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    Walmart to Add 150 U.S. Stores in Five-Year Expansion Drive

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    The retail giant, which last opened a domestic location in 2021, said most of the stores would be newly built.Walmart will add 150 stores in the United States over the next five years, a major expansion drive for the retail giant.The company said the move, which it announced in a statement on Wednesday, would involve millions of dollars in investment. Walmart employs roughly 1.6 million people in the United States, and said it hires hundreds of people each time it opens a new store.Walmart had just over 4,600 stores nationwide at the end of October, down from more than 4,700 a year earlier. The company has not opened a new U.S. store since late 2021.Most of the stores that Walmart plans to open will be newly built, while others will be conversions of existing locations to new formats. The first two new stores will open in the spring, in Florida and Georgia, and the company is completing construction plans for 12 other stores this year. It also said it would remodel 650 locations.Walmart announced this week that it was raising salaries and benefits for store managers and offering them stock grants.The company reported sharply higher profit in the first three quarters of 2023, and its share price is hovering near a record high. It has yet to report earnings for its most recent quarter, which included the holiday season.Consumer spending, which powers the U.S. economy, has been resilient even though shoppers have been squeezed by high inflation and rising interest rates. Credit card data from the holiday season showed retail sales increased from a year earlier.“This is a huge vote of confidence in the American consumer,” Craig Johnson, the founder of the retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners, said of Walmart’s announcement.Mr. Johnson said investors might be concerned over how this could affect Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores, which have increasingly moved from a destination for business owners to stock up on supplies to a place where individuals shop for groceries.Walmart’s choice to open new stores and remodel some existing ones reflects the company’s focus on enhancing its in-store and pickup experiences even as e-commerce has gained popularity, said Edward Yruma, an analyst at the investment bank Piper Sandler.“As we settle into the new normal, what we’ve come to is that the consumer likes great, physical retail locations,” he said.Jordyn Holman More

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    How to Build a Wind Farm Off the Coast of New York

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    The assembly line for South Fork begins miles away from the offshore site, at the State Pier in New London, Conn. The project — which is a joint venture between Eversource, a New England utility, and Orsted, a Danish company — has been a global operation. The biggest components, including turbine blades as long as […] More

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    Can Affluence and Affordable Housing Coexist in Colorado’s Rockies?

