Arizona, Texas Architecture Firms Design Their New Future
June 25, 2009
PHOENIX, Ariz. – A Texas architecture firm specializing in the design of educational, recreational and religious projects announced today it has merged with SmithGroup, one of the nation’s major architecture and engineering firms with offices in Phoenix and several other major cities.
F&S Partners in Dallas now carries the joint name of SmithGroup/F&S. The company provides architecture, interior design and planning to clients throughout Texas and the Southwest. F&S Partners was founded in 1962 as Fisher and Spillman Architects.
With the merger, F&S President Robert L. Shaw Jr. becomes a SmithGroup vice president and the office director of SmithGroup/F&S. He also joins SmithGroup’s board of directors. All of F&S Partners employees have been retained and its five principals maintain their management positions.
The merger gives F&S Partners the expanded resources needed to design larger and more complex projects while allowing SmithGroup to bring its national expertise in designing higher education, science and technology, health and workplace facilities to Texas clients.
The merger follows two years of discussions between the two companies. Earlier this year, SmithGroup and F&S Partners teamed up to win several significant healthcare, university and recreation projects in Texas and Arizona.
The merger “will allow the Phoenix office to work closely with our friends in Dallas, leveraging our healthcare, higher education and municipal portfolios,” said Mike Medici, managing director of SmithGroup’s Phoenix office.
SmithGroup, which posted 2008 gross revenue of $166.1 million, was founded in 1853. The new Dallas office increases the firm’s offices to 11 across the United States.
For more information:
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Renowned Astronomer Refocusing From Arizona’s Night Skies to Solar Energy
June 25, 2009
TUCSON, Ariz. – A world-famous University of Arizona astronomer is shifting his focus from the faintest stars in the night sky to the brightest daylight star at the center of the solar system.
Roger Angel and other researchers at UA and at Arizona State University hope to harness energy from the sun. They are collaborating on a new design of reflectors for next-generation solar energy generating systems.
“The possibility is, you may be able to combine reflector-concentrating solar ideas and photovoltaic technology and try to get the best of both of them and make something that’s lower cost than either of them,” Angel says, “and that’s the direction that I’ve been looking at.”
Unlike oil and coal, sunlight is available worldwide, especially during summer months. “Solar is free,” Angel says. “It just arrives free every day. So we have to be smart enough (to create solar energy).”
He leads me across the hall from his UA office to a lab. There, he picks up a small photovoltaic cell. It’s about 1.5 centimeters across. The goal is to use the tiny cells and curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight to create solar energy.
“We make the biggest mirrors in the world for astronomical telescopes, so why not make mirrors for solar concentrators,” he says.
Angel and his team at the UA Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory design and build large telescopes. They create telescope mirrors as large as 26 feet in diameter. Angel is founder and director of the Steward mirror lab.
The photovoltaic cells commonly used in solar panels have an efficiency range of less than 20 percent. That range could be doubled if sunlight could be concentrated onto the cells, such as by using curved mirrors, Angel says.
“Mirror technology may be a key to making low-cost solar energy,” he says. “As you know, solar can be very expensive if you don’t subsidize it. So in order to do anything useful for global warming, you’ve got to make solar energy less expensive.
“If you can figure out how to make mirrors and point them at the sun and focus light onto these (high-efficiency photovoltaic) cells, if you can do that inexpensively, then you can make electricity inexpensively.”
Angel reveals few other details of his proposal. He says “about 20 startup companies in the U.S. are trying to figure out how to focus light on these cells inexpensively.”
In May, Angel filed for patents for his concept. Although he’s keeping quiet about details, “there will be a time when all of this – for better or worse, I wrote up in 100 pages the complete recipe for what I think is the right system – will be published, since the patent office publishes stuff.”
The UA-ASU team received a $2 million grant as part of the Solar Technology Institute announced in April by Science Foundation Arizona. Co-directors of STI are solar-energy pioneers Richard Powell and Robert Annan. Assisting in the financial support of the SFAz grants is Stardust Foundation.
Angel, 67, grew up near London. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1967. His bachelor’s and master’s degrees are from the California Institute of Technology. He taught for six years at Columbia University before joining the UA in 1974.
He is a member of many scientific organizations. They include the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, an Honorary Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford, and a MacArthur Fellow.
Angel’s many awards include one from the American Astronomical Society in 2006. In 2007, the Optical Society of America honored him with the Fraunhofer/Burley Prize “for innovation in optical systems development, including large astronomical telescope and mirror technology, methods for observing extra-solar planets, fiber-fed spectroscopy, adaptive optics, and a possible optical solution for global warming,” according to a UA press release.
