Work/Practice under the New Normal

Yes I think you may not be getting many replies because there was enough work to keep going with, and people are hoping an absolute loss of desire for design work doesn’t happen or ever become a “new normal.” Keep up your personal projects and hope for the future. From what I’m thinking, the building industry can’t collapse because we will always need to revise and repair sites and there will be retro-fitting at least. Even if some companies go under, there will be replacements to fill the spaces as long as there is an active culture, but things may come back in variable regional and sector patterns. There isn’t a fundamental change, we have more like pent up demand than anything. I’m no prophet but I’d bet more on a shifting but visible resurgence, not decades-long semi-permanent cave in.

People are people; if they can’t carry out what were interrupted plans, they will revise or do something else. They aren’t going to convert into midieval monks. If the profession gets into near starvation mode, you’ll see plenty of dramatic posts – and even if we go through a period of that, the angst evaporates when healing gets underway. At least that was true in the 2012 or so time period and the doom of L.A. topics just stopped suddenly (not on Land8 but other platforms) when there was less idle time. It was a funny thing to see, not a trickle down but dead stop. Like people had enough gloom and a switch was turned off. Maybe some just dropped out but I believe others moved on with some kind of adjustment and others got to return to a condition more like their “old normal.”

Oh, I think that will always have potential. It was widely used even back in the “olden days,” when I had my drawing board at home and only later moved into a former classroom in a renovated school building (and now am back home again). You just have to decide to market yourself to earn the convenience, and it doesn’t work so well for people interested in government or teaching. CAD and virtual communication make self employment even more feasible and home as a 1-person office setting. There just are some people who cannot seem to focus (or claim that) at home. But you can let yourself get distracted too easily in a shared or rented office, too.

I have a one person home office since I started working on my own nine years ago, so that is a zero change for me. I do residential design – 90% raze and replace home projects on desirable vacation home lots, so it is a demographic that is not as “financially inconvenienced” as most. They still treat their personal lifestyles very well while how they run the rest of their affairs may be very different. They are still moving forward with buying other people’s older waterfront homes for the lot and tearing them down to build their new dream homes. Others are still looking to add swimming pools and outdoor living amenities.

The engineers and architects that I work with are not seeing a change in demand. They are not having clients in their offices. They have employees working remotely for the most part. The residential builders and their subcontractors here in Massachusetts have been able to continue to work without missing a beat – supposedly following social distancing and wearing masks.

Until this past week, we had to do meetings by Zoom, Skype, Gotomeeting, and such. I was able to meet on site with Conservation Agents during all of this.

I’m on Cape Cod, so we are a resort area with a very high percentage of vacation homes and have lots of people who rent out their second homes by the week when they are not using them or simply as investments. The short term rentals are not allowed at this time and restaurants can only do take out which is going to have a huge impact on a lot of people. However, the waterfront multi-million dollar home owners mostly from Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are only impacted by the restaurants and bars not being opened. … golf opened last week.

I have had some calls for adding swimming pools and outdoor living amenities to existing homes for the reason that “if we are going to isolate we want to have things to do”.

A builder of custom homes and some high end spec’ homes told me that he sold 2 houses since the “shut down” to people who decided it was time to invest in a vacation home partially so they had a place to escape the city if this ever happens again.

Lots of people escaped the city to “self isolate” or “work remotely” in their vacation homes since this started. We usually have traffic jams on Friday coming and Monday going from here on Memorial Day weekend since there are only two bridges. That did not happen Friday because everyone was already here.

Bottom line: high end waterfront development for rich people escaping the city is still a vibrant market.

Definitely agree that there are lots of people in lots of different boats in society at large and lots of different niches in the landscape architecture world. Some are in calmer waters than others.

This is a good time to pay attention to which segments of the market stay active and who keeps doing well. I’m talking about the people who hire LAs or others rather than the LAs themselves. Pay attention to what they have their land planners produce and learn what is valued. That will show you the opportunities that exist. Then you can figure out where you can fit.

We are taught to do certain things and then to hope there is someone out there that will hire us to do those things. It is backwards. Find out who is out there and what they need and see what you can do to meet those needs. You can’t miss.

Thanks for your advice the third one helped me!