Building Industry

This lakeside hamlet is about as remote as you can get in Southern California and still have plumbing and pavement. Nestled on the western shore of the Salton Sea, the town doesn't have a supermarket or movie theater or drugstore. But it has as many as 250 homes for sale, most of them newly built -- a huge supply for a place with just 1,440 people. When real estate values began soaring a few years ago, builders flocked here.

My notebook runneth over. Sightings from the real estate landscape: ? Still going green. Impaired as it has been by the economy, the home-building industry nonetheless has been making a fair amount of noise in the last couple of years about efforts to be more environmentally friendly. But it has a long way to go, according to a new report from Calvert Investments, a Bethesda, Md., company that specializes in sustainable and socially responsible investing. Calvert compiled a ranking of sustainability practices at the top 10 publicly held home-building firms, and despite giving a couple of builders a shout-out for their improved performances, the investment firm still flunked them.

In a dusty field on the outskirts of China's capital, Fan Zhi has built the American dream. The two-bedroom cottage comes with a front porch. The rocking chair is not included. By capturing the attention of Americans weary of high heating bills and soaring construction costs, Fan hopes to turn this prefab home into the McBungalow of the home-building world.

A construction site in Irvine is alive with the sound of the boom years. Workers hammering fresh wood beams shout orders at each other in Spanish. Diesel trucks rumble through newly paved subdivisions. Men with scrolls of construction plans tucked under their arms bark instructions into mobile phones. The cacophony emanating from the Irvine Co.'s newest project -- 685 houses and town homes in the company's Woodbury and Woodbury East developments -- is rare these days. To get the project off the ground, Irvine Co., which typically sells land to builders, is financing the project itself after enlisting six builders to put up the homes for a fee. "All of these people were probably unemployed or underemployed," Thomas G. Veal, Irvine Co.'s vice president for residential marketing, said as he stood on a stack of plywood surveying one of the company's work sites.

Los Angeles officials on Friday banned tall retaining walls that dot the city's canyon communities from Woodland Hills to Mount Washington, with critics calling the massive bulkheads "the hillside strangler." City Council members said the oversized concrete walls that loom over neighboring homes are wrecking the rustic feel of the city's canyons and hillsides.

The workmen spread across 17 acres in Woodland Hills cut a tableau of movement. Kneeling in dirt, their arms pumping like pistons, they hammer together wood molds so new home foundations can be poured. Nearby, an earth mover carves out a street from mounds of weeds and a water truck sprays behind to keep down the dust. All of this activity is the handiwork of Kaufman & Broad, the state's biggest new home builder.

Karen Higgins Construction coordinator Credits: Currently working on the comedy "Brothers Solomon"; just wrapped "Nancy Drew." Other films include "Anger Management," "50 First Dates" and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Job description: "The short definition is that I am head of the construction department, and the construction department is basically responsible for building the sets for a film or for TV or for commercials -- I do primarily film.

A construction site in Irvine is alive with the sound of the boom years. Workers hammering fresh wood beams shout orders at each other in Spanish. Diesel trucks rumble through newly paved subdivisions. Men with scrolls of construction plans tucked under their arms bark instructions into mobile phones. The cacophony emanating from the Irvine Co.'s newest project -- 685 houses and town homes in the company's Woodbury and Woodbury East developments -- is rare these days. To get the project off the ground, Irvine Co., which typically sells land to builders, is financing the project itself after enlisting six builders to put up the homes for a fee. "All of these people were probably unemployed or underemployed," Thomas G. Veal, Irvine Co.'s vice president for residential marketing, said as he stood on a stack of plywood surveying one of the company's work sites.

County education and building officials on Tuesday unveiled 10 videos aimed at informing students about career opportunities in the construction industry. The videos, screened in Huntington Beach, depict careers in the building industry and discuss educational requirements, salary ranges, types of work and opportunities for advancement. The videos are a joint venture of the Orange County Department of Education and the Home Builders Council, an educational arm of the Building Industry Assn.

