Usa, economia, gruppi e settori, edilizia Nyt 05-11-20
DANIEL GROSS
Il settore abitazioni e immobili in generale e le industrie ad esso legate hanno trainato i consumi interni e negli ultimi anni hanno avuto un forte peso nell’aumento dell’occupazione:
Ad eccezione di alcuni materiali per l’edilizia importati dell’estero, quasi tutto il capitale investito nell’edilizia crea domanda di forza lavoro negli USA.
Gli investimenti nell’edilizia abitativa rappresentano la quota maggiore del PIL mai registrata da 50 anni:
– 9,7%, mediamente, nel secondo trimestre 2005, dal 9% del quarto trimestre 2001.
Quote maggiori in mercati più caldi: California rispettivamente 13,4 su 12,3%, Las Vegas 14,6-12,9%.
Nyt 05-11-20
Economic View – As the McMansions Go, So Goes Job Growth
By DANIEL GROSS
THERE’S a growing consensus that the housing market is cooling off. This month, Toll Brothers, the luxury home builder, warned that sales of McMansions were falling, and its highflying stock fell to earth. Last Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that housing starts, a reliable gauge of present activity, fell 5.6 percent in October from year-ago levels, while building permits, a reliable gauge of future activity, fell 6.7 percent.
These data points are potentially worrisome, and not only for the legions of real estate brokers and Sheetrock layers toiling in offices and job sites across the country. In recent years, economists from Alan Greenspan on down have been discussing the way rising home prices and the growth of home-equity borrowing have fueled consumer spending, the piston that drives the country’s economic engine. But in recent years, housing, real estate and the related industries have become a huge factor in another crucial economic area: employment growth.
After the brief and shallow recession of 2001, the resilient United States economy stubbornly failed to create payroll jobs at the rate of past recoveries. Economists and politicians blamed factors and trends like outsourcing, global trade, high benefit costs and productivity growth. But amid the gloom, the real estate sector shouldered the burden of job creation.
Asha Bangalore, an economist at Northern Trust in Chicago, tallied figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for sectors like construction, building material and garden supply stores. She found that from November 2001 to October 2005, housing and real estate accounted for a whopping 36 percent of private-sector payroll job growth. "In four years, 2.3 million private-sector jobs were created in the U.S., and 836,000 were related to the housing sector," she said.
Given everything else happening in the corporate world, the housing sector was the ideal place to have an investment boom. Building, selling, decorating and renovating homes is labor intensive. And unlike much investment in the broader manufacturing sector, the money pouring into the housing industry creates demand for American labor. Yes, some housing materials come from overseas. But virtually all the labor associated with housing – the roofers, the investment bankers who securitize mortgages into bonds, the clerks at Home Depot – is based in the United States.
As a result of the boom, the economy is more concentrated on housing than ever before. "Residential investment as a share of gross domestic product is at the highest level in 50 years," said Jan Hatzius, senior economist at Goldman, Sachs.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, notes that real-estate-related industries accounted for 9.7 percent of total domestic employment in the second quarter of 2005, up from 9.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001. And in areas with the hottest markets, housing plays an even more important role. In California, 13.4 percent of jobs in the second quarter of 2005 were housing-related, versus 12.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001. In Las Vegas, the figure rose to 14.6 percent from 12.9 percent; in Panama City, Fla., it rose to 15.4 percent from 11.7 percent.
So what should we expect, now that housing appears to be cooling off?
If the frothy regional markets go flat or if prices simply stop rising at the rates of recent years, there will surely be wide-ranging economic effects on consumer spending and on jobs. "Housing and the job markets are joined at the hip," Mr. Zandi said. "And if housing cools, so too will hiring and the job market more broadly, particularly in the more juiced-up housing markets."
If housing prices are flat in 2006 and residential investment falls 5 percent, there could be a direct loss of a few hundred thousand jobs related to real estate, Mr. Hatzius said. And the indirect effects will certainly be larger, Mr. Zandi said: "Housing is going to go from being a key contributor to the job engine to being a significant drag on job growth."
But there’s some good news. Ms. Bangalore notes that while housing’s contribution to job growth has declined in recent months, "other sectors are picking up the slack."
Daniel Gross writes the "Moneybox" column for Slate.com.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times