance of context even when not understood. 

So with some chagrin---and after decades in academia---I now find that the real vocabulary grown-ups are the Brits.  And they are way beyond me. 

Understandably, of course.  They have their own lexicon and turns of phrase.  But still, the ones I read are not obscure.  Ian McEwan and Martin Amis adorn the Anglo-American best-seller lists; younger British aspirants, outside the snooty class, are worthy too.  Here’s a little list from Harriet Lane’s Alys, Always: frowsty, cornichons, benison, tetanque, groynes, skirls, knackered, spliff, lappet, hellebore, pongee, weir.

Now I’ve turned to the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker.  Staples of educated (but not erudite) American readers and what do I find?  Tinnital, orisons, estivating, clinquant.

In my defense, I should say that I am a good guesser.  Some of these words suggest faint associations just shy of true recognition.  But that’s not enough anymore.  “The game’s afoot,” as Sherlock would say.  And I am on the hunt.  Searching for words.  I’ve signed up with “Dictionary.com” for a daily word fix. Bookmarked the thesaurus.  I refuse to be banjaxed. Which, by way of online Merriam-Webster, means damaged or ruined.  The usage is chiefly Irish.  Wouldn’t you know.  Now if I could just get some attendant to deliver a gin and tonic.

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/