During the interview, Angel referred to a thought-provoking quote attributed to Thomas Edison, reportedly in a 1931 conversation with automaker Henry Ford and tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone. Edison said: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left.”
For more information:
www.sfaz.org
www.mirrorlab.as.arizona.edu
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SmithGroup Tapped to Design $10M Sports Center for City of Avondale
June 22, 2009
AVONDALE, Ariz. – SmithGroup’s team of architects and designers in Phoenix has been selected by the city of Avondale to design a $10 million indoor sports recreation center that will be managed by a private company.
The 83,000-square-foot facility will be constructed at Van Buren Street and Avondale Boulevard, starting late this year. Completion is projected for late 2010. A contractor has not yet been selected by the city.
The multipurpose community center will be owned by Avondale but managed by American Sports Centers, based in Anaheim, Calif. Avondale officials chose to bring in a private company to run the facility, rather than pay its annual operating costs. It will be the California company’s first facility in Arizona.
The design includes from four to six basketball courts; six to eight valleyball courts; indoor soccer; and a community center multipurpose room that can be used as a senior center. The multipurpose center will offer flex-program space and meeting rooms serving residents and visitors.
An additional 30,000 square feet of retail space is proposed around the multipurpose facility for additional services related to the sports center.
SmithGroup is a national architectural, design and engineering company with about 800 employees. Besides Arizona, it has offices in Michigan; Illinois; California; Wisconsin; Minnesota; North Carolina; and Washington DC.
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Halfway on its Road Map, Arizona’s Bioscience Community is Attracting Attention
June 18, 2009
PHOENIX, Ariz. – Downtown Phoenix is a special place for Jerry Colangelo. It is home to US Airways Center, which opened in 1992 as America West Arena, home of the Phoenix Suns. Colangelo coached and led the team, starting at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, for more than a generation.
Next door is Chase Field, which opened in 1998 as Bank One Ballpark, home for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It is the team that Colangelo assembled, starting in the summer of 1993, at the request of banker and former Maricopa County Supervisor Jim Bruner and sports attorney Joe Garagiola Jr.
The two sports arenas, as well as the $600 million expansion of Phoenix Convention Center across the street, a new 1,000-room Sheraton Phoenix Downtown hotel nearby, the new $1.4 billion light rail system and the $900 million CityScape project under construction, have scored high in the revitalization of the city’s downtown core.
Colangelo, 69, also was chairman from 1999 to 2008 of Phoenix Community Alliance, a downtown business group that discussed many of the major projects completed or under construction.
All of the new projects have benefited downtown Phoenix, but Colangelo and other business leaders say another new economic engine is needed to help keep the region’s momentum moving. That new engine, Colangelo and others say, is bioscience.
Arizona’s economy: too limited
Until a generation ago, Arizona’s economy historically was based on agriculture, mining, tourism and construction. Today, with economic conditions slowing down most of the state’s industries, state and business leaders are looking for a new economic engine. Those concerns are focused on “bioscience and the new technologies that lead toward the future,” Colangelo says.
New reports show that while Arizona has a long road to travel before it matches the economic power of bioscience clusters in other states, its young scientific community has taken some giant steps.
Analysts say cities and economic development groups in other states are watching Arizona because of its bioscience communities’ achievements and research, as well as their workforces totaling tens of thousands, and the millions they and their workers pay in state and local taxes.
“Arizona has one of the nation’s fastest-growing bioscience industries,” Walter Plosila, senior advisor to the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, said in his analysis of Arizona’s fledgling industry earlier this year. “It’s not a major bioscience destination yet – that will require several more years – but Arizona has gained a national reputation as an emerging bioscience center.”
Environmental research has been underway in Arizona for decades, but the state’s formalized biosciences strategy – called “Arizona’s Bioscience Roadmap” – dates to 2002, says Brad Halvorsen, assistant vice president of communications at Flinn Foundation, a private philanthropic organization.
A timeline for Arizona’s bioscience initiative is on Flinn Foundation’s Web site, www.flinn.org.
Even though it didn’t yet have a home, June 2002 is considered the official start of Translational Genomics Research Institute, promoted as a one-of-a-kind genomics research institute in Phoenix. For about two years, TGen worked out of donated office space from Arizona Public Service Co. and temporary lab space from Banner Health System and Quest Diagnostics.
TGen was the complementary research institute of the International Genomics Consortium, which was granted lab space in the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare in Scottsdale.
Research’s first home
Two years later, in late 2004, TGen and IGC moved into their new downtown Phoenix headquarters on a 15-acre biomedical campus. The six-story, $46 million building, owned by the City of Phoenix, is considered the cornerstone of the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, or PBC, and a key part of the statewide bioscience efforts.
