From MSN:
The shrinking American home: As demand rises, builders go smaller
“It’s pretty consistent nationally,” said Mikaela Arroyo, director of the New Home Trends Institute at John Burns Real Estate Consulting.
In an April report, JBREC surveyed 290 residential architects, designers and design-oriented builders and learned exactly how much homes are shrinking: A third of detached homes now being planned and built are expected to be under 2,000 square feet, and 70% will be under 2,500 square feet, the company found. Townhomes are expected to be between 1,500 and 2,000 square feet. “While overall home sizes will shrink, townhomes may grow as would-be detached homes become attached to increase density,” the report said.
And although “a lot of the market has historically been really resistant to density,” Arroyo said, even markets where lots and homes are typically bigger are seeing it increase. “Areas like Texas, where density wasn’t very common, we’re now seeing it increasing just because that’s the only way to get prices to an affordable level.”
As newly built homes get smaller, builders are allocating more space for more heavily trafficked areas of the house.
Builders are saying goodbye, for instance, to the formal dining room and welcoming a bigger kitchen island with seating. They’re adding another small bedroom instead of a bigger walk-in closet for the primary bedroom and including more outdoor space by forgoing a loft or a bonus room upstairs.
“We’re seeing a lot of deletion of separate, defined spaces,” Arroyo said.
“Think about the dining room and the living room. In the past, you would have had the downstairs of the house, which includes the kitchen, dining and living rooms. Now it’s just one great room and one kitchen,” she said. “And the kitchen is actually getting larger than it used to be, because we’re taking away the dining room.”
Builders are shrinking homes in part to reduce costs, according to the JBREC report. Designers said that they were redesigning projects to reduce the cost of building by 7% to 10%.
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Believers in remote work take note: Zoom, the video conferencing company that practically made working from home possible, is ordering employees back into the office, at least for part of the week.
A sign of Zoom fatigue? “We believe that a structured hybrid approach—meaning employees that live near an office need to be on-site two days a week to interact with their teams—is most effective for Zoom,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.
They are not alone. Other companies have changed return-to-office policies in recent months, says The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter, in the latest signs that the era of remote work is evolving.
Meta Platforms is requiring that workers assigned to an office come in three days a week starting in September. And Google sent a companywide email in June telling workers that office attendance would begin to factor into performance reviews. Read the story.
Shocker!! Not.
The working-from-home illusion fades
It is not more productive than being in an office, after all
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/06/28/the-working-from-home-delusion-fades
Off the Recent Lows
Orange Juice +45%
Natural Gas +43%
Sugar +41%
Gasoline +33%
Uranium +28%
Oil +24%
Lean Hogs +22%
Soybeans +16%
Iron Ore +15%
Coal +14%
Wheat +14%
*Bloomberg terminal data, lows since Dec.
**ALERT: Inflation expectations, US 5yr BEs, at a nine-year high.
Anheuser-Busch starting to sell off parts of the car. It would behoove the Board of Directors to can the CEO and some Exec VPs and offer a statement of apology for telling your customers their fratty and out of touch.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/sweetwater-parent-company-acquire-8-224302134.html
The Great Pumpkin says:
August 9, 2023 at 8:59 am
Off the Recent Lows
Orange Juice +45%
Natural Gas +43%
Sugar +41%
Gasoline +33%
Uranium +28%
Oil +24%
Lean Hogs +22%
Soybeans +16%
Iron Ore +15%
Coal +14%
Wheat +14%
Pumpkin , that’s great but not one of these items is in CPI anymore. All energy and food is now taken out of inflation. Politicians in the white house realize how the sheep in America are stupid. Lets put Joe back in, he has cut inflation!
As newly built homes get smaller…
They’re not building detached homes here, they’re building a thousand pods on a few acres of stripped land and tagging them with nauseating price tags and $15,000 tax bills on top of the HOA fees. Everyone gets to fleece the “savvy” buyers. More concrete and asphalt equals radiational heating, frequent and intense rain storms resulting in immense runoff and more flood damage. Solution? Ban stoves. I digress.
BRT – you mentioned Ukraine war yesterday, our Pentagon said what incremental progress? It’s been that way all year and it is indeed measured in meters.
Ukraine is facing a complicated layered defense of tank traps and millions of mines that the Russians deployed, these defenses have stopped Ukrainian tanks and heavy equipment from moving forward.
The troops are literally running in the trenches while under heavy artillery.
Video from 2 days ago in Donesk Region near that destroyed town Bakhmut the place we have been hearing about for months, the troops are dodging artillery in no man’s land.
https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1688667560516939776
They have been saying the Russians are running out of Ammo. I am not so sure, they still apparently have massive stockpiles.
Juice: I don’t think the war ends anytime soon, and I don’t know how long or how much money the American government can continue to provide Ukraine. When it does end, I don’t think the Russians will give up Crimea, and the Ukrainians if they want a settlement will have to agree to that. As for Ukraine joining NATO, and the EU, probably years away if ever.
Today is the anniversary of Nagasaki.
You wake up in the morning and just like that, vaporized.
