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A lawmaker from Dallas wants cities to be barred from requiring contractors to pay a "living wage" when awarding incentive packages. The Austin American Statesman reports:State...
Reshaping the Construction Industry
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A Houston TV station investigates contractors who claim to be licensed but really aren't.The full story can be found here and at Click2Houston.com.Your thoughts are welcome in the...
March 04, 2013
Construction spending fell in January, Census says, but Reed reports jump in startsEditor’s note: Construction Citizen is proud to partner with AGC America to bring you AGC Chief Economist Ken Simonson's Data DIGest. Check back each week to get Ken's expert analysis of what's happening in our industry. Construction spending in January totaled $883 billion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate, down 2.1% from December but up 7.1% from January 2012, the Census Bureau reported last week. The November and December totals were each revised up by over $15 billion, reflecting a surge in power construction as contractors rushed to finish wind energy projects to qualify for tax credits by yearend. Private residential construction spending was flat for the month and up 22% from January 2012. Private nonresidential spending slumped 5.1% from December but rose 4.0% year-over-year. Public construction spending fell 1.0% for the month and 3.0% year-over-year. New single-family construction rose 3.6% and 30%, respectively. New multifamily spending rose 1.7% and 55%. Of the top three private nonresidential categories, spending on power construction (including oil and gas fields and pipelines) fell 14% and 2.7%; manufacturing construction fell 2.9% for the month but rose 13% year-over-year; and commercial construction (retail, warehouse and farm) edged up 0.6% and 3.0%.
March 04, 2013
One of New York City’s major museums, the Whitney Museum of American Art, will move to a new location in early 2015. The new, 200,000 square foot building was designed by renowned...
February 28, 2013
Following last week's filing of a worker misclassfication bill in the Senate, Representative John Davis, R-Houston today filed his own version in the House. The Texas Construction...
February 27, 2013
The Houston Chapter of the American Subcontractor Association (ASA) recently hosted a luncheon panel that focused on the progress of the Construction Career Collaborative (C3), a local organization created to ensure a sustainable workforce for the construction industry. C3 is in its infancy, but has already made an impact on projects in the Houston region. This panel discussion gave an overview of the issues, the progress being made today and the plans for the future.The panel consisted of Jim Stevenson, the President of McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. in Houston and the current chairman of the C3 Executive Committee; Peter Dawson, the Senior Vice President of Facilities Services at Texas Children’s Hospital and the owner’s representative for one of the C3 pilot projects under construction today; John Roberts, the Executive Vice President of Project and Development Services for Jones Lang LaSalle and member of the C3 Executive Committee; and Danny Thompson, Construction Director of Vaughn Construction and contractor on one of the five C3 pilot projects.
February 26, 2013
For 140 days every two years, lawmakers, their staffs, armies of lobbyists, activists, journalists, and others descend on the Texas Capitol for the regular session of the legislature. What some call lawmaking could just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, be named "bill-killing." That's because, as one insider recently put it to me: "That system is designed to kill things, not pass them." The legislative issue we're watching most closely at Construction Citizen is worker misclassification. The problem, sometimes called "payroll fraud", has been a real scourge in the construction industry. University of Texas researchers recently found that more than 40 percent of the workforce is misclassified and there are now competing visions for how the state might address this.
February 25, 2013
Construction might be slow in some parts of the country, but despite Mayor Bloomberg’s restrictions on soft drinks, there is a big gulp on the West Side of Manhattan right now that will change the skyline again.Ground was broken in December on the Hudson Yards project. The “Big Gulp” (my words) mini-city will consist of, according to Business Insider, 16 buildings, one of them taller than the Empire State Building. The development, when fully built and re-zoned, will consist of 25 million square feet of Class A office space, 20,000 housing units, 2 million square feet of hotel space, a 750 seat public school, a million feet of retail and 20 acres of public open space. The first building will be a 1 million square foot office building whose major tenant will be
February 25, 2013
To call Exxon's Project Delta and the Springwoods Village that goes with it "huge" or "massive" or "enormous" would all be understatements. I'm not sure I've seen so many...
February 22, 2013
After talking about it for months, Sen. John Carona filed a bill that he believes will help stop the problem of worker misclassification, also known as payroll fraud.The bill...
February 21, 2013
