2012 To See Improvement In Housing, Commercial Building Starts

A new year brings new hope for the U.S. construction industry. While overall U.S. construction starts for next year will remain flat, single-family housing is predicted to improve 10 percent in dollars next year (7 percent in the number of units), according to the recently released McGraw-Hill Construction’s 2012 Dodge Construction Outlook. Multifamily housing will continue its steady rise with an 18 percent jump in dollars and 17 percent in units.

Commercial building is expected to increase 8 percent, the report says, with the largest growth in warehouses and hotels. The institutional building market - areas such as school construction and new health-care facilities, which had been bright spots in the industry in previous years - will slip another 2 percent in 2012, after falling 15 percent this year, primarily due to the painful fiscal environment found in states and local municipalities.

Add to this the fact that new home sales rose for the second month in a row (5.7 percent in September), we can see a teeny tiny ray of sunshine creep into the dismal construction landscape of the past few years.

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Kelly Faloon was a former editor of Plumbing & Mechanical as well as the BNP Media Plumbing Group’s Integrated Content Development Specialist. She also was a former editor of the Radiant Comfort Guide the Radiant & Hydronics Report — both official publications of the Radiant Professionals Alliance — and twice-monthly Radiant & Hydronics eNews, an enewsletter for anyone interested in the world of heating with hot water.

Her editorial specialties included women in plumbing, recruiting for the trades, green construction techniques, water conservation, water treatment, hydronic heating, radiant heating and cooling, snow melt, solar thermal and geothermal.

After a 3½-year stint at sister publication Supply House Times, Faloon joined the PM staff in December 2001 as senior editor. She was named PM’s managing editor in 2006 and editor in 2013.

Previously, she spent nearly 10 years at CCH, a publishing firm specializing in business and tax law, where she wore many hats — proofreader, writer/editor for a daily tax publication, and Internal Revenue Code editor.

A native of Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, Faloon is a 1986 journalism graduate of Michigan State University.