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    In the recreation-fueled, amenity-rich economy of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain region, there are two peak seasons: summer, with its rafting, hiking, fishing and biking, and the cold months filled with skiing and other winter activities.And then there is “mud season” — a liminal moment in spring when the alpine environment, slowly then suddenly, begins to thaw and only a trickle of tourists linger.It’s a period that workers in other places might bemoan. But for much of the financially stretched work force serving the assemblage of idyllic mountain towns across the state, a brief drop-off in business this spring was a respite.During a slow shift on a 51-degree day at the Blue Stag Saloon — a nook on Main Street in the vacation hub of Breckenridge — Michelle Badger, a veteran server, half-joked with her co-workers that “this winter was hell.”Crowds were larger than ever. And workers in the old Gold Rush town still enjoy the highs of the easy camaraderie and solid tips that come with service jobs in the area. But it was all sobered by the related headaches of soaring rents and acute understaffing, which left employees, managers and demanding customers feeling strained.Working in mountain towns like Breckenridge and others in Summit County — including Silverthorne, Dillon and Frisco — would feel like a fairer bargain, Ms. Badger and her colleagues said, if they could better afford living close by. Long commutes are common throughout America. But rental prices in hamlets among the wilderness on the outskirts of town are becoming burdensome too.Job growth has severely outpaced the stock of shelter throughout Colorado. Median rent in Frisco — which a decade ago was considered a modest “bedroom community” for commuting employees — is about $4,000 a month, according to Zillow, and 90 percent above the national median. Residential property prices in Summit County are up 63 percent in just the past year, even amid higher interest rates. Cash buyers buttressed by family money abound.The wage floor for most jobs in and around the county — from line cook to ski lift operator — is at least $18 an hour, or roughly $37,000 a year. Yet for those not lucky enough to land a rare slot in subsidized local employee housing, it’s not uncommon to live an hour or more away to attain a livable budget.As that happens, the contingent displaced by the rich ripples outward down rural highway corridors and, in turn, displaces the farther-flung working poor.Inequality has always been rampant within the orbit of popular destinations. But the financial knock-on effects of those ritzy spheres have expanded as the pandemic-induced surge in remote work has supercharged divides.Wanderlust-filled white-collar workers abruptly discovered that multiweek visits or even permanent relocations were possible for them and their families. Those seeking investment properties saw the opportunities of this hybrid-driven land rush as well, and pounced.Longtime residents have had a front-row seat.Matt Scheer — a 48-year-old musician who grew up on a ranch eastward in El Paso County, where “as soon as we could carry the milk bucket we were milking the cow” — is the sort of extroverted jack-of-all-trades who typifies the spirit (and the wistful brand) of Summit County.Matt Scheer feels lucky to have bought a house 11 years ago when homes were more affordable and mortgage rates lower. But he feels unable to move.Having moved near Breckenridge in the early 2000s to ski, hike, fly fish and work around town, he’s relieved that he managed to pick up his place in 2012 for $240,000 with a fixed-rate mortgage. Prices in his tucked-away French Creek neighborhood — a hilly, unincorporated patch with modest double-wide manufactured homes — have more than tripled.Though he’s a loyal resident with little interest in ever moving, Mr. Scheer said he “can’t really leave.”For a payout of tens of thousands of dollars from the local government, he recently signed onto a hefty “deed restriction” for his property, banning its use for Airbnb stays, limiting any potential renter or buyer to the work force of Summit, and limiting any potential resale price. And he did it with pride.It’s part of a growing program led by Breckenridge and other local governments to limit gentrification without licensing a large buildup of new developments. (Deed restrictions in destination areas got off to a quieter start in the 2010s but have ticked up.)Incumbent property owners willing to sacrifice lucrative short-term vacation rental income see it as a fair trade-off, key to keeping long-term residents and the dashing contours of their towns’ terrain. Policy critics, and frustrated local renters fighting over limited spots, say it is an inadequate tool for the scale and source of the problem: a lack of units.Those critics include the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, who is skeptical that lump-sum payments to owners in exchange for deed restrictions will be a sufficient incentive to broadly move the needle on affordability.“There is no silver bullet,” he said in an interview. “But one of the areas that we have focused on is removing the barriers to additional home construction.” He added that “housing is not a problem that you can solve by throwing more money at the existing housing stock.”His sweeping legislation to ensure “a home for every Colorado budget” by pre-empting local land-use laws and directly loosening zoning rules statewide died in the State Senate in May, after some initial momentum. All but one of the mayors in the state’s Metro Mayors Caucus issued a letter opposing the plan.‘It’s Either Five Mil or Five Jobs’As politicians jockey, many resourceful Coloradans find ways to make do.Mr. Scheer, for instance, has picked up over 30 music gigs through the end of summer, paying about $100 an hour — though he acknowledges it’s his locked-in, lower housing costs that make his lifestyle workable.During a practice jam session and impromptu afternoon party of 20- to 40-somethings at Mr. Scheer’s place in the spring, his pal and fellow guitarist, Bud Hallock (the other half of their occasional duo band, Know Good People), explained the grind people face by echoing the playfully hard-nosed aphorism uttered around town: “It’s either five mil or five jobs.”