Home Building Trends and New Custom Home Technologies

Unlike the Sun Belt states and cities along the East and West coasts, these locales not only grew during the boom of the mid-2000s, they suffered least in the Great Recession. The fact that they are mostly in red states should give the newly ascendant GOP comfort as it tries to deliver on its election-year promise to right the economy. That isn’t to say all the blue states will remain weather-beaten. Wall Street, heady with cheap money, has sparked a return to opulence. And the strong demand for high-tech products and services will likely keep places like Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego from devolving into fancy versions of Detroit. Yet given the results of last week’s election and the increasing odds against another bailout of state governments, the near-broke and highly regulated blue states will be hard-pressed to generate much new employment.

Of course, not everyone living in NEWSWEEK’s Top 10 cities has avoided the heartache. And the continued slow pace of the economic recovery could hamper expansion even in the most-favored cities. If energy tanks as a result of a renewed global slowdown, it could hurt Texas and Oklahoma; dropping agricultural prices would hit some of the Heartland Honeys hard. But relatively—and that is the operative word in this tough economy—our 10 cities should fare better than most anywhere in America. And they could offer us a road map for what the nation’s economy will look like once the dust settles.

THE TEXAPLEX

For sheer economic promise, no place beats Texas. Though the Lone Star State’s growth slowed during the recession, it didn’t suffer nearly as dramatically as the rest of the country. Businesses have been flocking to Texas for a generation, and that trend is unlikely to slow soon. Texas now has more Fortune 500 companies—58—than any other state, including longtime corporate powerhouse New York.

Austin boasted the strongest job growth in NEWSWEEK’s Top 10, both last year and over the decade. Home to the state capital and the ever-expanding University of Texas, the city is arguably the best-positioned of the nation’s emerging tech centers. It enjoys good private-sector growth, both from an expanding roster of homegrown firms and outside companies, including an increasing array of multinationals such as Samsung, Nokia, Siemens, and Fujitsu.

Yet Austin’s newfound prosperity isn’t simply a product of its university culture or its synergetic collection of technology firms. Its success owes a great deal to simply being in Texas—a state itching to eclipse its historic archrival, the increasingly troubled California. Indeed, Texas is becoming to the Golden State what Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon were in the last decade: a refuge for workers and companies fed up with California’s high unemployment, cost of living, and dysfunctional state government.

The Texas economy has benefited from widening diversification. Houston has a robust energy business and medical-services industry, and thriving international trade—all long-term growth areas. Dallas enjoys an expanding tech sector and well-developed business-service industries tied to a powerful corporate base. San Antonio has a strong military connection and an expanding manufacturing capacity, and it is a key locale for the growing Latino marketplace. What’s more, Texas offers pro-business policies and relatively low taxes, and the physical infrastructure in the cities is generally as good or better than in many East and West coast metropolitan areas.

People are voting with their feet. All four Texas cities are enjoying strong immigration from the rest of the country and abroad. Houston and Dallas have higher rates of immigration than Chicago, and if the job picture stays the same, those cities could someday rival New York and Los Angeles in terms of ethnic diversity.

THE NEW SILICON VALLEYS

Although Massachusetts and California are lauded as the places “where the brains are,” neither ranked high in the growth of tech jobs over the past decade. More important is where the brains are headed.

A lot of them are going to North Carolina, Virginia, and Utah. The population of Raleigh-Durham grew faster than any major U.S. metropolitan area during the recession, and the city ranked third on NEWSWEEK’s list in terms of job growth over the last decade. To the north, in Virginia, lies another Silicon Valley wannabe, stretching across Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax counties. And then there’s Salt Lake City and its environs, buoyed by the arrival of such big names as Adobe, Twitter, and Electronic Arts. The Greater Salt Lake region, which follows the Wasatch Mountains from Provo to Ogden, has much to attract tech companies: short commutes, decent public schools, spectacular nearby recreation, and, perhaps most important, affordable housing. Roughly 75 percent of households in Salt Lake can afford a median-priced house, as compared with 45 percent in Silicon Valley and roughly half that in New York City and San Francisco. The cost advantages of cities like Salt Lake and the other high-tech hubs are expected to prove especially attractive to millennials—the generation born after 1982—as they begin forming families and buying homes en masse.

None of these Silicon Valleys may ever reach the critical mass of the real thing in California, but they will become increasingly more effective competitors and take an expanding market share of the nation’s technology business.

Article provided by Newsweek

Click here to go to our website to see the December 2010 Urban Home Magazine Article with Master’s Touch Custom Homes.  Master’s Touch who was  selected by Urban Home Magazine to be interviewed for the best His/Her bath and Master bedroom. Urban Home magazine (Urban Home Austin) is one of the industry leaders in providing the public with information on fine home living.  Simply put Urban Home connects homeowners with the businesses that can make their house a home.  We were interviewed by the magazine for there December 2010 issue.  The first words they used to describe Master’s Touch Custom Homes were Passion, Vision, and Fusion.  Words that we here at Master’s Touch Custom Homes will keep striving towards for years to come.  The article quotes “This incredible home, replete with more exquisite details than can be imagined, is surely a perfect fusion of modern living and old world charm. It is also a testament to what can happen when skilled, farsighted builders, designers and homeowners work together to achieve a common dream.”