Fiesta Mall Here in Mesa Still Begging For "The Right Deal'

Attempts for years to revive the dead mall - where Mesa Mayor John Giles says "Location, location, location is everything" as if this practicing personal injury-accident law attorney knows anything about real estate - have floundered to say the least like most of the highlights of his NextMesa campaign that propelled into office: figments of his imagination,  if he ever had one like comparing the City of Mesa to Mayberry, the fictional television show from years gone by.

An article from Bloomberg News today might give the mayor and the bright minds in the Office of Economic Development inside City Hall some clues:

How to Save a Dying Mall

A small group of investors is buying struggling shopping centers on the cheap and trying to turn them around.                

By Patrick Clark ‎22‎ ‎February‎, ‎2017‎ ‎7‎:‎10‎ ‎AM         

@pat_clarkMore stories by Patrick Clark

Here are some extracted tidbits from Bloomberg News' article today :

Hull Property Group, which owns 29 shopping malls, sticks to a proven script that includes negotiating tax incentives with local governments, demolishing excess space, and reversing public perceptions that the property is struggling.

Hull is one of a small crowd of operators bucking the conventional wisdom that there are simply too many malls and that only those catering to wealthy shoppers will survive the death of legacy retailers. While operating strategies vary, most are shopping for older malls in places with no other enclosed shopping center within 50 to 100 miles. 
Such older properties have some inherent advantages. Many were built as the surrounding community was sprouting, so the original developers had their pick of the best locations. Despite the rise of e-commerce, people still come to malls to participate in the social aspect of shopping—especially in suburban or exurban places with few large gathering places. 

Some malls struggle because they simply can’t access credit, said George Good, executive vice president in CBRE Group's National Retail Investment Group. As department stores close and large mall operators retrench around their best assets, many lenders have decided to stop financing lower-quality properties. In many cases, owners that can’t get a new loan will look to sell at a discount, or let the mall go into foreclosure.

Not every struggling mall is a good candidate for a refresh.

In bigger markets with stiffer retail competition, developers have considered more radical strategies for failed malls, such as turning them into office buildings, medical centers, and hotels with mixed results.

Still, the vicious nature of the retail business makes plenty of opportunities for investors.“We think there are somewhere between 100 and 200 malls out there that fit the general criteria” for a rehab, said Chris Maguire, chief executive officer at Cypress Equities, a Dallas-based investor that bought a 40-year-old regional mall in Flagstaff, Ariz., earlier this year. “They need capital, but there’s cash flowing, so you just sit and wait.”

What Happens When A High School Student from Mesa Goes to Ivy League Yale?

Having had a 1st-Generation American-born father, the last child of 14 from a fertile couple who emigrated here from The Azores in the early 1900's who became a two-time All-American football player at Notre Dame, your MesaZona blogger got curious reading this article from Yale News about a 1st-generation high school student from here in Mesa with different circumstances ....and what he said about his high school education here in Mesa different from all the hype.

Rayan Alsemeiry

Rayan Alsemeiry ’19 arrived at Yale last year from Mesa, Arizona. His family had emigrated to the United States from Saudi Arabia when he was 3 years old, and is in the first generation of his family to attend college. In addition to the usual adjustments to campus life that most freshman face, Alsemeiry struggled to get his bearings in an unfamiliar culture.
“Everyone here [at Yale] seemed to have a sense of direction — to know where they’re going and what they want to get out of college,” says Alsemeiry.
“I came from a large public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigor.” 

According to the article- in addition to attending a public high school with not a lot of resources or academic rigors - he was both high-achieving from a low-income family - who gained entry to one of the most highly-respected universities in the world, Yale.
It wasn’t until the first semester of his sophomore year before he felt truly at home, he says.
Nearly 400 first-generation students like Alsemeiry are coming to Yale Friday-Sunday, Feb. 24-26 to discuss their common challenges and ways to overcome them at the third annual 1vyG Conference. Alsemeiry and Laura Plata ’19 are co-chairing the event, which will bring together first-generation, high-achieving, low-income students from the 19 top U.S. colleges and universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and MIT — including 25 delegates from Yale.

