links for 2009-10-14

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  • 2010 Apartment Forecast: Uncertainty, But Optimism
    Looks like rental rates are expected to stay down for a while. From a presentation given by NAA's Doug Culkin:

    "The 'shadow market' competition that followed the housing market bust will continue to be felt in 2010, Culkin said, brought on by failed condo projects going rental, foreclosed single-family homes becoming rentals and a continued lack of job growth. For those on the operations side of the apartment market, next year’s outlook will be more of the same, he explained. 'We are looking at pressures on rental rates [to] remain, and vacancy rates are expected to remain higher than we would like.'"

    (tags: apartment taa)

  • Pacing Toward a Fall: Airline's new owner came across as bringer of …

    According to Richard Craver's article Pace Airlines had problems before William Rodgers Sr. showed up and put a stake through its heart, but he certainly didn't do anything to forestall its demise:

    "He spoke in a folksy, yet brash tone, adding an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders for effect.

    'We're going to create jobs, make money and enjoy life, and honor and respect each other.'

    Less than four months later, Pace likely has been grounded for good by Rodgers' management."

    (tags: winston-salem business)

  • Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com " Blog Archive " Wish hard enough and Google …

    Google Docs just keeps getting better. You can now organize and share via a folder system. I agree with this Google Docs assessment by Rex:

    "The primary reason I love Google Docs is that I like being able to ask several people to comment on something I’ve written (with each of them having their own comment color) more than the Word way of having copy “edited over.” And frankly, I’ve always thought the tracking feature of Word is worse than an editor’s red pen all over a page. I greatly prefer the wiki-like version tracking method of Google Docs (just click on the time of the last edit and you’ll see what I mean)."

    (tags: google googledocs web2.0)

  • Freakonomics Announces Launch of Site That Threatens to Suck Me Into a Black Hole of Time Wasting

    "What’s more dangerous: a playground jungle gym or your office chair? As it happens, one in every 3,759 fatal accidental falls starts from a piece of playground equipment. You’re 85 times more likely, meanwhile, to fall to your death from a chair. That’s one of the many odd pairings waiting to be discovered in The Book of Odds, an online statistical encyclopedia launching tomorrow."

    (tags: coolstuff)

  • This Week's Business Incentive Story That's NOT About Dell

    WXII has a story about Unilin trying to renegotiate part of their incentive deal with Davidson County: "Unilin Flooring, despite investing nearly $80 million at its Chair City headquarters, has requested that Thomasville officials waive the minimum job creation clause for 2010 in its 10-year economic development contract with the city."

    and

    “When we broke ground on this plant in 2004, we had planned to have almost 400 employees by this time and be well into the execution of our Phase 3 expansion,” Lauten wrote. “The reality is that we will employ approximately half that number at year end 2009. … Despite the economic challenges, we are still on track to have invested $80 million at this campus by the end of 2009 as we originally planned.”

    (tags: northcarolina piedmonttriad)

  • Cone: Dude, You're Getting the Shaft

    "Had the busy Dell spoken longer, he might have said, 'We've also got a bunch of North Carolina taxpayer money that we've decided to just, y'know, keep, so that works to our benefit.'"

    (tags: winston-salem forsythcounty northcarolina businessopinion)

links for 2009-10-13

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  • Student housing for UNCG topic of meeting
    "Representatives for one of the country’s largest student housing developers will meet with the Greater Glenwood Neighborhood Association on Thursday as neighbors weigh a student housing project in the area."
    (tags: apartment studenthousing greensboro)
  • Downtown W-S: Urban Living in Camel City
    23 of 30 residential units at 836 Oak Street (an old JG Flynt Tobacco building)have been leased or sold.
    (tags: winston-salem realestate apartment)
  • Parents of "chunky" infant weigh in on health insurance reform – The …
    From the story: "Alex Lange is a chubby, dimpled, healthy and happy 4-month-old.

    But in the cold, calculating numbered charts of insurance companies, he is fat. That's why he is being turned down for health insurance. And that's why he is a weighty symbol of a problem in the health care reform debate."

    (tags: healthcare healthinsurance)

  • Student housing plans hinge on property owners : News-Record.com …

    "The first step: the developer — Dinerstein Cos. of Houston — needs 49 property owners in a targeted 10-acre area of Glenwood to sell. Last month the company sent letters to owners, trying to gauge interest. The move caused a flap when some residents objected to the idea of an apartment-style student housing complex. But Lindsey said there has also been a lot of interest."