“If you’re willing to put in the work, you’ll be able to,” argues Mr. Hallock, who moved out West shortly after graduating from St. Lawrence University in 2015. Mr. Hallock has three jobs, he said, adding, “I don’t think it’s the God-given right of anyone to come to a ski town and have it easy.”For many longtime residents and transplants alike, it has become harder to finesse: Even as Summit County adds waves of remote workers, it has experienced net negative migration since 2020. It’s a trend mirrored in the larger urban areas of Denver and Boulder, where the share of people working remotely is among the highest in the country, as homelessness rises.Breckenridge and other local governments are offering payments to some homeowners who agree to restrictions on how their property can be used and sold.Summit County is a draw for residents that enjoy outdoor activities like hiking, skiing and water sports.Seventy percent of residences in the county are second homes that sit vacant most of the year or serve as short-term rentals.Tamara Pogue, a member of Summit County’s governing board, said the mountain towns and valley cities of the Front Range near Fort Collins and Colorado Springs as well as those out by the Western Slope struggled with an “affordability issue” similar to the nation’s big cities for the same reason: “We’re supply-constrained.”“The problem is the average cost of a single-family home in Summit County so far this year is $2.14 million,” Ms. Pogue said. “Not one job makes that affordable.”The stock available is limited: 70 percent of homes in the county are second homes that sit vacant most of the year or serve as short-term rentals, she said, typically Airbnbs.As a single mother of three, Ms. Pogue bought a 1,400-square-foot duplex for $525,000 in 2018 — a rarity, if not an impossibility, now. She said a determination to prevent “mountain communities” from becoming “towns without townspeople” had driven her to become a staunch YIMBY, or a “yes in my backyard” supporter of home-building efforts, against the wishes of perceived NIMBYs, or the “not in my backyard” voices.Ms. Pogue and her allies argue that the relatively slow pace of building in the Rockies, despite the area’s popularity and rising prices, is a subtle form of denial.“Everyone wants to be here, whether they work here or not,” she added, “and so we have this spiral.”If, When, Where and How to Build MoreA few affordable-housing projects visibly chug along in Summit near the airport service road, not far from Kingdom Park Court, one of a handful of mobile home parks in the county with pricey lot rents. But getting middle-income developments greenlit can be a slog. Many proponents of limiting development note that about 80 percent of the county is restricted federal public land, putting a ceiling on what can be done. (There’s a nascent pilot program with the U.S. Forest Service to approve some apartments on leased land.) In the meantime, the well-off are gobbling up much of what’s left.Just north of downtown Silverthorne sits Summit Sky Ranch — a sprawling development with homes starting around $1 million, with a pledge of “bringing modern mountain living to over 400 acres of pristine natural beauty” in the valley. It quickly sold out and many have moved in, lured by a private observatory and private access to a river bend.Laurie Best, the longtime planning manager for housing in the community development department for the Town of Breckenridge, said she had emphasized deed-restriction policies and more generally trying to preserve existing units to reduce the need for new ones.Ms. Best and her backers have acceded to some construction at a slow and steady pace, but they staunchly oppose taller, dense multifamily buildings, which are not, as she put it, “consistent with the character of the town.”In several counties, there has been a swell in “conservation easements” — legal agreements between private landowners and local governments to guard wildlife and scenic open space by permanently banning development. The trend led the state to create a Division of Conservation in 2018 with an oversight commission to authenticate the contracts.A construction site in Silverthorne, Colo. Some officials and residents in the area have acceded to limited construction but are wary of adding taller, dense multifamily buildings.Eric Budd, a leader of a movement in Colorado called Bedrooms Are for People — which favors expanding land use and more widely permitting apartments, duplexes and triplexes — scoffs at the uptick in easements. He contends that what he tartly calls a “xenophobic attitude of ‘there’s only so much to go around’” is self-defeating.Trying to restrict access to a hot commodity — in this case, half of a state — won’t end well for anyone, he said, and a California-level, cost-of-living crisis is only five or 10 years away.Down in the foothills of the Rockies in Boulder, where Mr. Budd lives, school enrollment and the overall population have declined along with affordability, as remote-worker migration has picked up.In some sense, the arguments against restrictionism amount to a water-balloon analogy: squeezing leads to odd bulges in random places.Before the pandemic, Leadville, an old mining town 15 minutes from the trailhead of the highest peak in the Rockies, was an affordable harbor for working-class Hispanic employees of the nearby vacation economies: just out of reach of the affluence around Aspen to the west and resorts near Vail to the north.Since 2020, though, Leadville has become engulfed as those realms of wealth expand and overlap, causing rents and home prices to spike beyond what many can feasibly afford over time, with few other places to go.Second-home owners constituted half of all home sales in 2020 and 2021.The Downside of Good IntentionsKimberly Kreissig, a real estate agent, at a home she was selling in Steamboat Springs. She says an effort to build affordable homes yielded house flippers.Half of Colorado renters are officially defined as cost-burdened — spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. And local economists suggest that the rate has ticked even higher in mountain locales.For Kimberly Kreissig, a real estate agent in Steamboat Springs, a year-round recreation hub with natural hot springs near Wyoming, the affordability crisis in “the high country” has no simple villain. For years, her practice in Steamboat — where the average home price is above $1 million, compared with $580,000 in early 2019 — included both upper-middle-class, first-time home buyers and luxury-market sellers.In 2018, she and her husband, a developer, broke ground on a dense, 50-unit multifamily project in Steamboat designed for people “in that $75,000 range,” she said — “for instance, my office manager here.”“We had grandiose plans that we were going to be able to sell these things for $300,000,” Ms. Kreissig said, but they were foiled by several factors.Even before Covid-19 struck, “the demand was just so through the roof that people were offering us more than list price right out of the chutes,” she said, with precontract bids coming in “twice as high as we anticipated.”Then, once lockdowns in early 2020 ended, the remote-working cohort swooped in — just as labor and material costs shot up for the contractors still finishing some units. Before long, many families she sold units to in 2019 for around $400,000 realized that because of the housing boom they had “over $300,000 in equity” in their homes — and with interest rates so low, they could parlay a different (or additional) purchase. Many apartment owners began independently flipping their units to investors and buyers of second homes who were willing to pay well above the list prices.The Yampa River flows through Steamboat Springs. With the pandemic’s onset, the area became a magnet for remote workers.Diners at a restaurant in Steamboat Springs, a year-round recreation hub with natural hot springs.