Summary: In April, AIArchitect asked five members what the downturn in the economy was doing to their bottom line. What began as a steep decline in the residential and home mortgage markets has spiraled into a wider credit crisis and news of an all-out recession. That makes this economically inopportune time the perfect opportunity to check back in with four of those same members.

Richard Becker, AIA
Principal, Becker Architects Ltd., a small firm with a residential and commercial practice, with an emphasis on car dealership design
Chicago

It’s kind of like the stock market. It’s up, it’s down. You can’t really discern a pattern. By the end of the summer, things had started slowing down. A few weeks later, work had slowed down to the point where I needed to do a layoff. This was a person I’d just brought on last spring. Within a week our billings were down by 50 percent.

The people who are bringing us projects are developers and contractors, versus end-users, and I think that’s because the typical consumers are very reluctant to spend money on their homes.

In the last 30 days, we’ve been hired for three projects. I’d say morale is good here. But, we’ve gone to a four-day work week, with a resulting 25 percent cut in our salaries. People are working Monday through Thursday, and, as principals, we’re not always able to take paychecks.

One suspended project is an auto dealership, and he’s put it on hold because the auto businesses is so bad, they can’t afford to throw money at their facilities right now. The other segment that we’re in—residential—is not a great place to be with today’s decline. Even apart from the credit issue, as big an issue has been declining real estate values.

We get several calls a day from contractors, subcontractors, cabinet designers, and people who do home renovation—all looking for work. There’s this panic, I’d say. We have gotten hired for work, so it’s not like a tragedy, but it’s a tough market.

Bob Burke, AIA
CEO, Burke Hogue and Mills Architects, a primarily commercial firm with a blend of public and private projects
Orlando

We’re seeing a slowdown in the public sector, and it’s across the board—meaning cities, counties, states—everywhere we look it’s the same. The most active sector that we see now is in mixed-use town center or town center infill projects. We have started looking at federal work to get a more diverse portfolio of work and a more diverse client base.

It’s a daily or weekly sense [that things will get worse before they get better], in that, as soon as you think that everything is better, something happens to turn that attitude backwards. Are we going to bottom out quickly? I threw my crystal ball away. It quit working for me. In central Florida, I want to believe we’re near the bottom.

We’re still slow in that we have a majority of our projects on hold. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we have more projects and more people we’re talking to about projects that are real than we have had in the last 12-18 months.

Diane Geogopulous, FAIA
Architect with MassHousing, a quasi-public agency that lends money to developers who build affordable housing
Boston

We are experiencing some delays in areas where investor participation through tax credits is slow. Until that tax credit market increases, finding the equity partners for use of low-income tax credits will make production numbers very tight. Beyond that, there are probably some reasons to imagine that some costs could be going down on the construction side, but if you can’t close your deals that’s not really doing you very much good. It’s a very challenging environment.

The other side of the story is the whole question of how the federal administration is dealing with home foreclosures. How that gets resolved will have a very dramatic influence on what happens to housing prices and housing production going forward. There seems to be some movement out there that is moving away from foreclosures and putting people out of their homes and finding a way to recast existing debt. That’s really got to be a priority.

Kari Kimura, AIA
Partner of Roth Kimura, LLP, two-person firm that specializes in high-end residential projects
Holualoa, Hawaii

We haven’t seen much change from what we’re doing. We’re more nervous now than we were six months ago, because it seems a little bleaker. We’re good for this year and next year too, so it’s really 2010. We’re basically gearing up for the next great client.

The clientele we’re dealing with are just shifting assets. They’re not borrowing money. We haven’t been asked to resize or rescale projects, reduce quality, or anything like that.

We didn’t grow, so we didn’t have to deal with any personnel issues about not being able to get enough work to staff up. We’re just light on our feet.