    (tags: apartment studenthousing greensboro)

  • AVC: Open Subtitles

    Whenever I think I actually have a handle on all the latest offerings on the web I'm usually knocked down a peg or two when I read the blogs of people who really know what's going on. The latest instance is Fred Wilson's post on open subtitles: "The film is in swedish and the download I got did not have english subtitles. But fortunately Boxee supports Open Subtitles. If you are streaming or watching a downloaded video in Boxee, you can simply ask for subtitles and Boxee goes out and fetches them from opensubtitles.org."

    That's just amazing to me.

    (tags: web2.0 web)

  • Tort Reform Report a Distraction?

    Lex writes: "Also, a lot of people will be making a big deal out of a Congressional Budget Office report that “tort reform” would save $54 billion from federal deficits during the next 10 years — $41 billion in spending reductions and $13 billion in new revenue.

    That’s not peanuts … except in the case of what the U.S. spends for health care. We spend roughly $2.4 trillion every year on it. So these savings would be the equivalent of saving a nickel on a $24 restaurant tab."

    (tags: healthcare politics government)

  • NYT: Lobbyists Fight Last Big Plans to Cut Health Care Costs

    "As the health care debate moves to the floor of Congress, most of the serious proposals to fulfill President Obama’s original vow to curb costs have fallen victim to organized interests and parochial politics. "

    (tags: healthcare politics)

Bizarro Banking

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If we've learned nothing else the last year or so it's that we can't count on the folks running our financial system to be, you know, wise.  Check out this paragraph from an article in the Washington Post about the trouble Bank of America is having meeting the Obama administration's November deadline for modifying 125,000 home loans:

The company's effort has been hamstrung by a staff shortage and by adapting its computer systems and even fax machines to the scale of the program, which began in March. The company was also slow out of the box because it initially took a more conservative approach than some other banks, requiring that borrowers document their income and complete other paperwork before granting preliminary approval for a modification. In August, Bank of America softened the requirement and began authorizing some modifications without getting all the documents first. (Emphasis mine)

So a bank is struggling, in part, because it is doing what we'd normally expect a bank to do when it's loaning money to a consumer?  Obviously they're doing this because they don't want to risk any more of their capital than they have to, right?  Maybe not so much:

Under the Making Home Affordable program, lenders are paid with taxpayer funds to reduce borrowers' mortgage payments by lowering their interest rates, for example, or by extending the terms of their loans…

Bank of America and other lenders have a lot riding on the foreclosure prevention program. The company stands to collect about $6 billion — some of which will be passed on to investors — of the $75 billion the administration has set aside for the Making Home Affordable program. 

Hey, it's easy to criticize the banks since they really and truly have earned condemnation on many fronts.  It's also easy to laud a program that's set up to help people manage their mortgage expenses.  It's damn near impossible to understand how this is going to end well.

links for 2009-10-12

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  • Special Commemorative Stamp for Lewisville's 150th Anniversary
    Our town is celebrating 150 years this week and the postmaster is getting into the spirit. "The stamp, in the shape of a wagon wheel with a large "150" in the middle, will be placed on first-class postage during the celebration, scheduled for Oct. 17.

    Lewisville postmaster Michael Boone said he filed the paperwork for the special stamp after a suggestion by town officials."

    (tags: lewisville northcarolina)

links for 2009-10-10

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  • WXII: 929 Gallons Of Moonshine Seized In Wilkes County
    The roots of NASCAR still to be found in Northwest NC, or, White Lightning still to be found in the hills: "'This is one of the biggest seizures of white liquor I've seen come out of the mountains in my career,' Alcohol Law Enforcement Director John Ledford said Friday of the seizure of 929 gallons of moonshine at a home on Shew Ridge Mission Road.
    (tags: northcarolina)
  • Hammock: Here’s who will run the internet if the nuts have their way
    "Just in time for the National Peanut Festival, AP President Tom Curley is sounding nuttier and nuttier:"
    (tags: web media web2.0)
  • Alcoa and PCBs in the Yadkin River
    From a press release from the Yadkin Riverkeeper: "The Yadkin Riverkeeper® has announced that the cleanup Alcoa performed at the boat ramp access below Narrows Dam on Badin Lake Oct. 10-12 is a direct result of the PCBs discovered and linked to the company’s operations below Badin Lake, which have traveled as far down river as the Falls Dam boat launch."
    (tags: environment northcarolina winston-salem)
  • BBC: Parents 'should supply alcohol'
    Where was this research when I was 16?