“For the people that are already ‘in,’ there’s a fair share of folks that are saying, you know, ‘I’m in, we don’t we don’t need any more growth,’” Ms. Kreissig said. “But you can’t stop growth.”“One flip near the end for one of the units was for $800,000,” Ms. Kreissig said. “We tried to be the good guys.”One way to respond to house flippers is through greater deed restriction, which Steamboat has enforced in a few neighborhoods, along with some short-term rental restrictions, not unlike other hot spots. The area has also benefited from the state’s Middle Income Housing Authority pilot program, which has put up a few buildings in town. But Steamboat still has a shortage of 1,400 units, according to a report from local authorities.A big break came when an anonymous donor recently purchased a 534-acre farm property, Brown Ranch, and turned it over to the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, with instructions that it be used for long-term affordable housing for local workers.It came as welcome news to the area’s middle class. And yet the sheer surprise, and luck, of the donation is indicative of broader, underlying tensions that typically drive community-level and state debates: Is more supply a threat to both cultural vibes and property price appreciation, or a win-win opportunity to flourish?Ms. Kreissig thinks it all comes back to “the kind of ‘not in my backyard’ mentality” that a silent majority holds.“For the people that are already ‘in,’ there’s a fair share of folks that are saying, ‘You know, ‘I’m in, we don’t we don’t need any more growth,’” she said. “But you can’t stop growth.”Adrift Between Uphill and DownNancy Leatham and her husband got back on their feet after lean times early in the pandemic. But when looking for a new house, she found that the booming housing market had far outpaced the good labor market. In March 2020, Nancy Leatham, 34, was making just above the minimum wage, living with her husband and their baby daughter in Idaho Springs — a little city above 7,000 feet wedged between a steep crag and an I-70 exit, far downhill from chic resort land.They struggled to get by “right during the height of the pandemic, when everything was shut down,” wiping out their income, she said. It felt like a repeat of her teenage years during the mortgage-induced financial crisis when her family’s business as excavation contractors — preparing sites for home construction — went belly-up, and their house was foreclosed upon.In spring 2020, “I had to start going to food banks and stuff to get food,” she said. “And we had to sell a car, and just stuff like that to, like, to make ends meet.”By 2021, her husband, Austin, had found a job at Walmart making $19 an hour, while she was promoted at Starbucks, becoming a manager at $18 an hour, plus bonus — and “we had our child tax credit,” she added.“I started looking for a house because we had really great income,” roughly $80,000 before taxes, she said. “I grew up in poverty, since 2008 especially, and we’d been living with food insecurity and stuff, so I was like ‘Look at us, we made it!’”But almost as soon as she started house hunting, she realized that, within months, the booming housing market had far outpaced the good labor market. They had been priced out of their sleepy, snowy town, after merely a few bidding wars. The average home price — $340,000 at the start of 2019 — is up 66 percent. Higher mortgage rates hurt, too.The Gold Mountain Village Apartments, where Ms. Leatham and her husband live, about 10 miles outside Idaho Springs, Colo.The Historic Argo Mill and Tunnel, a former gold mining and milling property, in Idaho Springs.Lower-income workers are being priced out of the area and face the prospect of “having to move downhill.”The average home price in Idaho Springs is up 66 percent since the start of 2019.Many of the Starbucks employees Ms. Leatham managed owned their homes rather than rented, she said, and “half left because they were able to sell their house off for considerably more than they were when they bought.”Hoping to buy or rent something bigger than what she called a “closet” apartment, Ms. Leatham, who now has a second child, is preparing for the cold reality of “having to move downhill” — though where exactly is unclear: 15 miles down the corridor, renters and buyers run into coveted areas near Golden and Denver.Recently, a woman visited the Starbucks Ms. Leatham works at, she said, and was dressed very much like an out-of-towner. They chit-chatted at the register, and the woman mentioned she was in town to check on a recent property purchase.Getting her hopes up for a nicer place, Ms. Leatham pried a bit:“I was like, ‘Oh, nice, what are you going to do with it?’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, it’s for rental.’”“And I’m like, ‘Oh, cool.’ And then she goes, ‘Short-term rental.’”“And then, I went ‘Dang it!’ But really loud, and I made her feel awful — I didn’t mean to make her feel that way.”Irresistible Allure, Harsh RealityBack up the I-70 corridor in Frisco, a sprawling Walmart parking lot often occupied by unhoused people living out of their cars and campers is tucked in front of a commercial complex with a high-end furniture store, a Whole Foods and a craft microbrewery.It’s one of the few places for the growing homeless population to go, since overnight parking is widely banned in Summit County, even in sparse hamlets like Blue River, perched just beyond Breckenridge above 10,000 feet.The effects of the global and national wealth parked in the Rockies often cascade downstream like the snow melt that carves the rivers. But it’s a force that can be identified in any direction.For many, if not most, homeowners in high-country counties like Summit, the hard truth is that only so much can be done if the very idea of mountain living — experiencing nature, removed from the bustling downhill hassles of the outside world — is to be maintained.“It’s funny, on our little block, there’s probably, you know, 10 homes — and on a beautiful day, which we have a lot of, you’ll see all of us standing out in our driveway, taking pictures,” said Ms. Best of Breckenridge’s community development department. “I must have the same picture 100 times because it’s so stunning when you go out there, and you’re still in awe of where we live. So I totally get the folks that want to be here.” More

