Tag Archives: children

DOWNTOWN PHOENIX LIFE

The City of Phoenix defines Downtown as the area between 7th Street and 7th Avenue, from McDowell Road on the north to Buckeye Road on the south. However, the majority of downtown development is concentrated in the smaller area surrounding the intersection of Washington St. and Central Avenue. Downtown Phoenix is one of a the few major business districts in the city and is the central business district of the City of Phoenix, Arizona.

It’s located in the heart of the Phoenix metropolitan area or ‘Valley of the Sun’ with a large variety of designated historic districts housing some classic, vintage homes attracting people from all walks of life.

Phoenix, being the county seat of Maricopa County and the capital of Arizona, serves as the center of politics, justice and government on the local, state and federal levels. The area is a major center of employment for the region, with many financial, legal, and other national and international corporations housed in a variety of skyscrapers. Major arts and cultural institutions also call the area home. Downtown Phoenix is a center of major league sports activities, live concert events, and is an equally prominent center of banking and finance in Arizona. Regional headquarters for several major banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Bank of America, Compass Bank and MidFirst Bank are all located within or close proximity to the area.

A Little History of Downtown Phoenix

Territorial era

In 1870, a meeting was held to select a town site for the influx of pioneers coming to the recently recognized town of Phoenix. 320 acres were purchased for $50 raised by popular subscription. This original site, the whole of the town of Phoenix in that day, encompasses what would presently be the Downtown Core, bordered by Van Buren Street south to Jackson Street, and Seventh Street to Seventh Avenue.

With the first survey of the new town, streets were laid out in a grid, with Washington Street as the main east-west thoroughfare. The north-south streets originally bore Native American tribal names, but were changed to more easily remembered numbers, with everything east of Center Street (later Central Avenue) named as streets and everything west as avenues. The town continued to grow, and was eventually incorporated as a city on February 28, 1881 centered around downtown.

Throughout the 1880’s the newly incorporated city made many strides toward modernization with the construction of one of the first electric plants in the West as well as the opening of the horse-drawn streetcar line. The Phoenix Street Railway system was eventually electrified and expanded to several different lines that connected Downtown Phoenix to other neighborhoods and cities in the Valley. Independence Day of 1887 heralded the arrival first Southern Pacific train. This opened up the economy of the young city, as goods now flowed in and out by train as opposed to wagon. As Phoenix became the center of commerce in the territory, the capital was moved to Phoenix, with temporary offices being set up in Downtown.

The city of Phoenix’s story begins as people from those settlements expanded south, in conjunction with the establishment of a military outpost to the east of current day Phoenix.

The town of Phoenix was settled in 1867, and incorporated in 1881 as the City of Phoenix. Phoenix served as an agricultural area that depended on large-scale irrigation projects. Until World War II, the economy was based on the “Five C’s”: cotton, citrus and cattle, climate and copper. The city provided retail, wholesale, banking, and governmental services for central Arizona, and was gaining a national reputation among winter tourists. The post-World War Two years saw the city beginning to grow more rapidly, as many men who had trained in the military installations in the valley, returned, bringing their families. The population growth was further stimulated in the 1950’s, in part because of the availability of air conditioning, which made the very hot dry summer heat tolerable, as well as an influx of industry, led by high tech companies. The population growth rate of the Phoenix metro area has been nearly 4% per year for the past 40 years. That growth rate slowed during the Great Recession but the U.S. Census Bureau predicted it would resume as the nation’s economy recovered, and it already has begun to do so. While currently ranked 6th in population, it is predicted that Phoenix will rank 4th by 2020. Currently it the 6th most populous city in the United States.

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When the dining room turns into a play room, you know the kids are in charge

Parents are forgoing back yards and even living rooms to carve out space for the toys

How essential to young families is having a playroom for the kids? Very. And some are giving up another longtime family favorite feature to get them: the sprawling backyard.

“Buyers today — especially millennial buyers — want everyone to have a private space of their own to decompress under one roof, and the bonus room/playroom outweighs a large yard in their buying decision,” said Patty Blackwelder, a buyer’s agent with Twins Selling Real Estate/EXIT Realty Associates in Northern Virginia. “The first item that seems to fall off the list is the large yard.”

It was a formal living room repurposed into a playroom that recently swayed clients of Blackwelder’s to purchase a home in Bristow, Va. Gone were the typical sitting chairs and end tables, replaced by shelving for toys, blackboard paint and a Dr. Seuss quotation on a wall.

While the home has a yard, it’s small. No matter; since moving in, the buyers have been taking their children to a nearby playground anyway, Blackwelder said.

The biggest requirements for families with children, according to the National Association of Realtors, is what you’d expect: 62% of those with kids 18 and under say the quality of the neighborhood is important, while 50% are looking for a good school district and 49% want the home to be convenient to their jobs. Fewer said that lot size or proximity to parks and recreational facilities were a factor in choosing a home. The statistics come from the group’s 2015 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report.

Yet once those top-level needs are met, families start to make more detail-level compromises. And being able to visualize a place for the kids to corral their stuff and play has become a priority, according to Blackwelder and others.

In the San Francisco area, Ann Thompson, regional sales executive at Bank of America Home Loans, is seeing the same thing. Indoor play space was a top desire for buyers in 2015, she said.

“People are happy to have a patio for the kids to play on. The big-yard thing — it’s not necessarily everyone’s grandest dream anymore,” Thompson said. That may be especially true in California, where persistent drought — and restrictions on water usage — influence how much lawn people desire. Many owners also don’t want to spend the time or the money required to keep up a large lawn, she said.

That isn’t to say that a large backyard doesn’t remain a priority — for some buyers, in some locations. In Kansas City, for one, families don’t seem to be interested in downsizing lawns, said Sherri Hines, a real-estate agent with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Kansas City Homes.

“We are so used to space and land, we don’t have houses right on top of each other; we are very spread out geographically,” she said. “And I don’t see that diminishing.” Housing is also generally more affordable there than, for example, in markets on the coasts, and home buyers may not need to compromise as much as in high-cost areas.

But in the Kansas City area, too, an indoor play area is a priority, Hines said, since parents want a separate space to keep toys from flooding the kitchen and family areas. “The volume of toys we have is much higher [than in generations past],” she observed.

New life for the dining room
Millennials, in particular, are good at repurposing home spaces so that they’re more aligned with life today, said Jill Waage, executive editor for the Better Homes and Gardens brand. The brand includes the print magazine from which it gets its name and also includes its website, social platforms, apps, broadcast programs and licensed products. For years now, formal spaces such as dining rooms have been out of favor with many home buyers.

“They are willing to look at the renaming and reuse of the home,” she said, changing rooms “into something that they get value out of every day and every week.”

Retailers are also suggesting the dual-use room as a trend. On the website for Land of Nod, a Chicago-based retailer of children’s furniture and products, there are tips on how to create a formal dining room and playroom in one.

“Just because at some point in time someone wrote ‘dining room’ over this square plot in your home, doesn’t mean that it can only forever and henceforth be used as a dining room,” it reads, adding that often a formal dining room is used only a few days a year for gatherings. “We say you can have your dining room four days a year, but you can also have a playroom 361 days a year.”

Courtesy of: Amy Hoak – MarketWatch

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