Posts Tagged ‘Phoenix’

Phoenix leads nation in home price declines in February – From Phoenix Business Journal

That’s the largest decline of any of the 20 largest cities in the U.S. In addition, Phoenix home prices are down 51 percent from their peak.

From Antiplanner.com. The notion that real cities have big downtowns is firmly ingrained in the minds of many urban planners and city officials. As Joel Garreau points out in Edge City, this ignores the fact that such downtowns were only built for about a century, from roughly 1820 to 1920.

Modern cities, which planners deride by calling them “sprawl,” have job centers spread out all over the place. San Jose, Phoenix, and Los Angeles are all typical examples. Planners and officials try to re-create obsolete downtowns by building pork-barrel projects such as convention centers and giving developers huge subsidies for hotels and office buildings. This enriches developers and contractors, but it never really creates a “real” downtown.

Downtown Los Angeles, for example, has less than 4 percent of the jobs in the region and does not even have as many jobs as Long Beach. Downtown San Jose is pathetic as a downtown: it has a few restaurants and a heavily subsidized hotel or two, but most of the real jobs are scattered around other parts of Santa Clara County. If you want a real “lively streets” experience, go to Santana Row.

Now Phoenix has succumbed to the downtown mania. As the Arizona Republic reports, this year the city will open a $1.4 billion light-rail line, an expanded convention center (because the existing one wasn’t losing enough money) costing $600 million, at least $350 million in subsidies to a new Sheraton Hotel, and hundreds of millions in subsidies for a downtown campus of Arizona State University.

Just what this country needs: another failed convention center. And why does ASU need a downtown Phoenix campus anyway? Isn’t Tempe a prestigious enough address for it?

Of course, Phoenix doesn’t limit its subsidies to downtown. The city is providing $100 milion in subsidies to a new, mixed-use development (another utopian planning scheme) on the edge of the city. This is part of a “border war between adjacent cities over who could give away the most to attract the best retailers.” The Goldwater Institute is suing the city to stop this subsidy.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. These giveaways are nothing more than a way to satisfy political egos, transfer tax dollars to favored developers, and give urban planners a chance to try their insane theories.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under City planning, News commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Did you know that spending $1 in a local business keeps .42 cents in the community compared to just .11 cents for the same dollar spent in a national chain?

A little history; Tucson First was an idea adopted by Mayor and Council in 1990′s. The idea to support local businesses was started by a few in the business community and was funded by the City of Tucson. The problem was that due to City procurement procedures regarding low bidders the printing for the Tucson First program was actually done by an out of state company. The media got a hold of the story and the programs funding went away.

I was involved in another program started in the mid 2000′s called Returning Business To Tucson. Charlie Odowd (now director of Southern Arizona for ASBA) and I were the co-chairs. The momentum started but we didn’t have the dedicated personel or the budget to keep the project going.

Now another group out of Phoenix is looking to start up a chapter here in Tucson. Local First Arizona is a well organized and funded grass roots effort started and championed by Kimber Lanning. Kimber was the owner of a local record store in Phoenix called Stink Weeds.  She watch how hard it was for other local businesses to grow and thrive and decided to do something about it.

In Phoenix Local First Arizona (LFA) is up to 1800 members and growing. Each month 30-40 locally owned businesses are signing.  Some of the things LFA is doing in the Phoenix market include, buy local maps for restaurants and retail locations, numerous events to draw attention to local shop keepers including farmers markets, fall festivals, meet and greet events to name a few.  Kimber has expanded the efforts to look at zoning and building processes in Phoenixes older downtown area where a unique selection of local businesses are actually a huge selling point for consumers. Kimber is also moving LFA into the procurement arena to push for preferential treatment for local businesses in the lucrative government contracting areas. She is working with Wisk Office Products to change State of Arizona procurement rules. I have hear that the City of Phoenix has already implemented a procurement process using small businesses modeled after the Minority and Women Business program already in place.