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    GDP Grew at 2.4% Rate in Q2 as US Economy Stayed on Track

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    The reading on gross domestic product was bolstered by consumer spending, showing that recession forecasts early in the year were premature, at least.The economic recovery stayed on track in the spring, as American consumers continued spending despite rising interest rates and warnings of a looming recession.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, rose at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That was up from a 2 percent growth rate in the first three months of the year and far stronger than forecasters expected a few months ago.Consumers led the way, as they have throughout the recovery from the severe but short-lived pandemic recession. Spending rose at a 1.6 percent rate, with much of that coming from spending on services, as consumers shelled out for vacation travel, restaurant meals and Taylor Swift tickets.“The consumer sector is really keeping things afloat,” said Yelena Shulyatyeva, an economist at BNP Paribas.The resilience of the economy has surprised economists, many of whom thought that high inflation — and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to stamp it out through aggressive interest-rate increases — would lead to a recession, or at least a clear slowdown in the first half of the year. For a while, it looked as if they were going to be right: Tech companies were laying off tens of thousands of workers, the housing market was in a deep slump and a series of bank failures set up fears of a financial crisis.Instead, layoffs were mostly contained to a handful of industries, the banking crisis did not spread and even the housing market has begun to stabilize.“The things we were all freaked out about earlier this year all went away,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Bank of America.Inflation has also slowed significantly. That has eased pressure on the Fed to keep raising rates, leading some forecasters to question whether a recession is such a sure thing after all. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said on Wednesday that the central bank’s staff economists no longer expected a recession to begin this year.Still, many economists say consumers are likely to pull back their spending in the second half of the year, putting a drag on the recovery. Savings built up earlier in the pandemic are dwindling. Credit card balances are rising. And although unemployment remains low, job growth and wage growth have slowed.“All those tailwinds and buffers that were supporting consumption are not as strong anymore,” said Blerina Uruci, chief U.S. economist at T. Rowe Price. “It feels to me like this hard landing has been delayed rather than canceled.” More

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    What Is Happening in the Housing Market?

