Archinect - News

Lessons on Surviving, and Even Thriving Through a Recession

2020-09-15T14:54:00-04:00

Recessions are hard for everyone, but the architecture industry has a history of being especially impacted by downturns in the economy. This panel, one of Archinect's many upcoming virtual events, will share insights from architects who have successfully worked through previous recessions, or even started up during a recession.

From L-R: Gregg Pasquarelli, Carie Penabad, David Gensler, Patrick Macleamy

The panel will bring together seasoned industry experts: David Gensler, Former Co-CEO at Gensler; Carie Penabad, Principal at CURE & PENABAD; Patrick Macleamy, Former CEO at HOK; and Gregg Pasquarelli, Founding Principal at SHoP Architects. The panel will be moderated by Paul Petrunia, Archinect's Founder/Director.

The conversation will focus on ways firms have pivoted in response to changing economic landscapes, team restructuring, strategic hiring, and other approaches to not only make it through a challenging time, but to come out stronger during the recovery.

To reserve your spot...

Trump Administration poised to reshape government's role in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

2019-08-30T19:15:00-04:00

The Trump administration and lawmakers in both parties generally don’t believe the government should be running in effect two enormous financial companies. Administration officials want to shrink the government’s involvement and return housing finance to a privately run system.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at how (and why) the Trump Administration is looking to change the federal government's role in overseeing aspects of the nation's mortgage securities market.

According to WSJ, the two government-sponsored entities secure half of the nation’s $10 trillion mortgage market.

Elizabeth Warren unveils sensible affordable housing plan

2019-07-08T15:45:00-04:00

2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has unveiled a modest affordable housing plan that would work to improve existing development mechanisms in an effort to increase the supply of affordable housing across the country.

Arguing that "government at all levels hasn’t done enough to tackle our housing problems over the past few decades," Warren recently reintroduced her 2018 American Housing and Economic Mobility Act in the United States Senate. The act, which forms the basis for Warren's affordable housing plan, falls somewhat short of some of the more structurally-oriented housing proposals put forth by competing presidential candidates, including New Jersey senator Cory Booker, but aims to improve the existing system nonetheless.

First and foremost, Warren is pushing to increase the supply of affordable housing nationwide by embracing some of the principles of the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement by compelling cities to change their zoning codes to make it ea...

AI rising, in the single-family-rental industry

2019-06-24T17:32:00-04:00

Main Street Renewal is an arm of Amherst Holdings, a real estate investing firm with $20 billion under management. It owns or manages some 16,000 single-family homes, scattered across the Midwest and the Sunbelt. That portfolio makes Amherst one of the biggest, fastest-growing players in institutionally owned rental homes, a $45 billion subsector of the real estate industry that barely existed before the Great Recession.

Shawn Tully profiles Amherst Holdings and it's CEO Sean Dobson a "Texan data savant", who plans to use "digitally driven bargain hunting" and "Economies of scale" to "get to 1 million homes in the next 15 years or so."

Wall Street is cashing in on post-2008 housing crisis

2019-05-31T20:19:00-04:00

Blackstone Group is cashing in on its bet on the suburban rental class. The private-equity firm late Tuesday sold more than $1 billion of shares of Invitation Homes Inc., the giant single-family home landlord it launched following the financial crisis in a wager that many Americans would be willing to rent the suburban lifestyle they could no longer afford to own.

In the two years since private-equity firm Blackstone Group launched its suburban home management service, Invitation Homes, the company's stock has gone up by over 26%.

During that same time, homeownership has fallen to its lowest levels since the mid-1990s, rents have edged upward in the nation's biggest metro areas, and an increasing number of Americans have become long-term tenants of Wall Street-based investment firms.

Simply put: Owning rental housing is a booming business that, increasingly, is seeing profits flow into fewer and fewer hands. The phenomenon is due in large part to Obama-era policies enacted at the height of the Great Recession, when credit was scarce, demand was low, and the government moved to incentivize private investors into buying up flailing suburban properties. Nearly a decade later, following years of under-building in the housing sector, those policies and investments have begun bring in juicy dividends for the investment firms and their shareholder...

These are the most economically distressed cities in the United States

2016-03-01T17:52:00-05:00

While cities like Dallas and San Francisco have rebounded strongly since the recession, many other places are still struggling for economic growth and prosperity. As time goes on, we're seeing a divergence between successful parts of the country and the non-successful parts. More than 50 million Americans live in "distressed" ZIP codes, according to a new report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington D.C. think-tank.

"These areas—largely concentrated in the South, Southwest, and the Rust Belt—are suffering a "recovery gap" driven by low home investment, shuttering businesses, and poor job opportunities."

According to the report, economic opportunities are intimately tethered to geography in the United States. In turn, the regions most susceptible to job loss remain those with a history of financial woes, in particular former manufacturing hubs.

The report ranked cities based on economic indications such as the percentage of the population with a high school degree; housing vacancy rates; unemployment rates among adults; poverty rates; median income rations; percent changes in the number of available jobs; and percent changes in the number of businesses.

Here are the 10 most "distressed" cities in the United States:

1. Cleveland, Ohio

2. Detroit, Michigan

3. Newark, New Jersey

4. Toledo, Ohio

5. San Bernardino, California

6. Stockton, California

7. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

8. Buffalo, New York

9. ...