Housing and Community Development

Who are the others?  Politicians and financial gurus are most important at this time.
We need to get our message out on other blogs, in published news articles/interviews, on the TV/cable.

Right now we are fighting for survival.
Is talking about basic or esoteric design or services going to keep us from losing everything -- at the rate we are going?

The big picture is that construction for all building types is grinding to a halt.  In the ground zero areas it already has and the forward looking news continues to be grim.
We constitute one of the elemental aspects of the built environment -- the creators.
The creators are becoming irrelevant in this economic miasma.  No, it won't last forever probably but for many of us it is coming to an exasperating end.

I have asked what the AIA leadership is doing about this with no answer.  They have lobbied governments for other topics in the past, so they have the capacity to do so.  That is one reason why they have been elected to top positions.  What are they doing??

So, as someone pointed out earlier the members are individually left to plead our case.  Wonderful.
Why do we need to be members of an organization that is not protecting our interests if we are left to do it on our own?

What is our case?  We are a necessary component of the built environment?  Yes, we'd like to think so but as is evident in many regions, several years can go by with nothing being designed or built.
The paying public realizes that we can be ignored since there is an oversupply and that banks are sitting on mountains of cash offering low interest rates with impossible to qualify standards.  It is a joke but the outcome is that we cannot design if our clients cannot borrow.

That is the central issue in my thinking and it has nothing to do with architectural theory or practice, or anything really in the realm of what we have been trained to do.  It is something completely out of our control.  And there is this nauseous stink about that fact.  We are sitting ducks and helpless.

Really, when was the last time you read print or watched on tv how we and our related professionals, building suppliers, et al have been left out to dry.  We have been completely ignored yet we probably make up -- all mentioned above -- the large majority of the 9.8% who are in survival mode.

The latest news is that housing is now in a double dip, more foreclosures and shadow inventory are continuing to flood inventory and that basically WE ARE NOT NEEDED.

Get it: WE ARE IRRELEVANT.  Except for some remodeling.  New construction is dead. 

We need to do something about this.  NOW.  OR WE ARE DEAD.


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John Henry
John Henry Design International, Inc.
Orlando Florida
www.dreamhomedesignusa.com
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Although residential looks like it's heading for a double dip, people are still renovating houses. New parents are bursting at the seams in the current house and selling a house now isn't feasible in most areas. It will take the free market a little longer to return property values to where they should be based on real economic conditions and not whatever price someone was willing to go into debt for. The Walmart builders are trying to crush competition with volume strategies as soon as an area sees a brief sign of life and they quickly stagnate the market with too much cheap crap. It will take a long time for housing to heal and the health of the commercial industry depends on residential because residential makes far more money. What we can't seem to get through our thick heads is that the large commercial fees do not equate to a larger industry that makes more money as a whole. Ignoring residential work will continue our slide into irrelevance.