Law on Rice

I am working as a law clerk until April for a creditors’ rights firm learning about foreclosures and creditors’ law in bankruptcy in a big building in downtown Phoenix.  And tonight, I just saw this article:

A lender is seeking to foreclose on the Viad Corporate Center, a high-rise office tower on Central Avenue in Phoenix, the latest example of the region’s commercial real-estate woes. Bank of America has asked a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to appoint a receiver for the signature tower at 1850 N. Central Ave. The lender said the building’s owner has not kept current since December on a $65 million loan.

Here’s the full article.

Phoenix and I grew up together, and the Arizona Republic article about the GPEC reminded me that Phoenix is really built on marketing and sales.  While Arizona has some homegrown industries, Phoenix has perpetually relied on its salesmen to survive.  When surviving on growth and expansion, any business or state must have great salespeople.  And they’ve been great.  They have been selling Phoenix for decades.  Indeed, when I took a class on the history of Phoenix at Arizona State, the early marketing slogan was the “Three Cs”–cotton, climate, and citrus.

And those marketing efforts were critical to the growth and concentration of the majority of wealth and power in Phoenix in the real estate development industry, an industry with sophisticated sales forces.

So, I’m not surprised that the guys running GPEC focus primarily on attracting jobs from out of state employers.  Drawing a new Intel or Google campus with thousands of new jobs filled by people likely to qualify for mortgages is exactly the kind of high impact deal that real estate developers must have to keep growing.

But I think the salesmen are chasing a shrinking market of jobs and stagnating national salaries.  For every dream of a new Google campus comes ten realities of another call center.

What the rest of Arizona’s citizens–those of us who don’t own a real estate development company–need is to stop depending on finding jobs out of state, at least a little.  To really have a vibrant and robust economy, the state should focus on creating more locally owned businesses, so I’d rather see a “tax incentive” for in state entrepreneurs.

Don’t get me confused with one of those anti-growth guys.  I’m very pro-growth, and I’d love to see a new Wal-Mart born tomorrow.  I just think Phoenix would be smart if it tried to help start a new Wal-Mart here where the really high income corporate jobs can stay, rather than trying simply to attract yet another call center with low wages, subject to out of state interests.

I don’t know if I was just there on a good night, but something about this Waffle House made a tired student grin from ear to ear.

I went to the Waffle House on an anonymous strip mall on an anonymous intersection on the anonymous border between Tempe and Mesa because I figured it would be a good place to study late Friday night–at least before the bars closed.

I took a seat at the loners’ counter, looking for an anonymous place to sit and study in a place bathed in alarmingly white fluorescent lights.  The humming of those lights was all I could hear, at first… well, that and the buzzing of the refrigerator and that sizzling sound coming from the kitchen.

Then there was noise.

The girls were talking about who baby daddy doin’ what and what not and then the jukebox.  Michael Jackson, to be precise.  The entire restaurant sang along softly.  I mean, everyone including the customers (well, except me).

It compelled me to post this over the top tweet.

The desert is quiet, especially at night when you can often hear nothing more than buzzing refrigerators and the servo click of air conditioners turning on down the street.  I hate silence.  I’ve had way too much of it in my lifetime.  But places like this so-called anonymous Waffle House fill the desert with sound and light.  And that makes me happy.