Business leaders and elected officials are saying Arizona’s recent venture into the high-tech biosciences arena is critical to broaden the state’s total economy. They say diversification is needed to end the boom-and-bust cycles that cause high rates of unemployment and throw economies into a tailspin.
One has only to look at San Diego, Boston and Baltimore, to name a few, where bioscience ventures started decades ago have grown into economic powerhouses.
“It’s obvious that our economy needs to be diversified, and this (the biosciences) is one way to try to strengthen and add diversity to the state’s economy,” says Halvorsen.
While knowledge-based industries like biosciences sometimes are perceived as niche industries, biosciences are inextricably linked to the healthcare field, “which is significant in and of itself,” says Jim McPherson, assistant vice president of public affairs at Flinn.
Another heavyweight player in Arizona’s bioscience efforts is Science Foundation Arizona. The nonprofit organization was created in 2006 by three statewide business groups –– Flagstaff 40, Phoenix Leadership and the Southern Arizona Leadership Council. The goal is to establish a bioscience community that will make Arizona’s economy more competitive in the global economy. The agency’s director is William Harris, who was recruited from Science Foundation Ireland, where he was founding director general and CEO.
Ventana expanding
In 2008, one of the Arizona bioscience community’s high points was the $3.4 billion purchase of Ventana Medical Systems in Tucson by Roche Holding AG. Ventana develops, manufactures and markets systems that automate tissue preparation and slide staining in laboratories worldwide. Roche, based in Basil, Switzerland, is one of the world’s largest research-focused healthcare groups in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.
Roche says Ventana’s headquarters will remain in Oro Valley, north of Tucson. Ventana’s workforce of 750 is expected to increase to 1,000 by late 2009. This week, Ventana officials presented more details of their 10-year master plan to the town council. The long-range plan includes adding hundreds of jobs, up to 17 acres of parking for the additional workers, and raising the height of the company buildings.
Another out-of-state group eyeballing Arizona’s bioscience achievements is a consulting group in Georgia. The consultants, representing an Atlanta client, called executives at Flinn several times in 2008 to discuss the high rate of collaboration found in the Arizona bioscience community.
“They were looking to get their own bioscience initiative going, and how do you get the various groups to work together,” says Halvorsen at Flinn.
McPherson adds: “They were just asking, ‘How does Arizona do this? What makes you different? Why are you able to break through the silos,’ that sort of thing.”
The “silo effect” in business refers to the isolation created when companies, universities, elected officials and even departments within the same organization, all with similar goals, fail – or refuse – to collaborate.
Arizona attracting attention
Bioscience officials say Arizona’s gains in the scientific community are sparking the creation of more startup companies as well as attracting attention from bioscience nodes in other states.
“The state’s research institutes continue to capture a greater share of NIH (National Institutes of Health) dollars and continue to build a critical mass of research,” says Plosila at Ohio-based Battelle. “More firms are being spun off university and research institute intellectual property and Arizona is moving towards a critical mass of research strengths and creation of firms in each of the state’s three regions – Tucson, Phoenix, and Flagstaff.”
Plosila adds that Arizona’s bioscience achievements and ongoing efforts are raising the state’s profile in this high-tech arena. He and others point to TGen and IGC as the sparks that created this new element in the state’s economy.
“First, I believe the attraction and growth of TGen itself became a model for other regions such as Florida to create their own research anchors to buttress their university base,” Plosila says.
“Second, Arizona is definitely getting attention and recognition but it takes 12 to 14 years at least to build a major bioscience center. Arizona’s approach is two-fold: focus on key signature opportunities around research strengths and technology commercialization opportunities and encourage collaboration among and between universities, medical centers, and private research institutes and industry. Focus and collaboration means Arizona can stand out in certain areas without requiring the kinds of investments otherwise necessary to be good in everything. And that is one feature Arizona is getting national recognition for – the ability and willingness to collaborate.”
Using Plosila’s estimate that it can take 12 to 14 years to establish a major bioscience center, Arizona’s bioscience community in 2009 could be halfway to its goal, since the state’s bioscience strategy was officially launched in 2002. That was the year when more than 50 leaders in science, government and business met at the state Capitol to begin promoting bioscience as part of the state’s economics.
Arizona budget crisis
However, the state’s bioscience community could be forced into the slow lane by the state’s current budget crisis, which has triggered proposals for widespread cuts throughout state government. Arizona faces a deficit of $3 billion to $4 billion in its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, beginning July 1. Gov. Jan Brewer favors a temporary tax. State legislators are excluding tax hikes in their own proposals. Brewer has sued the Legislature over its failure to send her any proposed budget.
Although the discussions about the state budget, a temporary tax and cuts in state agencies have complicated the state’s economic arena, what is anything but complicated is the far-reaching potential of bioscience, officials say.
