Rise & Fall of LA Firms: Did Company Greed Kill Our Jobs?

[Tom Cluff]

No, no one has these statistics. I’ve been looking at doing a master’s thesis related to the impact of the economic downturn on the profession, but there is so little in the way of reliable data that even designing a research proposal is a exercise in frustration.

The closest you could get to data that might give you a peek at what’s happened to the profession is ASLA’s quarterly survey. However, the real data behind that survey isn’t available unless you buy it and, given the laughable spin ASLA puts on the press releases that accompany the dribble of results they do release, I doubt they really want anybody doing independent analysis of the responses.

A close proxy for reliable data is some internal reporting that the CEO Roundtable does for their meetings. Even if they wanted to, they can’t release that data because of Anti-Trust Act restrictions. Sometimes you can talk to one of the people on the roundtable and get them to tell you — in broad generalities — what’s happened to the profession, but nothing that you could run your own analysis on. Or even reliably cite.

Unfortunately, the broad generalities that they can tell you are bad. Very, very bad. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 60+% employment shrinkage in the profession. That doesn’t take into account the large number of LAs who lost a job, went home and hung out a shingle for themselves, so it’s reasonable to think that the profession hasn’t truly lost 60% of it’s practitioners, this is merely what a limited (and decidedly non-representative) sample of still-functioning firms are reporting. Nor does that 60% equate to anywhere near 60% fewer firms as it’s more likely that a firm would hang on with two or three people (where they had 20 or so) rather than close outright. (The truly scary thing here is that this 60+% number comes from earlier this year when things seemed like they were turning around and no one had mentioned the possibility of a double-dip recession.)

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On the thread topic: Among all the costs that a working firm bears, the salaries of your people are so far and away the largest that the difference in cost between a plush downtown office space and some drab strip-mall horror isn’t going to matter when the money stops coming in. Regardless of what firm management spent their money on when the times were good, once the economy tanks there is no other cost saving measure, either before or during the downturn, that can save them from having to layoff employees for whom they don’t have work. 

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

There is no reason why anyone in any business should not be allowed to enjoy aesthetics within their work place. Greed has nothing to do with that, as far as I am concerned. Excessive vanity is not a trait that I appreciate, but it still is not the same as greed.

 

Greed is when you exploit others for any reason, when you replace other values to get more, and things of that nature. That is out there in any profession or any community. I think we most see it in this profession with the exploiting interns that I’m just learning about. If they buy art, they are providing artists with money – a good thing. If they re-decorate, they are buying goods and services. How is that bad?

 

Making hay while the sun shines is practical. Cutting back when you have to is also practical. Enjoying life when the opportunity presents itself is not a bad thing. It is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all, as they say. No one is going to keep an employee that has no work employed whether they bought a chandelier or not. If you have work, you have employees. It is not simply because you still have money in the bank that you’ll continue to pay someone to not work.

 

The success that the profession enjoyed last decade inspired a lot of people to join it. Were they greedy? Is some of the problem that too many people tried to get into a profession that was overloading itself in a time of unsustainable growth? Let’s not forget that a lot of people went into this profession because they thought they could make a lot of money doing something fun. Was that greedy? I don’t think so.

 

Most of the time our role is to improve aesthetics and without that human need to make things nicer through the use of money, all of it would be done by engineers and architects. We live by selling aesthetics, why would we want to entertain the idea that spending money on aesthetics is a negative human quality? That would be hipocracy at its best.

 

There is way too much brainwashing going on out there to get people to hate those that are successful. We used to be encouraged to strive for prosperity. Now it is like a crime to be successful. Unfortunately, I can’t find any poor folks that want to hire me, so I’m stuck working for people with at least a moderate income. They are also the only ones keeping the contractors busy which keeps the unskilled and semi-skilled laborers employed as well. I can’t wish them to go away. I definitely don’t want them to stop spending money either. I wish more of them were landscape architects (I wish more LAs were getting rich).

 

 

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