The US economy grew in the second quarter, slowing from previous quarters and not growing as fast as economists wanted, with gross domestic product (GDP) advancing at an annual rate of 2.4%, its fourth consecutive quarterly increase.

GDP grew in the first quarter at a 3.7% pace and in the fourth quarter of 2009 at 5.0%. Economists are now concerned that the slowing growth rate is an indicator that this will be a double dip recession.

Buoyed by the home buyer tax credit, the housing industry actually contributed positively to the second quarter growth rate, adding 0.6% to the overall growth rate, thanks to improvements in single-family activity and remodeling, with multifamily construction down. This was the first positive contribution from the Housing Sector since it added 0.25% to growth in the third quarter of 2009, which was the first quarter in two-and-a-half years that home building was not a drag on GDP, a grim reminder of the depth and length of the downturn in the housing market.

Second quarter GDP was boosted by business investment in equipment and software, which may be a sign that firms are generally positive about their future prospects. Companies also continued to build their inventories, another positive for growth, although at a slower pace than in the previous two quarters. The lift from inventory investment will disappear, however, if final demand falters.

Consumer remain cautious, but have not abandoned the marketplace, contributing roughly half of the growth recorded in the second quarter. In normal economic times, consumers typically account for two-thirds of economic growth. At present, consumers are hunkered down, maintaining a generally glum outlook, so it is unlikely that consumers will increase spending anytime soon.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell from 76.0 in June to 67.8 in July, a significant drop, recording its lowest reading since November 2009. The Conference Board  reported a similar drop in its July Consumer Confidence Index, which dropped from 54.3 to 50.4, its second consecutive monthly decline.

While it is encouraging that businesses and consumers are still active participants in the economy, their growing expenditures in the second quarter led to a large increase in imports, which reduces GDP growth, and this was only partially offset by rising exports. Spending by businesses, consumers and the government may produce sufficient economic growth to spur employment growth, which in turn would support consumer spending, but significant improvement in the near term is unlikely.

While the NAHB is forecasting moderately faster economic and job growth over the next few quarters, projections of a recovery in the housing industry are overly optimistic. This is due, in part, to the NAHB acting as cheerleader for the housing industry, hoping positive prognostications become self-fulfilling. But, analyzing the housing industry is particularly treacherous at the moment because housing data has been skewed by the home buyer tax credit. While the tax credit certainly boosted home sales while it was in effect, temporary stimulus, such as this, rarely provide any real long term benefit. The tax credit likely only served to move buyers into the present from the futures, the net result being a severely depleted pool of prospective home buyers now that the tax credit has expired.

The data support my position, as new home sales peaked in April, prior to the April 30 expiration of the tax credit, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 422,000 housing units. This was the highest sales level since September 2008. But, in May, sales fell precipitously to 267,000, the lowest level since the Census Bureau began tracking sales in 1963. Sales in June rebounded to an annual rate of 330,000, which seems like a healthy increase, but is, in reality the second lowest level ever recorded.

New Home Inventory fell to 232,000 in June, the lowest level since 1968. Since then, the number of US households has grown by more than 90%. As demand returns, a larger inventory will be clearly needed, which bodes well for residential construction, dependent upon banks beginning lending to builders again. Since their recent peak of 5.06 million annual units in April, sales of existing single-family homes declined 1.6% in May to 4.98 million units and fell 5.6% in June to 4.7 million annual units.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) Pending Home Sales Index, which is comparable to new home sales statistics since it is based on pending contracts, plunged 30% in May and fell an additional 2.6% in June. The index was down 18.6% from a year earlier, roughly in line with a 16.7% year-over-year decline in new home sales in June.

Other rosy news came from the Census Bureau, which has reported that the nation’s rate of homeownership slipped from 67.2% in the first quarter to 66.9% in the second quarter, the lowest level of home ownership since 1999, a result of foreclosures and continued uncertainty surrounding the housing market.