“Bioscience sounds complicated and scary, but it actually affects pretty much everybody,” Halvorsen says. “I think everybody’s been touched by disease through their family or friends, in one way or another. And there’s a lot of activity going on here to prevent and cure those diseases.
“And also there’s the economic impact, as far as trying to diversify the economy and strengthen our economic base,” he continues.
The economic impact of Arizona’s bioscience community in 2007, the latest year for which numbers are available, was nearly $21.2 billion in direct, indirect and induced impacts, according to an April report from Battelle Technology Partnership Practice.
The report, called “The Economic Impact of the Arizona Biosciences Sector,” prepared April 7, also shows that:
• The bioscience community employed 87,417 workers who, along with their employers, paid $765.7 million in state and local taxes in 2007.
• State and local tax revenues increased from nearly $567 million in 2002, when bioscience arrived in Arizona, to $765.7 million in 2007, for a 35 percent increase.
• Battelle’s research also shows that the 87,417 workers in Arizona’s bioscience community (which is 2.5 percent of total state employment) earned more than $5.3 billion in compensation.
Entertainment district, more central city living
In addition to the bioscience community’s presence in downtown Phoenix, Colangelo and others would like to see an entertainment district downtown that would complement hotels and the new convention center, and the increased residential construction within the city’s core.
A proposal for such a concept – the Jackson Street entertainment district – is winding its way through Phoenix City Hall. It could reach the city council by early July. Plans for the project are available for viewing at www.jacksonstreetphx.com.
Colangelo and other business leaders envision an entertainment district filled with restaurants, art galleries, retailers and public spaces that could be used for a variety of seasonal events.
“I see a downtown Phoenix down the road – I don’t know when the year is – where people work and live and eat and are entertained in an urban setting,” he says.
“I love the community. It’s been great to me. I’ve been blessed to have an opportunity to be part of its growth. I’m sure I’ll be involved in many ways going forward.”
For more information about the bioscience community in Arizona, visit:
• Arizona BioBasics: www.arizonabiobasics.org
• Arizona BioIndustry Association: www.azbioindustry.org
• Arizona Bioscience News: www.flinn.org
• Arizona’s Bioscience Roadmap: www.flinn.org/bio/roadmap.cms
• Bioindustry Organization of Southern Arizona: www.bio-sa.org
• Statewide Biosciences Directory: www.flinn.org/bio/bio_directory.cms
• Statewide Biosciences Calendar: www.flinn.org/bio/bio_calendar.cms
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Apple Prepares to Open its Largest Arizona Store in Scottsdale
June 9, 2009
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Apple computer fans might want to start their upcoming weekend early by stopping by the computer company’s first store in Scottsdale and largest in Arizona.
The new store opens at 6 p.m. June 12 at Scottsdale Quarter, an innovative retail district at Scottsdale Road and Greenway-Hayden Loop. The new retail store at 15169 N. Scottsdale Road will be Apple’s first Arizona store to offer Pro Labs, which involves free training on Apple’s professional creative applications for digital photography, music production and video editing.
Several of the retail center’s tenants opened March 26 across Scottsdale Road from Kierland Commons. The first tenants include two home furnishing stores, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma Home. Future phases will be opened in response to retail and office market demands.
Scottsdale Quarter’s mixed-use design includes retailers on the ground floor of two parking garages. In its other buildings, office space is above retailers. The project’s design offers 370,000 square feet for retailers and restaurants; 36,000 square feet for entertainment, such as theaters; and 203,000 square feet for offices.
Scottsdale Quarter’s developer is Glimcher Realty Trust. Partners are Vanguard City Home and The Wolff Co. The architect is Nelsen Architects. Construction manager is Whiting-Turner. Leasing is coordinated by CB Richard Ellis.
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Retired Nurse Rebounding from Homelessness; Experts Seeing More Professionals Joining the Needy
June 7, 2009
PHOENIX, Ariz. – When Regina Fahnestock marched out of college in Ohio in the 1970s with nursing and psychology degrees, she was beaming. Her head was as high as her noble goal of saving the world. All of her patients will recover, that was her plan. Death was not an option.
But over the years, people and patients around Fahnestock did die. Her father died in 1984 on Father’s Day. She learned quickly that disease, aging, bad habits and bad luck will trump the newest medicine and medical techniques.
Fahnestock remembers wanting to become a nurse when she was a first grader. That was 50 years ago.
She worked for doctors during most of her career. For a time, she was a paramedic. Fahnestock even joined the Army, where she was a military nurse from 1984-86.
Today, after a medical career of 28 years, followed by her own rough patch of medical challenges, Fahnestock is thanking the world she dreamed of saving, for helping save her from homelessness.