After an extensive letter-writing campaign, phone calls and some powerful lobbying, the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California was able to land a float on the 109th Rose Parade next New Year's Day. The residential construction organization's float was one of four new entries accepted from a flood of applicants.

Looking for new ways to help plug the leaky job market, President Obama pressed Congress to provide money to homeowners to improve energy efficiency -- and the economy -- by replacing doors, caulking windows and padding their attics with more insulation. Obama admitted that the "idea may not be very glamorous" but declared Tuesday that he found insulation "sexy." Lawmakers also are getting excited by the concept, which they said could help create badly needed jobs for the beleaguered building trades.

The uneven nature of the economic recovery was on display again Tuesday with the release of mixed data on pending home sales, manufacturing and construction spending. The residential real estate market showed signs of gaining momentum in the new data, while manufacturing appeared to lose steam after a growth spurt over the summer. More troubling, the commercial real estate sector seemed to be in "free fall," as one analyst put it. All told, the data did little to help economists assess how fast the economy was growing and whether that growth would be strong enough to generate jobs.

Hoyt S. Pardee, who with his two brothers transformed a family construction company into a leading Southern California home builder, died of pancreatic cancer Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 91. The brothers and their company, Pardee Construction, had built more than 30,000 homes by 1985, when they were among the first builders inducted into a statewide hall of fame sponsored by the California Building Industry Assn. Formed in 1946 in Los Angeles, the company became one of the more prolific home builders in the region after World War II, constructing housing tracts around Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas.

After more than a year of meager activity, the nation's architects reported a growing number of new contracts in October from builders preparing to get real estate developments off the ground. It was the highest level of new business for the nation's architects since August 2008, a report from the American Institute of Architects says. "This news could prove to be an early signal toward a recovery for the design and construction industry," said Kermit Baker, the AIA's chief economist.

Pablo Nuñez, a carpenter by trade, says he is accustomed to working 10-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week, on home-building sites throughout Southern California. But legally mandated overtime pay was almost as unheard of at job sites, he says, as visits from labor inspectors. "The only person getting overtime might be the brother of the foreman," Nuñez said. The Corona resident is among 85 residential construction workers from California, Nevada and Arizona who will share $242,301 in unpaid wages after settling a federal lawsuit last month against a major home-builder, Boise, Idaho-based Building Materials Holding Corp.

President Obama's plan for a powerful new agency to protect consumers from shady financial products is coming under increasing fire from the industry it would regulate and its allies in Congress, forcing backers to delay action on legislation to put the plan in force. The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency would have broad authority to make consumer protection rules for credit cards, bank accounts and other financial products.

The 1985 Elan Awards, honoring the home-building industry, will be presented by the Sales & Marketing Council (an affiliate of the Building Industry Assn.) of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Century Plaza Hotel. The annual dinner is held to mark superior achievement in more than 30 building and marketing categories.

Ventura County's construction industry is enjoying a strong, sustained recovery from the recession, with the value of projects so far this year exceeding that of comparable periods in each of the past five years. The county's home builders are doing even better than the construction industry in general. More permits for new single-family homes were issued through July of this year than in any comparable period since 1989, according to the Construction Industry Research Board.

Giant home builder Pulte Homes Inc. agreed Wednesday to buy rival Centex Corp. for $1.3 billion in a move that could spur more mergers in an industry decimated by the housing slump and the reeling overall economy. The stock transaction would make Pulte the biggest home builder in the country with a presence in more than half the states, including Dallas-based Centex's sizable land holdings in Texas and the Carolinas.

By day, it's far too quiet at the site of a planned housing and retail development on a former Navy base in Oakland. At night, neighbors can hear the thieves come out. They rip out copper wire, haul away pipes and take anything else they can steal from dozens of buildings on the site, abandoned after Irvine developer SunCal Cos. fell victim to the economy.