The housing industry is weak and will remain at these anemic levels, along with the rest of the US Economy, for as long as we have a socialist in the White House. The negative effects of Obama’s economic policies, which are tantamount to an attack on the free enterprise system, combined with the uncertainty his policies are having on consumer sentiment and capital markets, make any real rebound in the housing sector and the overall US economy unlikely for the foreseeable future.

We  published our first blog two years ago in November.  Those in the know insisted I had to have a blog in order to boost the search engine rankings of my website.  As a home builder, I elected housing and real estate as the subjects of that first blog.  I started the Dallas Urban Blog on Google’s Blogger Platform and was blogging.  I soon decided I liked the presentation of WordPress Blogs more than I did Blogger, so I started the Lexington Blog on WordPress.

I knew very little about what I was doing, but I realized I was enjoying it.  Within a short time, I was authoring and publishing several blogs.  I ultimately figured out that blogs really do increase the search engine ranking of your website, but only if said blog is located within the website.  Thus, all of my efforts to this point had produced no results.  With little alternative, I accepted the challenge of self hosting the blogs within my website.  I refer to it as accepting the challenge because self hosting requires a great deal more technical knowledge as more web coding is required.  It was a daunting prospect.  I generally learned that which I needed to learn and, to my great surprise, began enjoying it even more.

Then came the epiphany; I realized that a good number of people actually cared about what I had to say.  I was honored, flattered, even validated; and emboldened to continue.  What had started simply as an effort to boost search engine results had become, essentially, successful on its face.

As readership and site statistics grew, we were amazed that there were some days we had as many as 3,000 page views.  Noting these spikes in our statistics, we dug deeper into our web analytics and were truly amazed.  When my wife and I began this endeavor, we researched our web presence and Google could only find me or my company on 87 web pages.  This is a truly insignificant web presence for a business owner.

Here we now were, a year later, doing the very same research.  This time, the results were remarkably different; Google found me or the company on more than 80,000 web pages.  Our websites and blogs were ranked very highly in search engines, our Google Page Rank was growing across the board, and our traffic was increasing steadily.  Our search engine ranking was so high amongst home builders in our  market areas that Google search results consistently place us in the top 10, some times even achieving the number one position.  We routinely rank higher than the largest home building companies in the country; big companies with several billion dollars in revenue who spend millions of dollars a year in advertising. 

These were resources I couldn’t begin to fathom.  It had taken us a great deal of time, but we achieved phenomenal results having spent only $4,000; that’s all we had.  But, we were beating the results of companies that spend several times that amount every day.  Clearly, we were on to something.  That is a story for my next article.

We also found that many independent ranking services were beginning to rate us very highly.  For example, Website Grader ranked our website in the top 20,000 sites in the world.  This may not seem all that impressive at first blush, but when compared to the several million websites they rank, the fact is we ranked in the top 97 percent in the world.  Further, Technorati recently ranked two of our blogs in the top 500 in the world in the categories of Politics and US Politics.  Accolades, such as these, are very gratifying.

We also noticed there were days when visitor traffic to our websites skyrockets.  It took us some time to figure out why that was happening.  The answer astonished me.  Institutional websites, like the Washington Post, occasionally link back to our articles as source material.  We came to find that even Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment website cited one of our articles as a source for an article on Obamacare published in October.  This was particularly gratifying because I admire Andrew, as was the news that Technorati had moved the ranking of one of our blogs up to number 300 in the world on the subject of US Politics.

In the final analysis, I decided that the entire endeavor into blogging was very much like becoming a millionaire, as Steve Martin once quipped: it’s easy, first you get a million dollars.  The better you do at increasing your web presence, the easier it becomes to increase your web presence.

Data through November 2010, released January 25 by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the leading measure of US home prices, show a deceleration in the annual growth rates in 17 of the 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and the 10- and 20-City Composites compared to what was reported for October. The 10-City Composite was down 0.4% and the 20-City Composite fell 1.6% from November 2009 levels.

Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoy penning articles of my own creation.  I find it both cathartic and satisfying when I take an idea that has been rattling around in my head, organize my thoughts, reduce them to paper, as it were, and God willing, the result of my effort is an accurate, informative and interesting article.  Because of this, in addition to the most base reason, honor, articles I publish are of my own creation.  Occasionally, however, I come across material that is so good, I feel compelled to re-publish it.  This is one of those articles, and it is written by one of the few journalists I truly admire: Bernie Goldberg.