Fahnestock is an example of a college-educated, career professional who was as close to homelessness as one could get, without actually having to survive on the streets.
“I was right there,” she says of being homeless in Phoenix. “I kept thinking someone will come through, or things will turn around. I wasn’t ready to quite give up. It was a pride thing. The homeless, you think of the bum on the corner who’s begging for money for alcohol or drugs or whatever. But that’s not always the case.”
Fahnestock, 56, has avoided living on the streets or under viaducts, but she was close enough to see that parallel universe. She says her brush with life on the streets “made me realize that even the best man on the mountain can be knocked down by a cold wind.”
Fahnestock says her failing knees made her give up nursing as a career. After a few years, when her finances were drained by medical bills and joblessness, she found herself in a financial tailspin. She was headed toward homelessness.
In recent months, while she was recuperating from knee surgery at the Carl T. Hayden Veterans Medical Center in Phoenix, her home was a transitional shelter in east Phoenix. Today, her life is rebounding. Workers at Society of St. Vincent de Paul helped her find a part-time job in central Phoenix. That job allowed her to relocate from the shelter into an apartment in May.
A Midwestern girl
Fahnestock is a product of America’s heartland, with its flatlands and rolling fields, of silos punctuating family farms of corn and soybeans, of daily farming chores through humid summers and icy winters. It’s a region filled with front porches in friendly rural communities where pedestrians and motorists can become rare after sunset.
Fahnestock worked as a nurse or medical assistant, starting with a podiatrist soon after her graduation in 1973. In the 1980s, she joined the U.S. Army and worked in military medicine. It was in the Army where doctors – after determining she had serious knee problems – discouraged her from re-enlisting after her two-year hitch.
She was 40 when she underwent surgery for implants in both knees. A few years later, she fell and damaged her right implant. She was unaware of the damage until later, after the implant had worn away part of her leg bone.
Around 1996, because of her years of 10- and 12-hour days on her feet, the mounting pain forced her into retirement.
In 2007, after tiring of the cold South Dakota winters, she boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Arizona. A friend in Phoenix opened his home for her, but she left within weeks because of personal disagreements.
It was at this point where Fahnestock found herself facing homelessness. She had no job. She needed knee surgery again. A doctor ordered her to use a wheelchair to give her knees a rest.
Tiger by the tail
Fahnestock has two adult children. Her son is overseas in the military. Her daughter and son-in-law on the East Coast recently welcomed their first child. She uses e-mail to stay in touch with her children. They have offered to help, but Fahnestock insists on taking care of herself. Her children have their own lives, she says.
Fahnestock had a tiger by the tail, and it was turning on her. That’s about the time she reached out to St. Vincent de Paul for help.
In her Phoenix apartment, Fahnestock says she’s happy with the new direction of her life. She doesn’t have nearly as many material possessions she once had, which she says is okay.
“I may never get to where I used to be, and that’s alright,” she says. “I just want to work and I want to be able to come home and just live my life for however many years I have.”
After her surgery at the Veterans Medical Center hospital, Fahenstock recuperated from her knee surgery at Ozanam Manor, a transitional shelter at 1730 E. Monroe St. in east Phoenix. About 10 percent of people seeking help from St. Vincent de Paul have college degrees or backgrounds in professional careers, says Mike Bell, the nonprofit agency’s director of shelter services in Phoenix.
Increasing numbers of families facing unemployment or the loss of their homes are turning to St. Vincent de Paul for meals, spokesman Ryan Narramore says.
“Your everyday families are starting to come in,” Narramore says. “They’re turning for help everywhere they can, from food boxes to anything that we can do to help them out.”
Homeless includes regular people
Fahnestock says there are many others like her living on the brink of homelessness.
“We’re not all addicts or alcoholics or people looking for a free ride,” she says. “There are some genuine, normal wanting-to-work type people out there who have just had some bad breaks.”
She adds that the twists, turns and stumbles on her journey, while as challenging “as trying to describe the color green to a blind man,” have changed the way she thinks of others and of herself.
“I’m not nearly as proud, to put it bluntly,” she says. “I’m a lot kinder and a lot more understanding.”
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New Options Offered to Homeowners Facing Foreclosure
June 3, 2009
PHOENIX, Ariz. – A real estate and mortgage information provider is offering two new online products that could help homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages.
The Web-based products, eModifyMyLoan and eShortSaleMyHome, became available June 1. They are designed to help homeowners work with lenders to modify an existing mortgage or negotiate a short sale, says Chris Mozilo, who founded eModifyMyLoan with Omar Kassem.
The online systems, based on a homeowner’s responses to a series of questions, help prepare documents needed for a modified loan or initiate a short sale. Those documents usually include personal finance statements, monthly budgets and letters explaining hardships, such as job loss or other financial struggles.
