How Real Estate Companies built Phoenix, Arizona


Every once in a while I hear about how city planners have screwed up again. They may be building a freeway to nowhere, or they may be building a neighborhood "out in the middle of nowhere". These people apparently have secret meetings where they plan how a city will grow, and they can predict everything, and are either geniuses with their foresight or they are idiots, or are absolutely criminal.

And then at a certain point in my life, I realized that there's really no one like that in charge. There's no group of people who have control of how a city is built. There are, of course, people in places (probably right now) talking about the future of Phoenix, and there are people who are hoping that they can do the right thing for the future, and I'm sure people who are hoping that they can make a lot of money by having things go their way. And not surprisingly, it's the people interested in money that make things happen. Real Estate Companies.

Now waitaminute, calm down here, especially if you work for a Real Estate Company. I know that there are a lot of people who don't understand what you do, and probably think that all you care about is money. Of course you do care about money. Real Estate Companies aren't charities, they invest their time and effort with the hopes of making money. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

There are a LOT of failed investments in Real Estate in the Phoenix area, and I won't try to list them all (it's kinda depressing). My favorite one, by the way, is the Sun Valley Parkway, which is just west of the White Tank Mountains. If you have time, drive along there and look at the Real Estate signs, most of which are so old and faded that you can barely read them. If you've never even heard of this area, it's not surprising. Failure doesn't get much publicity.

My two favorite Real Estate Companies in Phoenix were owned by Dwight Heard (the Suburban Land Company) and by Moses Sherman (he also built the original trolley lines in Phoenix). These guys wandered out into empty desert, looked at it, imagined that they could make a lot of money if they sold the land divided up for lots, and built houses there. And they did.

Time-travel with me back to the 1890s in Phoenix, and let's walk out into the desert. Just like any empty area of the desert now, there's a lot of dirt there. Maybe a cactus or two, and possibly a tumbleweed rolling by. Now listen to Dwight, or Moses. They see a neighborhood there. Yes, they have dollar-signs in their eyes. Anyone else walking past them would wonder what they were looking at? They imagined a city, and they built it. And they got tremendously rich doing it.

Image at the top of this post: 1949 ad for Dwight B. Heard Investment Company. Founded 1897, Realtor.
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/Phoenix HistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more