    "University researchers questioned nearly 10,000 15 to 16-year-olds in the north-west of England.

    They got into trouble more when buying their own cheap alcohol, rather than getting access from parents, it found.

    Carefully introducing alcohol to children may help them "prepare themselves for life in an adult environment dominated by this drug", said the study."

    (tags: parent interesting)

links for 2009-10-09

1 Reply

Dell Hell, NC Version

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**Update** If you'd like to see a really good discussion about the Dell situation then head over to Cone's blog and check out the comments.  No shouting and lots of thought behind the comments.  Really good stuff. 

A couple of years back Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, blogged about a very negative experience he had with Dell and he dubbed it Dell Hell.  After yesterday's news that Dell is closing down their desktop plant here in Winston-Salem I'd say we're having our own version of Dell Hell.

Yesterday I wrote that Dell's move couldn't possibly have been a surprise to anyone who's been awake the last 18 months.  Ed Cone quoted me on his blog and since at least one of his commenters suggested that it is a surprise to a lot of people I felt compelled to explain myself in the comments:

The reason I wrote that it shouldn't be a surprise was really an observation that given the overall economic environment of the last 18 months, the fact that the plant was built to produce desktops, that the market has been moving strongly towards laptops and Dell didn't seem to be interested in re-tooling the plant to produce laptops and that Dell has been reducing it's workforce at the plant, then it shouldn't really be seen as very surprising that this has happened. Abrupt? Sure, but these things tend to be.

As for Winston-Salem getting back its incentive money I heard an interview on WXII this morning in which the Dell rep said that the incentives were based on job creation and the Dell had met those conditions, so maybe Dell is planning on fighting the return of those incentive dollars.

In addition to my points in that comment I'd also like to put forward the following thoughts:

  • I remain convinced that subsidies stink. I also remain convinced that if subsidies are a part of the economic development competition between states then state and local officials are pretty much forced to use them. 
  • Hopefully Mayor Joines is right when he says "The city, the county and the community will get reimbursed every dollar we put into the project." What worries me is that Dell might go to court to fight the reimbursements. Even if Dell is wrong they probably have less to lose in taking the issue to court and working for a settlement than they do in ponying up the reimbursements without a fight.
  • Even if we get our money back we still have over 900 people being added to the unemployment rolls by January. That's a heck of a hit for an already overburdened unemployment system, not to mention a potentially chatastrophic impact on the employees.
  • Some leaders have pointed out that the silver lining here is that we have a relatively new manufacturing facility that can now be marketed to another company. I guess that's a good long term view, but short term I wouldn't hold my breath. From the Fed's September 9 Beige Book report for the fifth district, which includes North Carolina:

    "Vacancy rates climbed higher across office, industrial, and retail space in most District markets, while the amount of available office sublease space remained fairly steady since our last report. On the sales side, very little activity was reported in recent weeks."

    Maybe we can re-purpose it as a fabulous new indoor soccer park.

  • I've read some comments on other blogs and news stories that essentially say, "Hindsight is 20/20" or "It's easy to criticize the deal now, but no one could have known this was going to happen at the time the deal was struck." Those folks are right, and at this point I don't think it's appropriate to criticize the folks who put the deal together. I truly believe they were doing what they thought was best for the community and given that incentives are a tool that most state and local governments are using to attract business it's hard to criticize them for trying to compete. (We could argue that the price tag was too high, but that horse is out of the barn).  What we should be focusing on is how we protect ourselves in the future. Winston-Salem is in the unfortunate position of having two deals (the downtown baseball stadium and Dell) go squirrelly on them in very short order and I think it's clear that we have to go into these deals with eyes wide open and assume that the worst can happen.
  • Any which way you slice it, this situation stinks.

links for 2009-10-08

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  • Harvard Biz Blog: The Dismal Financial IQ of US Managers
    "Our experience over the years has shown us that the vast majority of managers and leaders in Fortune 1000 companies have deficiencies in their basic financial knowledge. We spend most of our time teaching managers and leaders in corporate America how to read their own financial statements, understand key financial measures, and use financial tools to understand the data."
    (tags: finance business)

About Those Incentives

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News that cannot possibly be a surprise to anyone who's been conscious for the last 18 months:

Dell Inc. announced today that it will close its plant in Forsyth County by the end of January, cutting 905 jobs overall, including 600 in November.

Just in time for the holidays.  Nice.