Dear Repubs,
You best not underestimate the force of women when they get together and vote.
If you try to take away the most powerful part of their being, you won’t make it into office.
Ohio Vote Shows Abortion’s Potency to Reshape Elections
The Dobbs ruling has turned a coalition of liberal, swing and moderate Republican voters into a political force. Even in August in Ohio.
Republicans suck
I don’t believe any of the reporting on Russian ammunition or Putin’s health.
If you have balls, short UPS long-term or long-term
Options on UPS labor contract deal. You will be hurting a good american company that produces good paying jobs.
Shorting does not hurt a company. Moreover, it’s not personal. The only time I ever felt extra satisfaction with a specific company was filing on Intuit Turbo Tax while shorting the company the same day to pay for the filing.
Dianne Feinstein, 90, HOSPITALIZED after falling in her $16.5 million San Francisco mansion: More health fears for ailing Democratic Senator after tripping in home.
Old bat is going to pull the RBG trick, croak while in office. She should start an Only Fans page with Mitch McConnell, with Lizzo doing a guest appearance.
US Capitol is a federally funded nursing home.
LOL
Phoenix,
The day the SCOTUS overturned Roe V. Wade, I said Biden just won the 2024 general.
Most Republican women are pro choice. They just won’t admit it publicly. Same as the men who wouldn’t vote for Hillary and wouldn’t admit it to their wives.
Maui is on Fire:
Line up to buy your real estate soon.
Lots of people are pro-life until they end up with an unwanted baby in their belly.
Lots of people are pro-life until they end up with an unwanted baby in their belly.
Listen up… any baby in my belly is because I had an appetite for it. I find a lot of basting while you roast the sprog presents wonderful tenderness… especially using a smoky paprika garlic marinade.
Tastes just like chicken.
It’s tough to be Zoom. They were one of the biggest beneficiaries of Covid. They saw growth that had absolutely nothing to do with leadership or strategy, they just stepped in shit.
As covid fades away, so does their relevance, and their stock price. It’s like covid never even happened, lending more weight to my opinion, that they were a product of covid, not strategy.
What happened was the competitive landscape exploded, and now, Zoom is quickly losing relevance to Microsoft Teams, Google’s Suite, and Salesforce’s Slack.
Their own employees are making fun of leadership. People making fun of the CEO was a trending topic on TikTok. Good luck saving face man.
Zoom doesn’t work for Zoom, but for all our customers out there, keep buying it!
They will lose a huge amount of talent, and it’ll be the talent they need that leaves, not the talent they don’t.
ZOOM = PTON
Glanced at ZM for a short, problem is it has $5B of cash and is cash flowing like a pig….my screen shows a 16x forward P/E….?
Not a fan of drunk drivers, but just how competent are the people that absorb our tax dollars? On top of that, they give themselves a retrial that they would never give an opposing counsel.
A man can be retried for a 2017 fatal crash in Jersey City after his 2019 trial ended in a mistrial because of “inexcusable neglect” by the prosecutor’s office in handling evidence, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
Three of the five counts against Zadroga, the alcohol-related offenses, were dismissed when “the (trial) court found that the state’s ‘handling of 13 the blood vial evidence’ was not only ‘negligent and inept,’ but also supported a finding of bad faith and inexcusable neglect,” the state Supreme Court ruling said.
While I was in San Diego, my son sniped two Clover Club tix at the Mets game for $68 each. I had no idea. We are behind home plate row 6. Unlimited food at the (good) buffet behind the plate, plus any concession in the entire ballpark, plus open bar with hard alcohol.
This kid is ok.
Even in this crowd I would imagine the anti abortion people are in the minority. One of the great things about this country is that religion is not legislated.
Eddie, you are free to believe whatever you like. The trouble starts when you start to impose your beliefs on me.
Chi,
Let me know when you put him up for adoption.
I just whispered to Cody Bellinger that I have popcorn if he has the munchies.
Nice
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/15lelpm/the_alabama_riverboat_brawl/
Is that code for something kinky?
Chicago says:
August 9, 2023 at 8:32 pm
I just whispered to Cody Bellinger that I have popcorn if he has the munchies.
Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnNEEJhvtkc
Another angle:
https://twitter.com/shannonsharpeee/status/1688217322933432320/video/2
The best one of all:
https://twitter.com/IBYG_CRYPTO/status/1688344740817735680?s=20
Make a law, someone finds a loophole.
Students come back to class tomorrow and our superintendent just sent out a message to the entire county explaining that parents have to fill out legal documentation or teachers aren’t allowed to call kids anything but their full, legal name.
So if your child is named William, I can’t call him Will, Bill, Billy, etc. unless the parent signs paperwork. 🤦🏻♂️
I know there are more serious policy issues at work in Florida, but it’s pretty embarrassing that innocuous nicknames (nicholasnames?) have become collateral damage in the culture wars.
One mom on “stop moms for liberty” posted on Facebook that she was going to sign the form stating that her son should be referred to as “DesantisIsADouche” and insist they use it. The high school aged son agreed to it.