'Construction' Archive
Good news from the National Association of Realtors led to a rise in housing stocks this week. To which one must ask, “What? Isn’t that crazy?”
But investors are just cock-eyed optimists, except when they are panicking and dumping everything in sight.
The good news is good, sort of. Data from the National Association of Realtors shows that pending home sales in March rose slightly over February, and only less slightly over March of 2008. Buyers are taking advantage of the various incentives, especially for first-time home buyers, and bargains, also known as foreclosures. Plenty of savvy buyers are looking at foreclosed properties for the best price on a good home. This is causing the hardest hit markets in states like California and Florida to rebound a little.
But new homes? Brand new homes? Well, if there’s a glut of housing on the market, and there is, buyers can get a discount on a new home too. Right? Just take a look at Toll Brothers’ Web site — they acknowledge right up front that it’s a buyer’s market. KB Home takes a different tack. Its Web site touts California housing credits and “low monthly payments.” That set off warning bells for me; tell me it’s not going to be reminiscent of Golden West’s disastrous Pick-a-Pay plan? Please tell me that.
What also must be going out is that credit is loosening somewhat. Just a few months ago, banks were running scared and weren’t lending. If houses are moving, it’s an indication that bankers are writing mortgages again. Maybe not with the same gleeful abandon as last year and the year before, but that’s what we want, right? Judicious application of credit, not wanton bacchanalia.
It’s a welcome sign, the one that says contract pending.
The New York Times article on the history of the Merritt Parkway was pretty timely in light of the economic stimulus. About $40 billion is going toward highway and infrastructure construction. Will the money include the kind of development that went into the Merritt back in the 1930s?
The highway was laid out to have a parklike feel, lined with dogwoods and other trees and crossed over with magnificently carved and ornamented bridges. Nowadays the parkway is congested and traffic crawls. When I lived in Connecticut we often spoke of the Route 7-Merritt Parkway main commuting highways with appropriate horror. I gather it has only gotten worse since then. But as the article says, when commuters are forced to drive in stop-and-go traffic they can appreciate the art and the architecture that graces the highway to this day.
I think that the idea of creating beauty out of infrastructure has, well, merit. Texas has been building plenty of roads and overpasses lately — toll roads have sprung up around Austin, causing a huge outcry — and there are a couple of interchanges that are quite handsome. The 183–IH-35 interchange, for instance, has beautiful brick columns and plazas. Odd I know, because the only people who will appreciate these touches are the flower sellers and the guys asking for change, but it’s a welcome relief for motorists too, who are used to staring at nothing but gray concrete and dead grass on the embankments while waiting for the light to change.
So will it be considered a waste of money if we use some of the stimulus funds for pretty? I hope not. Highways and roads are pretty utilitarian. Maybe putting in a little art will make them human too.
Like the “Hooverville” shanty towns of the Great Depression, the homeless encampment along the American River in Sacramento, California, is becoming a national symbol of the financial meltdown and the recession, and the consequences for ordinary people. There are no multibillion-dollar bailout packages for these unfortunate folks.
The Lede blog of The New York Times last week covered the transient village, with its hundreds of residents, and National Public Radio chimed in with a feature this morning.
What makes this tent city stand out is its presence in the capital of California, where home foreclosures are rampant around the state.
As NPR noted, the chronically homeless are represented in this encampment, which has no running water or sanitation, aside from the nearby river, and that may be a public health crisis in the making. There’s also a large proportion of the newly homeless — people who lost their houses to foreclosures after they lost their jobs. As one resident told the NPR correspondent: You can’t get a job if you don’t have a home address. And you can’t get a home if you don’t have a job.
I’ve spent many summer days whitewater rafting on the upper reaches of the American River and its tributaries. It’s a singularly beautiful river, and all too ironically named for these downtrodden times.
President Obama is famous for reading his e-mail on a BlackBerry and using social media to campaign. To help pass the economic stimulus package that came together in Congress this week, he again turned to the high-technology industry.
The president and his advisers called on industry leaders to push for the package, which contains provisions and funding for such items as electronic health records, R&D for renewable energy sources and other clean tech, and widening the reach of broadband access to the Internet.
One executive taking a high-profile run through the nation’s capital was Paul Otellini, the president and CEO of Intel. In a speech to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Otellini laid out his company’s plans to spend $7 billion over the next two years to build and equip advanced wafer fabrication facilities at three sites in the US. The initiative will support about 7,000 jobs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon.
Otellini didn’t mention how Intel is consolidating older plants in California and Oregon, and overseas in Malaysia and the Philippines. The company announced those moves last month, saying between 5,000 and 6,000 employees would be affected as a result. Not all of those people will lose their jobs; many may catch another assignment within Intel.
Intel has long been one of the biggest spenders in the semiconductor industry on building, expanding, and upgrading its plants. Only Samsung Electronics has outspent the company on “capex” (capital expenditures) in recent years, and that’s bound to change in 2009, with Samsung going into the red.
Otellini also made the rounds of the media this week, getting interviewed by NPR and other outlets.
President Obama didn’t just play up the high-tech angle in lobbying for the economic stimulus package. He visited a Caterpillar factory in East Peoria, Illinois, this week to emphasize how the package could prompt sales of earthmovers and other heavy equipment. Jim Owens, the chairman and CEO of Caterpillar, didn’t quite play into the marketing of the event, however, telling reporters that he didn’t think the economic stimulus package would help the 22,000 employees being laid off this year by the company. (Owens backpedaled in a corporate statement on Friday, saying he supports the economic stimulus package.)
Well, never mind. It looks like the administration will get most of what it wanted in the big package, now priced at $787 billion.
My parents insist that I became a fan of the New York Yankees after watching the TV broadcast of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, when I was not quite three months old. I tell people it was earlier than that; I say that I was a Yankee fan in utero.
It was with something other than professional interest, then, that I saw the news about how the new Yankee Stadium, going up next to the fabled House That Ruth Built, is being wired by Cisco Systems to have the most advanced information network in any North American stadium. (That is, at least until the Oakland Athletics open their proposed new stadium, Cisco Field, sometime in this century.)
The $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, scheduled to open next spring, will give the affluent if pitching-challenged franchise a new place to display its 26 championship banners. Not coincidentally, that other baseball team in New York City next year will open its own new stadium, Citi Field, next to the site of the unsightly Shea Stadium, where the Yankees played for two seasons, 1974-75, while The House That Ruth Built was purchased by The City of New York, reconstructed, and reopened in 1976 as what fans called “the House That Lindsay Rebuilt,” referring to former mayor John Lindsay, who shepherded the project through the city bureaucracy to keep the Yankees from leaving town.
When the Yankees returned to Yankee Stadium in 1976, they won an American League pennant following a 12-year drought. After signing superstar outfielder Reggie Jackson as a free agent, the Yanks went on to win the World Series in 1977 and 1978. The Bronx Bombers clearly hope a new stadium will similarly revive their championship ways in 2009, since winning their most recent World Series in 2000.
Among the capabilities of the Cisco network in the new Yankee Stadium will be central control of some 1,100 flat-screen HDTV monitors throughout the stadium and the ability to show something different on each of those monitors. The ball players will have a computer in each locker, and we hope they will use those computers just to look at MLB.com’s Web sites.
Opening a new stadium is no guarantee of financial success — just ask the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees want to regain their former glory in the bright new stadium, after a record 4.3 million fans filed through the turnstiles of the old Yankee Stadium during the 2008 season, but those fans won’t return year after year if the team doesn’t win, no matter how many flat-screens are posted throughout the edifice.
* Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network, aka the YES Network.