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    Home construction surged in May and prices have ticked up, even with interest rates at a 15-year high. The resilience has surprised some economists.Gianni Martinez, 31, thought that it would be fairly easy to buy an apartment.Mortgage rates are now hovering around 7 percent — the highest they’ve been since 2007 — thanks to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to tame inflation. Central bankers have lifted their official policy rate to about 5 percent over the past 15 months, which has translated into higher borrowing costs across the economy.Mr. Martinez, a tech worker, expected that to cool down Miami real estate. But instead, he is finding himself in stiff competition for one- to two-bedroom apartments near the ocean. He has made seven or eight offers and is willing to put 25 percent down, but he keeps losing, often to people paying cash instead of taking out a pricey mortgage.“Because of interest rates at 7 percent, I didn’t think it would be this competitive — but that doesn’t matter to cash buyers,” Mr. Martinez said, noting that he’s competing with foreign bidders and other young people who show up to open houses with their parents in tow, suggesting Mom or Dad may be helping to foot the bill.“When there is a correctly priced listing, it’s a madhouse,” he said.The Fed’s rate increases are aimed at slowing America’s economy — in part by restraining the housing market — to try to bring inflation under control. Those moves worked quickly at first to weaken interest-sensitive parts of the economy: Housing markets across the United States pulled back notably last year. But that cool-down seems to be cracking.Home prices fell nationally in late 2022, but they have begun to rebound in recent months, a resurgence that has come as the market has proved especially strong in Southern cities including Miami, Tampa and Charlotte. Fresh data set for release on Tuesday will show whether that trend has continued. Figures out last week showed that national housing starts unexpectedly surged in May, jumping by the most since 2016, as applications to build homes also increased.Housing seems to be finding a burst of renewed momentum. Climbing home prices will not prop up official inflation figures — those are based on rental rather than purchased housing costs. But the revival is a sign of how difficult it is proving for the Fed to curb momentum in the economy at a time when the labor market remains strong and consumer balance sheets are generally healthier than before the pandemic.“It’s another data point: Things are not cooling off as much as they thought,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist for Nationwide Mutual. In fact, new housing construction “tells us something about where the economy is headed, so this suggests that things are potentially picking up.”

    Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.Source: S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller IndexBy The New York TimesThat could matter for policy: Fed officials think that the economy needs to spend some time growing at a speed that is below its full potential for inflation to fully cool off. In a weak economy, consumers don’t want to buy as much, so companies struggle to charge as much.The question is whether the economy can slow sufficiently when real estate is stabilizing or even heating back up, leaving homebuilders feeling more optimistic, construction companies hiring workers and homeowners feeling the mental boost that comes with climbing home equity.So far, the Fed’s leader, at least, has sounded unworried.“The housing sector nationally has flattened out, and maybe ticked up a little bit, but at a much lower level from where it was,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, told lawmakers last week, adding a day later that “you’ve actually kind of seen it hit a bottom now.”Higher rates have helped to markedly cool down sales of existing homes, to his point, though demand for new houses is being bolstered by two sweeping long-run trends.Millennials — America’s largest generation — are in their late 20s and early 30s, peak years for moving out on their own and attempting to purchase a house.And a shift to remote work during the pandemic seems to have spurred people who might otherwise have stayed with roommates or parents to live on their own, based on recent research co-written by Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group.“Remote work means working from home for a lot of people,” Mr. Ozimek said. “That really increases the value of space.”Available housing supply, meantime, has been tight. That’s also partly because of the Fed. Many people refinanced their mortgages when interest rates were at rock bottom in 2020 and 2021, and they are now reluctant to sell and lose those cheap mortgages.“The most surprising thing about this housing market is how the increase in interest rates has affected supply and demand pretty equally,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. The pullback in demand was probably a bit more intense, she said, but builders are benefiting from a “dire lack of supply.”As young people continue to bid on houses and inventory comes up short, prices and construction are staging their surprise comeback.“Demand has hung in there better than we would have expected for that first-time buyer,” said Michael Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. Ms. Bostjancic said that the recent housing data will probably nudge the Fed toward higher rates. Officials paused their rate moves in June after 10 straight increases, but have suggested that they could lift them twice more in 2023, including at their meeting next month.If there’s a silver lining for the Fed, it is that home prices will not directly feed into inflation. America’s price measures use rents to calculate housing costs because they try to capture the cost of consumption. Buying a home is, in part, a financial investment.Rent growth has been stalling for months now — which is slowly feeding into official inflation data as people renew leases.“Rent growth is taking a nice, deep breath in,” said Igor Popov, chief economist at Apartment List. “Right now, it does not feel like there’s a lot of new heat.”Still, at least one Fed official has fretted that the pickup in housing could limit the scope of that slowdown. As home prices rise, some investors and landlords could decide to either charge more or to shift from renting out houses and to buying and selling them — curbing rental supply.“A rebound in the housing market is raising questions about how sustained those lower rent increases will be,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said in a speech last month.He said that the upturn “even with significantly higher mortgage rates” raised questions “about whether the benefit from the slowing in rent increases will last as long as we have been expecting.” More

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    As Infrastructure Money Lands, the Job Dividends Begin