The two products are priced at $199 each. Interested homeowners can decide which of the products to purchase after responding to a few questions to determine which would be best for them.
“It’s going to create the document that your lender is going to need in order to review the loan modification request,” Mozilo says. “It will calculate the payment that you should be able to afford, based on your income.”
While an astute borrower struggling to pay his or her bills might balk at the price, Mozilo says other options could include paying $3,000 or more to attorneys or loan modification companies.
Mozilo, who was a mortgage banker a total of 17 years with Countrywide Financial and Citigroup, adds that his company’s online products are designed to provide information borrowers could obtain from their lenders, if the borrowers were able to get lenders to return their calls.
In today’s economy, Mozilo continues, many lenders are swamped with calls from borrowers asking about loan modifications and short sales. The irony in these situations is that borrowers sometimes are unable to get their calls returned from lenders, even though the borrowers are about to fall behind on their payments.
As long as the borrowers are current, the lender isn’t too concerned, especially if the lender is backlogged with delinquent borrowers, which is why some lenders “are pretty difficult to work with, in regards to loan modifications right now,” Mozilo says.
“They’ve got a flood of requests for modifications, so they’re not really prepared to handle all of it (the requests),” he says.
Other reasons for lenders’ reluctance to modify loans include efforts by some borrowers to exaggerate their financial distress just because they want to reduce their mortgage payments; and the expense lenders face in shifting workers – or hiring new ones – to process loan modification requests, legitimate or not, Mozilo says.
A third reason for lenders’ slowness in responding to borrowers’ requests could involve mortgages serviced by one lender but which has been sold to an investment group or another bank, which sometimes are in other countries.
“So it’s a very difficult process for homeowners to try to navigate through and get the help that they really need,” he says.
He adds that the new online tools helps the average homeowner organize the financial information that his or her lender will need to consider a loan modification or short sale.
One of Mozilo’s first customers is a single mother who recently was laid off and has taken a job paying less than what she was earning. She wants to modify her loan, but she is having difficulty getting in touch with someone at her lender’s local office.
“She had been current on her mortgage payment (before her job changed), and they didn’t want to give her the time of day because she wasn’t late yet,” Mozilo says. “She will be a foreclosure if they don’t modify her payment.”
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Discount Store Carved into Offices; Blackstone Accepting Other Clubs’ Golfers
May 29, 2009
Closed Sam’s Club converted into offices
PHOENIX, Ariz. – A Pennsylvania company is renovating a closed Sam’s Club building in north Phoenix into CrossRoads Corporate Center, a large back office building.
Kossman Development Co. of Pittsburgh plans to have the 105,000-square-foot project complete in August. The $800,000 redevelopment includes adding 120 windows along with entrance canopies, additional landscaping and upgraded parking.
The building in the Deer Valley area is just north of Bell Road, on the west side of Interstate 17. Cushman & Wakefield’s Steve Sayre, Michael Sayre, Pat Harlan and Kyle Westfall are the leasing agents.
Kossman Development is one of western Pennsylvania’s largest commercial real estate developers. The company has more than 3 million square feet of developed property among its holdings throughout the Midwest and Southwest.
Private country club course opening to other clubs’ members
PEORIA, Ariz. – With costs rising and membership declining, Blackstone Country Club at Vistancia is opening its Jim Engh-designed course to golfers from other private clubs in Arizona.
“Private clubs in Arizona and throughout the country are looking at ways to increase profits at a time when costs are rising steadily and club memberships are down,” says Curt Smith, chief operating officer for Sunbelt Holdings, Blackstone’s developer in a partnership with Shea Homes.
Members of other Arizona clubs can schedule tee times at Blackstone through their own club professionals.
Blackstone is a private, 570-acre gated community in north Peoria west of Lake Pleasant Road and north of Happy Valley Parkway within the Vistancia development.
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Arizona’s First Transplant Patient Helped Others, Despite Her Medical Challenges
May 19, 2009
PHOENIX, Ariz. – The young social worker’s courage kept pace with her fear, but her energy level was reaching empty. She was in pain, racing to an Arizona hospital. Her kidneys were failing. It was early 1969. She was 25, the youngest in the family.
“It was horrible, that’s all I remember,” Violet Lopez says today of the pain coursing through her muscles. “It was just awful. It was like an itch, like a really deep tissue itch that I could not satisfy by scratching.”
Violet was nauseous and in a world of hurt. She was restless in the passenger seat, her head down. Shooting anxious glances at her was the driver, Leonor, her older sister.
“She just kept telling me, ‘We’re going to make it, we’re going to make it,’” Violet says.
