In addition, there were about 333,000 job openings in the construction industry as of the end of September. Lumber, which is used for framing, remains expensive and prices for copper, another essential material in homebuilding, are high. A survey from the National Association of Home Builders on Tuesday showed confidence among single-family homebuilders rose for the third straight month in November, but noted that "supply-side challenges, including building material bottlenecks and lot and labor shortages, remain stubbornly persistent." Homebuilding has essentially been treading water this year as builders battle shortages and higher prices of raw materials.
The densely populated South, where the bulk of homebuilding occurs, reported a 1.8% drop in single-family starts. Homebuilding fell in all four regions, with large decreases in the Northeast, Midwest and West.
The fourth-straight monthly decline pushed starts to the lowest level since August 2020. – and citygovernments must address the unique privacy concerns of this vulnerable population.Single-family housing starts, which account for the largest share of the housing market, dropped 3.9% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.039 million units last month. Some projects have attracted criticism, however –a system in Los Angeles County, designed to connect people seeking shelter with unused housing, was seen by some as a covert surveillance mechanism. TAP London, a social technology start-up, has introduced contactless payment points that allow passers-by to donate to homelessness charities, after the demise of cash in the city has denied some homeless people of asource of support. A pilot project in Austin, Texas, for example, used a blockchain-based system to provide homeless people with digital identity credentials that allow them to access services including healthcare. Some municipalities are exploring the potential of technology to help support and house their homeless population. Homelessness is a global issue that tends to be concentrated in cities. Open data on plastic pollution would also help researchers understand the flow of plastic from city to ocean. Projects such as the Ocean Cleanup project, which uses satellite imagery to map the flow of plastic from its source to the ocean, and the Plastic Bank, an app that rewards people for recycling their plastic waste, give an indication of how cities might address their share of plastic pollution. Many city governments are banning single-use plastic but technology can help manage the waste that remains. Cities are a huge part of the problem - urban land use and population density are positively correlated with high concentration of plastic pollution in rivers - but they can also be part of the solution. The unfolding tragedy of plastic pollution in the oceans has rightly become the subject of public outcry. Smart prevention has three components, the report’s authors explain: detailed monitoring of air quality using connected sensors policy responses, such as traffic diversions when air quality goes in a certain area reaches an unsafe level and finally cancer research that incorporates sensor data to better understand the link between the city environment and cancer prevalence. A recent study by researchers in Canada proposes the concept of ‘smart prevention’, which applies smart city techniques to cancer risk reduction. While smart city initiatives are often focused on environmental issues, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be applied to health challenges too. In particular, the poor air quality that is common in many cities has been linked to a higher prevalence of lung cancer.
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