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    It has never exactly been boom times for the archaeology profession, but this past year comes close — thanks to Congress.Kim Redman runs Alpine Archaeological Consultants, a firm that searches for historically or culturally valuable artifacts in the path of construction — an essential step for federally assisted projects. For decades, she has hired temporary workers (affectionately known as “shovel bums”) to comb the ground.These days, she’s bringing on as many full-timers as she can, as billions of dollars in infrastructure appropriations make their way down through the states.“If you’re going to build a road, we’re at the beginning of the process,” Ms. Redman said. “The opportunities in archaeology are immense right now — everybody’s trying to hire so we can meet the demand.”Archaeologists are on the leading edge of a wave of jobs that will result from $1.2 trillion in direct government spending from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Two subsequent initiatives — $370 billion in incentives and grants for lower-emissions energy projects provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, and $53 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing funded by the CHIPS Act — are expected to leverage tens of billions more in private capital.An archaeological crew excavating an Ancestral Pueblo pit house in southwestern Colorado in advance of a highway project.Rand Greubel/Alpine Archaeological ConsultantsThe primary purpose of the three laws isn’t to stimulate the economy; they are mainly intended to combat climate change, rebuild infrastructure and reduce dependence on foreign semiconductors. But they will affect the labor market, including a reallocation of workers across sectors.The funding comes as the economy is decelerating, and it may avert a sharper dip in employment brought on by the Federal Reserve’s attempts to contain inflation by raising interest rates. The construction industry, in particular, has been buffeted by a slowdown in new-home sales and stagnant demand for new offices.“By spring or summer, the job market will basically go flat,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “The infrastructure spending won’t kick in until late 2023, going into 2024. It feels like the handoff here could be reasonably graceful.”Nevertheless, the exact number of jobs produced by the three pieces of legislation is uncertain and may be difficult to notice in the aggregate.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Noncompete Agreements: A sweeping proposal by the Federal Trade Commission would block companies from limiting their employees’ ability to work for a rival.Retirees: About 3.5 million people are missing from the U.S. labor force. A large number of them, roughly two million, have simply retired.Switching Jobs: A hallmark of the pandemic era has been the surge in employee turnover. The wave of job-switching may be taking a toll on productivity.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for New York City workers could mean higher delivery costs.The only jobs that are possible to count precisely are those created directly by the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management, which set up a handy filter for jobs associated with the infrastructure law, aims to hire 7,000 people by the end of September.The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of the largest chip-makers in the world, is planning to expand and upgrade a factory in Arizona.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe actual number, of course, is larger. Dr. Zandi’s analysis of the infrastructure law found that it would add nearly 360,000 jobs by the end of this year, and 660,000 jobs at its peak employment impact at the end of 2025. He does not expect the Inflation Reduction Act to affect employment significantly, given its lower public expenditure.A group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst disagreed, forecasting the Inflation Reduction Act’s impact at 900,000 additional people employed on average each year for a decade. Betony Jones, director of energy jobs at the Department of Energy, thinks the number could be even higher because the bill includes incentives for domestic sourcing of materials that may create more jobs along the supply chain than traditional economic models account for.“It will change those assumptions in significant ways,” Ms. Jones said.But a number of mitigating forces make that number less powerful than it appears.Some of the jobs already exist, for example, since much of the money will go to extend tax credits that would have expired. The estimate includes jobs that are supported by infrastructure workers’ wages, from hairdressers to plumbers.It’s also a gross number, not accounting for the employment that the Inflation Reduction Act could subtract through the taxes it imposes on corporations, or the fossil fuel jobs that might disappear as renewable energy capacity increases. And plenty of the new infrastructure jobs will be filled by people who might otherwise be working in other sectors, especially if they’re better paid.At the same time, inflation has made construction materials more expensive, decreasing the purchasing power of public agencies. For the first portion of money from the infrastructure law, which was allocated to states by a formula in the first half of 2022, that largely meant salvaging large projects already underway that might otherwise have been stymied by rising costs.For all of those reasons, said Alec Phillips, chief political economist for Goldman Sachs, the infusions of cash haven’t increased his payroll employment projections for the coming year.The archaeological crew at a prehistoric campsite in the Colorado Rockies. Archaeologists are on the leading edge of a wave of jobs that will be created from federal infrastructure spending.Rand Greubel/Alpine Archaeological Consultants“This is not happening in a vacuum,” Mr. Phillips said. “Once you go through all those factors, it’s one of those things that wouldn’t influence our employment forecast all that much.”Nonetheless, the industry-level impact will be significant. The nation will need more people working in construction and manufacturing in the next few years — even if they come from other professions or, ideally, the ranks of people who aren’t working.That has given organized labor a rare opportunity to expand. In a policy reversal, the infrastructure law allows federally funded transportation projects to require hiring from the local community, which can aid union organizing. The Biden administration also issued an executive order in early 2022 favoring collective bargaining agreements with unions.The infrastructure law includes $42.5 billion for expanding broadband access — part of about $100 billion provided across several measures — and the agency running the program expects work on the cables and cellphone towers to start in 2024. The Government Accountability Office estimated that 23,000 more people would be needed when deployment peaked. The Communications Workers of America, a union that represents about 130,000 telecommunications workers, said that members had often left for other occupations as industry conditions deteriorated and that many would come back for the right salary and benefits.“There’s a lot of people sitting on the sidelines,” said Nell Geiser, the union’s research director. “They are not willing to take what’s on offer.”It’s clear, however, that new workers will be needed to meet the demand.A piece of an adobe wall from an Ancestral Pueblo pit house that has the 1,200-year-old handprint of a builder.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York TimesA reconstructed pot, found during excavation of an Ancestral Pueblo hamlet in Colorado, being prepared for curation.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York TimesThat’s why unions are gearing up training programs and recruiting apprentices, or even “preapprentices,” some directly out of high school or prison — times when people sometimes struggle to find work.Mike Hellstrom, Eastern regional manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said the union’s apprenticeship applications had been snapped up within minutes of release. His region — New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Puerto Rico — stands to get $45 billion just from the infrastructure law.“It’s going to be a really unique time of our lives of being construction workers and watching this building boom we’re about to come into,” Mr. Hellstrom said.Recognizing the need for new workers, the infrastructure law in particular allows state agencies enormous flexibility in using funds for work force development. So far, they’ve been slow to take advantage of it. One reason: You can train people, but if you’re not able to compensate them competitively because of limits set by the state legislature, they’ll go somewhere else.“I think the biggest challenge for state departments of transportation on the work force side are what wages they’re able to pay,” said Jim Tymon, executive director for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “That really isn’t tied to the federal dollars as much as it is to the restrictions that each individual state has because of their government employee pay scales.”Partly for that reason, as has long been the case, much of the work will be awarded to construction firms, which have more flexibility to offer higher wages. Their capacity isn’t infinite, however. Already, the wave of impending business has prompted concerns that some projects may not attract enough bids to ensure competition.President Biden was in Kentucky this month to highlight funding for infrastructure projects, including building and rehabilitating bridges.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThat may not be a problem for huge undertakings, like a $935 million award to rebuild two locks on the upper Ohio River, a project that the Army Corps of Engineers expects to directly support 8,900 jobs. But it can prove more difficult for smaller jurisdictions that may lack the staff to solicit bids.Emily Feenstra, chief policy and external affairs officer for the American Society of Civil Engineers, said more coordination would be needed to ensure that all the money that Congress allocated was spent.“On that smaller scale, it’s almost like matchmaking — finding the firm, finding the agency and seeing where the needs are,” she said.All of that is good news for people doing the work, like Roger Oberdier, 33, who was hired at Alpine Archaeological Consultants in October. He was happy to find a staff position after picking up jobs all over the country and is applying to Ph.D. programs to advance his career, in which he plans to specialize in zooarchaeology (which means a lot of digging up butchered animals).And the increasing demand for talent affects the whole field. Even friends who don’t want permanent jobs are doing pretty well, hopscotching the country looking for evidence of ancient human activity, Mr. Oberdier said. Job websites like archaeologyfieldwork.com are stacked with listings at pay rates significantly higher than they were in previous years.“Right now, the job market is in favor of the job seeker,” Mr. Oberdier said. “My friends who are committed shovel bums — who never want to sit in an office and write a report, they just want to travel the world and hike to new places and be the first person to see something in 10,000 years — they are taking the jobs they want right now.” More