Bernie’s article, in this case, makes fun of those moronic members of the lamestream media who never actually get their stories right, blinded as they are by their zeal to influence the news to the left, rather than just report it.  This article was published right after election day in November.  Enjoy it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Older American voters are the voting block most likely to vote in any election. This year, however, they are going to do so in record numbers. Seniors are supporting Republicans more than any other demographic group, in this election cycle, and they are poised to vote at historic levels. That means bad news for the Democrats.

Republicans, who are usually more likely to vote than Democrats, are far more likely to vote than are their Democratic counterparts this year, in every age group. But, older Republicans and independents who are leaning right, are creating a political tsunami that is crashing down on thousands of Democratic candidates.

This generational tidal wave of seniors and baby boomers, are mad as hell and they’re apparently not going to take it anymore. They are more enthusiastic about voting than at any time in the past, according to the Pew Research Center, and they are invested in the outcome of this election. By comparison, the group which includes young voters and 30-49 year old adults, are likely to turn out to vote in numbers typical for midterm election cycles.

Make no mistake, it is older voters who will carry the day today, and their enthusiasm is measurable. Here are some of those measures. Beating by 9% their previous high water mark, 84% of seniors and boomers say they will Definitely vote and 60% of them have given the election alot of thought. Historically, enthusiasm of this magnitude is usually a predictor of a very high voter turnout.

This senior wave represents a tremendous paradigm shift. Think about election cycles of the past, for a moment, and see if you can visualize the impact senior voters had. There really isn’t anything that jumps to mind. The impact of senior voters – and their voices – are typically minimized. Not so, this year. As another journalist recently put it, this time around seniors are concerned about the future. And, having lived through the ascendency of America as a superpower, they don’t like the fragile state America is now in. The way things are now in America isn’t exactly what they had in mind for their golden years.

They are pessimistic about the economy and 70% of them now say they plan on working after retirement and 60% say that Obama’s progressive policies have made the economy worse. In an amazing declination of support, at the beginning of the Obama administration, 60% approved of Obama, while now only 40% do. They are far more skeptical of healthcare reform than are younger voters, and they prefer a small government over a large one.

Some 80% view the economy negatively, while two-thirds of them believe their children’s generation will have it worse than their generation did. Never before in our history has a generation of Americans believed the next generation would be worse off. They believe that the US government is too big and spends too much, which translates into the evaporation of their safety net.

Gallup estimates that the senior turnout this year will be 11% higher than it was in the 2006 midterm election cycle, and in 2006, seniors turned out to vote at double the rate of younger voters. Rasmussen reports that seniors favor the Republican in their district by an18% margin, 53% to 35%. Seniors turning out in these kind of numbers and favoring Republicans as strongly as they are, are causing a political tsunami which will crash down on Democrats all across America.

I’ve cited enough numbers to make my point. However, two more numbers are certainly noteworthy. The Tea Party has hugely impacted older voters. More than 30% of the Tea Party are seniors, and almost 50% are Baby Boomers.

Since it is approaching closing time for the polls on the east coast, I’ll wrap this up. I want to conclude by giving thanks. Thank you, seniors and boomers, for standing up for what you believe and thank you for having the strength to back it up with your vote.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the one man who, I believe, had the greatest single impact on the electorate of any man in history. And, were it not for him, the resurgence of patriotism and ascendancy of the Tea Party – forces that will bring America back from the brink – would never have been possible. Thus, it is with a full heart that I thank Glenn Beck. There is no doubt in my mind, we would have been lost without you.

By the way, there is one thing of which seniors and boomers are absolutely certain: they’re not racists, despite the constant claims of the liberal media and Democratic leaders to the contrary.

It may seem like an oxymoron to say historic downtown Plano.  The city that is synonymous with the automobile, strip malls and I don’t know my neighbors, is rapidly building up to 1,000 new townhomes, condominiums and apartments within a quarter-mile radius of its small, but largely intact, downtown area.