I’ve jumped on with LFA’s efforts to start a similar program here in Tucson/Pima County.  Currently we have just shy of 100 business registered – HERE is the Tucson listings. Once our membership hits 150 here in Tucson additional marketing and support will be coming our way.  The public relations efforts have been amazing. Lisette DeMarsfrom Mrs. Tiggy Winks Toys is the Tucson point of contact and tireless champion trying to get us going here in Tucson.

 The Mayor and Council proclaimed Black Thursday, the traditionally biggest shopping day of the year as Buy Local Day.  Click HERE for the story.

I encourage all of you to check out Local First Arizona. Join the organization and help us make it a success.

From the Tucson Citizen about Local First Arizona – HERE.

From Business Pundit.com – Buy Local! – HERE

Local flavor

In the early 90′s I was one of three involved in a start up venture with a company that used absorption technologies to solve some every day problems.  Our first product was a water absorbing polymer marketed to to agriculture industry. For a short time we sold cooling ties to the likes of Walgreens and Walmart.  In eary 1996 we worked on and perfected a oil absorbing polymer that could take oil out of water.

About the same time as we started AbTech, we learned that functioning out of Tucson was becoming a liability to the start. Travel in and out of Tucson wasn’t as convenient, investors enjoyed the social and business aspects of coming in and out of Scottsdale. The cache of the Scottsdale name made doing business there a logical step. The network of entrepreneurial companies and the feeder businesses that supported a young start up like patent attorney’s, product and package design firms and a host of others just didn’t exist in Tucson. I personally traveled back and forth for a little over a year until that got too old on myself and my family. Abtech maintained a small manufacturing plant in Tucson until the early 2000′s now all company functions have moved to Phoenix.

Inc. magazine recently featured our company in their November issue on technologies that are using green ideas to change the world.

Read the full article HERE.

Glenn Rink, founder and CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based AbTech Industries, first used his Smart Sponges — made from a synthetic polymer — in 1997 to clean up oil spills from tankers at sea. In 1999, when he turned his attention to storm water, most regulation was focused on runoff from new construction. “No one was really doing anything about dealing with the billions of gallons of rain that come down on the roads and go into our flood-control devices and are contaminated on the way through,” he says. So Rink figured out how to mold the sponge material into different shapes that would fit into street-level storm drains and catch basins, soaking up oil and debris and letting clean water pass through. Later, he developed a way to coat the sponges with an antimicrobial agent so they would disinfect water as well. The next iteration will add the ability to capture heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides.

Long Beach, California, installed 2,000 AbTech filters in June 2004. Tom Leary, the city’s storm-water compliance officer, was primarily concerned with cutting bacterial pollution at beaches. Tests showed the Smart Sponges effectively eliminated bacteria. And in the unusually rainy year following the sponges’ installation, they also caught almost 92,000 pounds of trash and debris and 3,600 gallons of waste oil. Leary likes the technology, because unlike UV treatment or mechanical debris catchers, “it’s not outrageously expensive, and it’s easy to move around. You don’t smell them, hear them, or see them.”

Today, AbTech has 13,000 installations in 36 states and seven countries, and its 2008 revenue is expected to be 2,000 percent higher than last year’s. Seventy percent of its business is with municipal customers. But private developers and commercial entities are increasingly part of the mix. British grocery giant Tesco recently installed an AbTech system to treat runoff at a new 88-acre facility in Riverside, California. Smaller operators are employing the technology to solve niche problems — in bus depots and fast-food drive-throughs, to cite two examples. Airports, too: The ones in Newark, New Jersey, and New York’s Westchester County areamong those that have installed AbTech sponges, which typically need to be replaced every two to four years; used sponges are sent to waste-energy plants and burned as fuel.

As a founder and minority stock holder I wish AbTech the best of luck.  Their technology is superior and years of R&D are starting to pay off. The green revolution is taking off and AbTech is poised to capitalize on the hype. Visit their web site to learn more HERE.

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