The annual conference is presented by the Inter-Ivy, First-Generation College Student Network (1vyG), a network of students and administrators aimed at building best practices and advocating for institutional change to increase first-generation students’ chances at success in both their academic and professional careers.
The first conference was held at Brown; the second at Harvard . . .
“One of the biggest hurdles as a first-generation student is that you don’t have a lot of knowledge about the professional world,” says Alsemeiry, who is also co-chairing the conference’s finance committee, which raised over $155,000 and received sponsorship from companies like Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, DE Shaw, Teach for America, and more.
The ultimate goal of the 1vyG conference is to raise awareness of the challenges faced by first-generation students and “to provide people with the information and tools to organize and push for more acceptance of this community at top colleges,” says Alsemeiry.
The Yale sophomore — who is now a campus tour guide and economics tutor and helps run a peer liaison group for low-income students in Yale College — is majoring in Economics and Global Affairs, and a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Program in Human Rights. In the future, he says, he wants to continue to work to improve access to education on a global scale, thereby breaking a cycle that “perpetuates poverty and inequality.”

The entire article can be accessed here at Yale News

The Global Network > Dangerously Unstable

The global network has become dangerously unstable
By Niall Ferguson   February 20, 2017
Source: The Boston Globe
The world today is like a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage.  Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hate, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on.

The president of the United States tweets that his own intelligence agencies are illegally leaking classified information to The New York Times about his campaign’s communications with the Russian government, but he insists that it’s all “fake news.” (Read that again, slowly.)

You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of new information technology. This has become a truism. The question is, how has it changed? The answer is that technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures.
The reality is that the global network has become a dangerously unstable structure. Far from promoting equality, the network does the opposite, by allowing hyperconnected “superhubs” to emerge.

Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hate, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on. If Zuckerberg seriously intends to turn Facebook into the vanguard of liberal world government, then he is on a fast track to joining George Soros at the top of Steve Bannon’s Most Hated list.

Niall Ferguson’s new book, “The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks,’’ will be published early next year.

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Zucker's Cyberia: Labyrinth of Lies + Hate

Niall Ferguson

February 19 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

The lying, hating hi‑tech webs of Zuck and Trump are the new superpowers

Extracts from The Times UK [over 100 comments published with article]

*Please see blogger's note after reading extracts

"Laugh out loud if you dare. Globalisation is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. How on earth do we make sense of all this? In pursuit of answers, many bewildered commentators resort to crude historical analogies. To some, Donald Trump is Hitler, about to proclaim an American dictatorship. To others, he is Richard Nixon, on the verge of being impeached."

 

You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of information technology. This has enormously empowered networks of all kinds over traditional power structures.

Networks were the key to what happened in politics last year.
Above all, there was the grassroots network of support that Trump built using the power of Facebook, Twitter and the Breitbart news website.

It was this that defeated the “global special interests” that — according to the final ad of campaign chief executive Steve Bannon — stood behind the “failed and corrupt political establishment” personified by Trump’s opponent. Note here how one network attacks another.
It all goes to show networks are transforming not only the economy — through viral advertising, targeted marketing and “sharing” of cars and apartments — but also the public sphere and democracy itself. Yes, it’s awesome: we’re all connected. But the notion that taking the whole world online would create a utopia of “netizens”, all equal in cyberspace, was always a fantasy.

On Thursday Facebook’s co-founder, chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a long defence of that ideal of an interconnected “global community”, arguing that his company’s role should be to promote “meaningful” local communities, to enhance “safety” (by monitoring content with artificial intelligence), to promote diversity of ideas, and to foster civic engagement — even at the global level. “As the largest global community,” Zuckerberg wrote, “Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.”
The example he cited was last month’s anti-Trump Women’s March.
The reality is that the global network has become a dangerously unstable structure. Far from promoting equality, it does the opposite, by allowing hyper-connected “superhubs” to emerge. Surprise, surprise, from Trump to PewDiePie, these turn out to be rather the reverse of saintly role models.

Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hatred, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on.
Zuckerberg’s letter has been “liked” more than 66,000 times on Facebook and 2,400 times on Twitter.


The following tweet was liked by twice as many people on Facebook and 35 times as many on Twitter: “Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism — even before tax plan rollout!”
That tweet came from Trump.

If, 20 years from now, someone asks you what finally crashed the global network, you’ll want to mention the @realDonaldTrump virus.

But remember: the flawed design of the network made the outage inevitable. And for that, Chairman “Zuck” is much more to blame.

Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks, will be published in the autumn by Penguin

Blogger's Note:
None of the images used in this post appeared in Niall Ferguson's original article.





Other news sources:

The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/.../02/...zuckerberg-manifesto.../517113/

3 days ago - A sprawling new manifesto by Zuckerberg, published to Facebook on Thursday, should set off new alarm bells for journalists, and heighten

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Wrote a Manifesto: Read It Here ...

fortune.com/2017/02/17/mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-text/

3 days ago - Here's the open letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote to his users. ... Here's the Full Text of Mark Zuckerberg's Manifesto.

Op-ed: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto is a political trainwreck | Ars ...

arstechnica.com/staff/.../op-ed-mark-zuckerbergs-manifesto-is-a-political-trainwreck/

2 days ago - Op-ed: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto is a political trainwreck. He says that Facebook is developing AI to create a global democracy—kind of.

 

 

 

BEWARE: When Giles, The FOG & Worsley Use The 'Catch-All' Phrase Community Engagement

Source: Field of Schemes 
[Also see previous post on this site from 16 Feb 2017]
The SB1492 bill would allow creation of “community engagement” districts of up to 30 acres.
Within them, up to half of the state’s share of sales taxes generated from retail sales and hotel stays would be dedicated to paying the bond debt for new sports or entertainment facilities. It also would allow an additional 2 percent district sales tax to be applied to all purchases within the district, with those revenues also dedicated to defraying the cost of facility construction.
This is a bit of a hybrid bill, combining super-TIFs (where half of existing sales and hotel taxes would be kicked back to pay teams’ construction costs) with a new sales tax surcharge in the area around the new venue.
This arrangement would also work for the arts and music theater Worsley and his wife are proposing in Mesa. No conflict of interest in this, is there?” 

Now, the bill has so far only passed one committee in one branch of the Arizona legislature — Sen. Bob Worsley of Mesa used one of those “gut an unrelated bill and insert your own language” tricks to get it on the agenda of his own transportation and technology committee.
 

John Washington on February 15, 2017 at 11:15 am said:

Good work, as always, Neil!
I agree with KT, there are a lot of morons (or sellouts) in the AZ State Legislature…as elsewhere, I’m sure. So, it’s important that we call them out by name.
In this case, Bob Worsley, so called “Republican” senator from Mesa, AZ, is leading the charge to give away our tax money to a millionaire . . .  Bob Worsley is a moron, along with 4 of the 5 other people on his AZ Senate “Transportation and Technology” committee.
More analysis: http://wp.me/p7hU3T-qH

Piggy Wilf on February 15, 2017 at 7:25 pm said:

‘Course I should have added that such a “crisis” only works when you have a whole buncha pols who are either idiots or bought and paid for. And fortunately that pretty much covers 98% of them.

Jerry McKenzie on February 16, 2017 at 10:13 am said:

Fits perfectly with Worsley’s bleed the beast mentality: no tax increases for education, roads, bridges, etc.; but it is OK to give away tax dollars to the filthy rich in order to decrease government.

John Bladen on February 16, 2017 at 11:48 am said:

True Jerry. But why do voters simply accept this? I’ve heard far too often that “you can’t do anything”… well, that’s certainly true if you don’t try. But if the people who are ultimately paying for these facilities/subsidies were more active in their opposition, I wonder if they would go through?
Politicians don’t listen to a few angry voices.

Jerry McKenzie on February 16, 2017 at 1:41 pm said:

The one’s who vote, agree with him. Voter turnout among the young and Mexican-Americans is low and it is reflected in the makeup of Mesa politicians — white Mormon men with a fetish for rich folk. This is a problem in other parts of AZ too. It is all about registering and then going to vote.
I suspect this proposal will die as the state is getting hungry for funds and any carve-out will make it worse. Sales taxes are a big part of the AZ budget, so there is no way to avoid that, and property taxes are low, but if you don’t pay, an investor can swoop in and buy up your tax lien and slap a debt with interest on your property and then, after a time, turn you out.

NotMyGlendale on February 16, 2017 at 1:36 pm said:
                 

A few more articles to digest on Worsley’s shenanigans:
http://www.scottsdalecitizen.com/2017/02/15/roberts-a-225-million-subsidy-for-coyotes-really/
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/mesa/state-senator-wife-raising-funds-for-concert-hall-next-to/article_8ed73d5e-d558-11e2-b86d-0019bb2963f4.html

Also, this article by Representative Anthony Kern on the procedural trick to move the bill between committees:
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2017/02/14/kern-warns-of-procedural-tricks-regarding-taxpayer-funded-arena/

Worsley is a founder of SkyMall.