“Not long ago, if you saw someone walking in downtown Plano after dark or on weekends, you thought they were lost or you did not want to meet them,” says Frank Turner, executive director for the city of Plano and a mastermind for the redevelopment of downtown.

Now, all that has changed. Plano is banking on the city becoming more diverse and more dense. The catalyst: a Dallas Area Rapid Transit station that almost didn’t happen. The new housing in downtown Plano is driven by two men who started building homes first in Uptown Dallas, a long way from Plano in miles and culture.

Recently, Scott Schaefer, the urban maverick behind the Lexington Companies, who has been building townhomes in Uptown and Oak Lawn since the mid-1990s, will start 20 townhomes on what was Plano’s first high school football stadium. The Rice Field project on 6 1/2 acres will feature 98 townhomes. A two-bedroom and a study with 1,616 square feet will cost $279,000. Three-bedroom homes with 2,400 square feet will sell for $380,000.

Influenced by the classic-style townhomes of Savannah Georgia, the Rice Field homes are being designed with porches and stoops, a small-town-style park and 10-foot-wide brick sidewalks to make the short two-block commute to the DART line feel like a historic stroll.

In building the Rice Field project, Mr. Schaefer’s Lexington Companies is following in the footsteps of Uptown pioneer Robert Shaw, who was the first to break ground in downtown Plano. Mr. Shaw built and now has sold Eastside – 500 apartments along the rail line. When the first train rolled into the station, the conductor could be excused for thinking he had made a wrong turn. Eastside looks like it belongs on McKinney Avenue, instead of Plano’s Avenue J.

On the day the city of Plano sent him a notice that it wanted a development partner for Rice Field, Mr. Schaefer was starting to look for more land. He had finished all of his intown projects.

For the next nine months, Mr. Schaefer, the son of an American Airlines executive, waded through the Plano bureaucracy, including its historical commission. He also weathered protests from longtime Planoites, who objected to the city’s tearing down the old football stadium, now the Carrollton Christian Academy’s football stadium.

“I think this project will work,” Mr. Schaefer says. Projections are that the 98 units will be sold out before he is finished building them. Would he have taken the chance on downtown Plano without DART? “Having the train two blocks away made all the difference. It will make a lot of sense to the residents,” says Mr. Schaefer, who rides DART to his meetings in Plano.

When DART first unveiled the Red Line, there was no stop planned for downtown Plano. The end of the line was only a mile north. But the city of Plano was adamant that it wanted a downtown station. DART agreed, but designated the station as a special events station only. That wasn’t going to make the train the catalyst Plano city leaders and merchants wanted. Today, the full-service DART station carries about 750 passengers a day, even without parking.

In his 23 years as a Plano planner and now an assistant city manager, Mr. Turner has seen Plano go through incredible changes. In 1960, Plano was a community of about 3,500 residents, most of whom lived a short distance from downtown. Then the growth north from Dallas turned Plano into a national synonym for suburbia.

Today, Plano has about 255,000 residents and is a net importer of labor with 130,000 jobs. “That would have been inconceivable even in 1980,” Mr. Turner says. But it really annoys him to hear, “It looks like Plano is built out.”

With the new downtown housing, Plano is serving notice that it is far from built out. “I would expect to see mid-rise and high-rise residential along Preston Road in Plano in the next 15 to 20 years.”

Just as Mr. Schaefer is looking to colonial Georgia for design inspiration, Mr. Turner believes that the 72-square-mile suburb “is learning to age gracefully.”

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was presidential election season in the run-up to the 1980 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I was 16 years old and paying a great deal of attention to the election which remains the widest chasm between candidates that I have ever seen. I started, being very excited about observing American democracy at work.

Look at MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, for example. This slobbering moron actually said he gets a thrill up his leg when listening to Obama. Bernie Goldberg was right in describing the media’s relationship with Obama as a slobbering love affair.

Moody’s estimates that US households have lost almost $6 trillion in housing values during the recession.