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    As Warehouses Multiply, Some California Cities Say: Enough

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    From the front yard of her ranch-style home, Pam Lemos peered out on the vast valley of her childhood.She can still picture the way it looked back in the 1980s — citrus groves blanketing hillsides, dairy farms stretching for acres and horses grazing under a bright blue sky. These days, when she looks toward the horizon, she mainly sees the metal roofs of hulking warehouses.“Now it’s all industrial,” said Ms. Lemos, 55, who has lived in Colton, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, her entire life. “We are working to change that and starting with these warehouses.”Ms. Lemos is part of a growing coalition of residents and leaders in Colton and neighboring cities — a logistical hub for the nation — who are increasingly frustrated with the proliferation of warehouses in the region, as well as the side effects of the rapid expansion.As warehouse construction has ballooned nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back. Neighborhood apps like Nextdoor and Facebook groups have been flooded with complaints over construction. In California, the anger has turned to widespread action.Several cities in this slice of Southern California, known as the Inland Empire, have passed ordinances in recent months halting new warehouse projects so officials can study the effects of pollution and congestion on residents like Ms. Lemos. Similar local moratoriums have cropped up in New York and New Jersey in recent years, but on a much smaller scale.Labor groups and business coalitions have entered the fray, warning that the new ordinances — along with a push in the state Legislature to widen the restrictions — will cost the region tax revenue and needed jobs and could further disrupt a shaky national supply chain.The Inland Empire, where the population has quadrupled to 4.6 million in the last 50 years as people were priced out of places closer to Los Angeles, is a critical storage-and-sorting point because of its proximity to rail lines that are a short jaunt from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, global hubs that handle 40 percent of the nation’s seaborne imports.In the early 1990s, there were about 650 warehouses in the region, according to a data tool from Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. By last year, there were nearly 4,000.Pam Lemos has lived in Colton her entire life. “Now it’s all industrial,” she said. “We are working to change that.”Amazon is a major presence, with more than a dozen warehouses in the Inland Empire. Although it is slowing its warehouse expansion nationally and has closed or mothballed some buildings, it is constructing a five-story, four-million-square-foot facility in the city of Ontario. The warehouse, which is scheduled to be completed in 2024 and expected to be one of the company’s largest in the nation, will provide jobs for roughly 1,500 people.Susan Phillips, a professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer who has studied the growth of warehouses in the Inland Empire, says the only way to regulate construction is through the municipal planning process.“Warehouse growth is totally demand-driven,” Ms. Phillips said. “Developers and many municipalities do not want any regulation on this, and at this point warehouses are growing at many times the rate of population growth.”Since 2020, elected officials in a half-dozen Inland Empire cities, including Riverside, its most populous, have imposed moratoriums on warehouse construction. The timeouts are meant to assess, among other things, the effects of pollution, the appropriate distances between homes and warehouses, and the impact of heavy truck traffic on streets.Tucked in the shadow of the San Bernardino Mountains, Colton has long been known as “Hub City” because it is a crossing of two railroads — BNSF and Union Pacific — that shuttle cargo to and from the ports. Today, the city of 54,000 is home to 58 licensed warehouses.Isaac Suchil, a councilman in Colton, was a sponsor of his city’s moratorium, which was recently extended through May 2023. While he stresses that he is not “anti-warehouse,” Mr. Suchil said he would like to see buffer zones requiring that new facilities be at least 300 feet from schools and residential areas. The current requirements vary and are applied differently from project to project, he said.“The moratorium gives us time to address future projects,” he said.Residents have grown increasingly frustrated with the proliferation of warehouses in the region.Isaac Suchil, a councilman in Colton and a sponsor of the city’s moratorium on warehouses.Colton, a city of 54,000, is home to 58 licensed warehouses.Assemblywoman Eloise Gómez Reyes, who represents several Inland Empire cities, including Colton, has taken the fight to Sacramento, the state capital. She sponsored a bill this year that would require new logistics projects in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties that are 100,000 square feet or larger to be at least 1,000 feet from homes, schools and health care centers.“The warehouses bring with them trucks producing diesel particulate matter,” Ms. Gómez Reyes said, noting an American Lung Association report this year that found that those counties were among the worst for annual particulate pollution.Ms. Gómez Reyes, who withdrew her bill from consideration after struggling to find votes, even among fellow Democrats who dominate the Legislature, said she planned to reintroduce the measure next year.The efforts to suspend and regulate warehouse construction have faced staunch opposition from groups including the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which represents construction workers in the United States, and the California Chamber of Commerce.Jennifer Barrera, chief executive of the California Chamber of Commerce, said a measure like the one put forth by Ms. Gómez Reyes would hurt job growth and apply a one-size-fits-all approach that would strip local jurisdictions of necessary freedom around land-use decisions.In the first half of 2022, there were roughly 135,400 warehouse jobs in the Inland Empire, according to the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, a group that works with business and government leaders. In 2010, there were roughly 19,900 warehouse jobs in the region.“A warehouse ban would only exacerbate the goods movement and logistics backlogs California consumers are facing,” Ms. Barrera said. “With more people ordering goods online and wanting quick delivery, the need for storage space is growing.”But some local residents are tired of feeling that their region is losing out on more than it is gaining.This summer, a deal was reached to relocate an elementary school in Bloomington, Calif., to make space for a warehouse, and earlier this year, the City Council in Ontario approved the construction of a warehouse on the site of an area that was once home to a dairy farm. In both instances, residents voiced their frustration on social media and at public meetings.“For too long it’s been build, build, build, with no repercussions,” said Alicia Aguayo, a member of the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, a group that has pushed for some of the moratoriums.Ms. Aguayo, a lifelong resident of the Inland Empire, says that in recent years she has met more and more people in her community who have asthma and cancer. She would like to see more resources dedicated to studying the health impacts of pollution in the region.“It’s environmental racism and hitting mostly Latino communities,” Ms. Aguayo said.Last year, Southern California officials adopted rules for warehouses that aim to cut truck pollution and reduce health risks.Morris Donald has witnessed the warehouse boom from his backyard in San Bernardino, Calif.The regulations from the South Coast Air Quality Management District require large warehouses to curb or offset emissions from their operations or pay fees that go toward air-quality improvements.In San Bernardino, where a proposed effort last year fell one council vote shy of establishing a 45-day moratorium on the construction of new warehouses, Morris Donald has witnessed the warehouse boom from his backyard.For 11 years, he has rented a three-bedroom home in a neighborhood now surrounded by four warehouses. In recent years, he said, most of the neighbors he knew have moved away and several landlords have sold to developers.“It’s taken away the neighborhood feel,” Mr. Donald said. “Kids don’t play outside. No one is in their yards.”But he sees the benefits as well — he works as a forklift mechanic at a Quiksilver warehouse, his wife is a manager at another and his son works as a security guard at a third facility.“If you want jobs,” Mr. Donald said, “they’re out here in the warehouses, and that’s a fact.”In Colton, Ms. Lemos spends some of her free time volunteering for groups that work closely with the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice. The moratorium, she said, could not have come soon enough.“How did this get so out of control?” Ms. Lemos said, noting that in the months before the moratorium was enacted, the city approved a pair of warehouses with a combined square footage of 1.8 million.On a recent afternoon, Ms. Lemos twisted her Jeep Wrangler along a winding two-lane road, which was pockmarked with potholes left behind, she said, from the semi trucks that shuttle goods from warehouses. The air was thick, and a line of smog hovered along the horizon. A horn from an incoming train pierced the air.“There is always something going on here — trucks, trains, construction from warehouses,” she said. “It’s like we’re living in this logistical bubble while trying to raise our families.” More

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    Highlights From Today’s G.D.P. Report

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    The top-line number for U.S. gross domestic product is a composite of positive and negative forces, and the details matter: Consumer spending, which powers the majority of the economy, rose 1 percent on an annualized basis, a marked slowdown from previous months as purchases of goods declined and spending on services grew only moderately.Home construction, also referred to as residential fixed investment, sagged 14 percent at an annual rate under the weight of rising interest rates, which have put mortgages beyond the reach of more would-be home buyers.Inventories, which measure the amount of stuff that’s been produced or imported but not yet sold, depressed the overall number by more than two percentage points on an annual basis. Companies still added to their inventories in the second quarter, but more slowly than in the first, which dragged down overall growth.Business construction, known as fixed investment in nonresidential structures, dove by 11.7 percent on an annual basis, as construction of factories and warehouses — also an interest rate-sensitive sector — slowed. Federal government spending shrank 3.2 percent on an annual basis, as stimulus money continues to fade out and oil was released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, although defense spending grew 2.5 percent as military aid flowed to Ukraine.Final sales to domestic purchasers, which some economists favor as a metric that cuts out volatile inventories and government spending, sank 0.3 percent.(All the figures are reported on a seasonally adjusted basis.) More