 

Going Rogue Again with Jon Talton: White Majoritarianism

February 16, 2017

White majoritarianism

Source: Rogue Columnist

Budweiser's "Born the Hard Way" advertisement during the Super Bowl won plaudits for putting today's anti-immigrant sentiment under a harsh light. But it was a stretch. . .  

For example, especially after the failed revolutions of 1848, German immigrants transformed Cincinnati. . . The Irish were reviled in many cities in the same century. They went on to become among the most American of Americans, producing two presidents. The largest mass lynching in American history was carried out in 1891 against 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Italians, too, assimilated, and became a distinguished (and sometimes, with the Mafia, notorious) part of America.

In the early 21st century, the governor of Arizona, most prominent businessman in Phoenix and, ironically, anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County were all Italian-Americans (many of Phoenix's most important earlier leaders were of Jewish extraction). So it went for scores of different ethnic and religious groups who came here. Native fear, discrimination and even atrocities, assimilation and acceptance. America is a credal nation, not an ethnic one. And we have been stronger for it.

Still, America — the empire built by conquering 500 indigenous nations and the enslavement and long, often brutal, discrimination against blacks — was always a white majority nation. And that majority, whether WASP, Scots-Irish, German or Italian, traced its roots to Europe and Western Civilization. The academic-protest left despises this and claims that America holds a unique place in the world for ethnic cleansing, discriminatory criminality, and hatred of "the other." But it is the American creed and the tenets of reviled Western Civ that even give birth to such intellectual conceits.

As of 2015, the United States was 61.6 percent white (not Hispanic), down from 63.7 percent in the 2010 Census. According to the Brookings Institution, almost half of young people under 18 are racial minorities. Meanwhile, the white population is aging. The Census American Community Survey in 2014 showed that the immigrant population was 42.4 million, or 13.3 percent of the total U.S. population.
This is an unprecedented high as a percentage, more even than the historic wave of immigrants of the late 19th century immortalized by the Statue of Liberty ...
Unlike in the past, America's elites oppose assimilation. Many celebrate the looming end of a white Christian majority. On top of this, norms and a broad national consensus on American values have crumbled.

I suspect that a large number of Trump voters were not white supremacists, white nationalists, racists, or whatever names are hurled at them (some surely were). But many are definitely white majoritarians who don't want to lose that country. They support equal rights and opportunities for minorities. But they want a white majority America. They won't tell pollsters this precisely because of the calumny that would be hurled at them. I've even talked to many African-Americans who quietly resent losing their status as the minority to Hispanics and others.
History shows no example of a nation that survives long as the kind of polyglot entity for which many progressives long. It shows many examples of the unsustainability of such experiments. The Austro-Hungarian Empire existed from 1867 to 1918, most of that time peaceably under the reign of the beloved Emperor Franz Joseph. But the empire was comprised of dozens of different ethnic groups, often jealous of each other and holding grudges. When World War I destroyed Austria-Hungary, it became the "killing fields of Eastern Europe" for much of the 20th century. Conversely, China is reclaiming its world power role after "the century of humiliation" with a conscious tilt to a Han Chinese majority and assimilation of "superior" Chinese civilization.
Progressives would like to see an America like Seattle. It's an amazingly international city on the surface, full of tolerance, cutting-edge left policies, diversity, and boasting a Socialist-Alternative member of the City Council. The Mexican Consulate is in my block — the only protests I've ever seen there are by Mexican nationals outraged by the mass kidnapping of students in 2014. At the airport, announcements for flights to China are read in Chinese and English. Faces from all over the world are found along Seattle's sidewalks
"I voted for Trump because of the economy" makes no sense, either. Many Trump counties are doing quite well. And he's put in place people and policies representing the buzzard capitalism that devastated the worst-hit pockets of the nation. But Trump and his dog whistles do appeal to demographic and cultural anxiety. White majoritarianism is "a thing," as the saying goes. It's powerful and deserves thoughtful consideration, not glib dismissal.

Rogue columnist Jon Talton