Violet and Leonor were in the Lopez express, racing west on dirt roads and blacktop between fields of corn and cotton. Gravel fired by the tires was clicking a loud rhythm against the bottom of their car. They were headed from their rural home in north Mesa to Good Samaritan Hospital in central Phoenix. It was 25 miles between home and help.
“I would have to put my head down because I was so nauseous,” Violet says. “Not doubled over but kind of squirming around in the seat. It was like dry heaves.”
A few months earlier, Violet learned from her Arizona doctors that her kidneys were shutting down. The doctors recommended a treatment that never had been performed in Arizona. Organ transplants would be considered rare, even experimental, for many more years.
Violet had a whirlwind of thoughts in the weeks and days leading up to this race to the emergency room. She thought about her older brother, Bill Lopez, ready to donate one of his kidneys to help her. She lacked medical insurance so her father was scrambling to pull together the $20,000 for her operation.
She thought about her job, her new apartment, recently paying the rent, and the hours of discussions with her doctors about the risks involved. They talked about traveling to another state for the operation. They decided they could perform the operation at Good Samaritan. But overpowering Violet on this day were fear and pain and nausea. She kept talking to Leonor about the pain.
“I told her, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it,’” Violet says today. “I was just like gagging, but worse, now that I think about it. It was not fun. I was really very sick.”
They were praying there were no detours or traffic jams. Mid-afternoon traffic was heavy. Time was slowing to a crawl. Violet’s kidneys were shutting down. The accumulating wastes poisoning her body were causing a powerful itching sensation in her muscles.
When they reached the hospital, a medical team sprang into action. A doctor grabbed a long needle. He paused, then carefully inserted it into Violet’s abdomen to drain the fluids backed up by her failing kidneys.
“I remember they just said to tighten up your belly,” she says. “It was a huge needle. I had tanks and tanks of water coming out. I remember, immediately I felt so much better.”
During the drive and later in the emergency room, Violet prayed she would live a few more years. “I was thinking then, ‘Well, if I live to be 35, I’ll be happy.’ I was 25 then,” Violet says, laughing.
Her race to the hospital was 40 years ago. The transplant operation took place a few days later on Feb. 25, 1969.
Pioneering operation
Transplant surgery was a medical frontier when Violet was racing for medical help. The nation’s first successful kidney transplant had been performed in 1954 on identical twin brothers in Boston. The recipient lived another eight years. Anti-rejection drugs were not readily available for many years after Violet’s operation.
Despite the risk, Violet was willing to take the medical journey. That decision placed her and her doctors among Arizona’s medical pioneers, says Dr. Lawrence Koep, a surgeon who arrived in Phoenix in 1981. Koep and other surgeons helped reorganize and expand the organ transplant program at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center. He currently is in private practice at Arizona Transplant Associates in Phoenix.
That first night in her hospital bed 40 years ago, before the surgery, Violet felt panic. Her sister and the rest of their family had been with her earlier, but now they were gone. She was alone. She grabbed the phone and dialed her sister. Their mother died six years earlier. Leonor urged Violet to contact someone from their church. She did. A church official arrived at Violet’s bedside.
“That (counseling) felt great,” Violet says today. “I didn’t have any problems in the morning, going in to the surgery. I was pretty calm. I was really confident in my doctors. Now that I look back, I was not scared. I knew it was new, but I had no doubts that this was going to be what was best for me. It was not a thing of having second thoughts or anything. I just plowed straight ahead.”
Simultaneous operations
Six surgeons, according to a copy of a 1969 newspaper story about Violet’s surgery, worked simultaneously on Violet and her older brother, Bill. The doctors removed one of his kidneys and carried it in a sterile container to Violet’s operating table in another room, where the surgeons inserted it into her right side. Violet says the team of surgeons included Dr. William Cornell, a cardiovascular surgeon who has since retired. He was said to be traveling and unavailable for comment.
Violet’s brother called his donation of one of his kidneys “my birthday and Christmas present all rolled into one,” Violet told reporters, according to the 1969 newspaper account. Violet says she took Prednisone to help prevent rejection of her brother’s kidney. The side effects of the first anti-rejection drugs included weight gain.
“I really blew up,” Violet says. “You build up all this fatty tissue. It was just horrible. I went from 99 pounds to just not even looking like myself. It was very traumatic. I was only 25 so it was not a happy time.”
Violet’s transplanted kidney functioned until 1981. She added dialysis to her life’s routine until 1986 when she received her second transplant. It came from a deceased donor. But when Violet suffered acute rejection, doctors removed the kidney within a day or so. She was forced to return to dialysis treatments twice a week. Each treatment lasted two hours.
In 1990, after four more years of dialysis, Violet underwent a third kidney transplant, also from a deceased donor. “This one is still ticking,” she says. “I’m trying to keep it as long as I can.”
A career of helping others
Violet, 65, recently retired from her career of helping others. When she underwent her first transplant in 1969, she worked as a child welfare worker for the Department of Economic Security. Later, she worked in community health at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Phoenix. She went on to become director of crisis services with a Phoenix mental health center.
Violet’s supporters say her career involved more than social work. She was instrumental in setting up mobile crisis teams that responded with police to calls involving domestic violence, suicide attempts or the mentally ill, says Charlie Thomas, a social worker at Banner Good Samaritan. He first met Violet in 1985, when he started working at the hospital.
“She had some of the most difficult social work jobs that are out there,” Thomas says. “She was a leader in her field, and she was a volunteer with the Arizona Kidney Foundation through the years.”
In 1997, Violet fell and broke her left leg, her right ankle and injured her right knee. That was followed by two months in the hospital. Those injuries, along with facing months of relearning how to walk, led to her decision to retire.
After recovering, Violet became bored with retirement. She could have qualified for disability, but she says she preferred working. Friends told her there were openings at Arizona State Hospital. Violet applied and was hired. She worked there for several years, starting as a social worker in the adolescent unit and working her way into administration. She was director of admissions when she retired again in November 2007.
Violet, though still a reluctant retiree, today enjoys reading, volunteering in her church and studying her family’s genealogy. Occasionally, she glances through the scrapbook the hospital staff put together for her in 1969 after her first transplant. It contains letters, photos and get-well cards from medical workers cheering for her. Many other letters and cards arrived from well-wishers throughout Arizona.
“You can’t measure the value of a transplant,” Violet says. “You just can’t do it. It’s priceless.”
Reviewing her career and her medical challenges, Violet says she felt compelled to give back as much as possible, since others helped her. Long on giving is her nature. She also expressed gratitude for the donor of her third kidney. She says it came from a teenager who died in the Phoenix area.
“Hopefully, I’ve done well by that (donor’s) life. You hope that you do the best you can, that your life has meaning and value.”
For more information:
• United Network for Organ Sharing, www.unos.org
• Transplant Living, www.transplantliving.com
• National Kidney Foundation, www.kidney.org/transplantation
• Coalition on Donation, www.donatelife.net
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Greater Phoenix Metro Region Among Nation’s Top 10 Places for New Grads
Press Release
May 13, 2009
TEMPE, Ariz. – As President Barack Obama welcomes the more than 8,000 graduates of Arizona State University to ‘the real world’ at today’s commencement at Sun Devil Stadium, those who choose to stay in the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area might feel a bit more confident.
Apartments.com and CBcampus.com have named the region as one of the 10 Best Cities for Recent College Graduates. Based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, inventory of new jobs requiring less than one year of experience and the average cost of rent for a one bedroom apartment, Phoenix ranked seventh.
Graduates should have an easier time finding jobs in sales, customer service and marketing, according to the survey.
“This is great news as our local graduates look for jobs in the worst economy in decades,” said Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman, home of ASU. “Tempe is the only city in the region that has more jobs than residents. We also have a large number of marketing, advertising and public relations firms in our downtown, including Sitewire Marketspace, Terralever, Off Madison Avenue and Spark Design.”
A page at www.tempe.gov/jobs also has listings of positions for which students may apply. Details on how to get involved in Tempe’s business community may be found at www.tempe.gov/business. City figures show that 175,000 people work in the community, which has a population of 165,000.
“Tempe’s outstanding mix of employers provides a unique opportunity for graduates to walk right into a challenging career and lifetime opportunity for not only professional but also personal success,” said Tempe Economic Development Director Sheri Wakefield-Saenz. “Arizona State University is a job engine for the Greater Phoenix region and provides the natural Town and Gown link for graduates, particularly in the engineering, technology, healthcare and business fields,” she said.
(Read the complete story about the new survey at: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/05/13/cb.top10.cities.grads/index.html)
According to Apartments.com and CBcampus.com, the top 10 U.S. cities for new grads are:
1. Indianapolis
Average rent: $625
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, health care
2. Philadelphia
Average rent: $1,034
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, management
3. Baltimore
Average rent: $1,130
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, health care
4. Cincinnati
Average rent: $691
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, health care
5. Cleveland
Average rent: $686
Popular entry-level categories: sales, marketing, customer service
6. New York
Average rent: $1,548
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, admin-clerical
7. Phoenix
Average rent: $747
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, marketing
8. Denver
Average rent: $877
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, health care
9. Chicago
Average rent: $1,133
Popular entry-level categories: sales, marketing, customer service
10. San Antonio
Average rent: $696
Popular entry-level categories: sales, customer service, management
Source: City of Tempe, Ariz. For more information: www.tempe.gov
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