I took the construction economic show on the road to Reno, where the local Construction Financial Management Association of Northern Nevada invited me to their lunch meeting on Thursday September 14. The slides are below.

Today was another fun lunch with the Sacramento Chapter of the Construction Financial Management Association. There is something about this group that makes me (uncharacteristically) optimistic about the economic status of the construction industry. Check out the slides below and e-mail me at [email protected] with questions or comments or if you want to geek out over tower cranes.

I am a huge fan of the Rider Levett Bucknall quarterly tower crane data drop. Tower crane counts are a sign of construction economic activity. Based on this one metric (and my own travels), things are pretty hot in Seattle, Los Angeles and Denver. While the skylines of LA and Seattle are certainly dominated by tower cranes, the undisputed king of North America is Toronto, which clocked 252 in Q1 2022 (compared to 203 in the cities listed below during the same quarter).

Based on an average of three quarter's worth of data (Q1 for 2021, 2022 and 2023), 50% of US tower cranes are on residential projects, 21% mixed-use and 13% commercial and the balance on other types of projects.

It has been nine months (and a move out of state) since a roundup of tower crane activity in Sacramento. I was passing through town on the way to watch Grace run her first marathon and was able to perform a quantity takeoff. It was easier than Q2 2022 because the skyline is a bit barer. Sacramento lost the following cranes:

• 7th and I Streets.
  
• Cathedral Square multifamily project on J Street and 11th Street.
  
• One of the tower cranes at the Sacramento County Courthouse replacement project, 6th and G Streets.

Moving from north to south, we can start with the remaining tower crane at the Sacramento County Courthouse.

Sacramento County Courthouse replacement project, 6th and G Streets. Clark Construction is the general contractor (project info in the link).

The newest addition to the Sac skyline is at Turner Construction's remodel of a State DGS building (Department of Water Resources?) on O Street between 8th and 9th Streets.

 Anthem Properties multifamily project at 15th and S Streets. Brown Construction is the GC.

Two new additions at the Aggie Square project being constructed by Whiting-Turner (construction updates can be found here). This could have been your project Jared ;)

This Saturday, the Boise State Broncos travel to Reno to face the University of Nevada Wolf Pack. This game has great significance in my family as my daughter Ella is in her second year in the Boise State CM program and I am an alum of UNR. While these cities house universities that are rivals on the gridiron, they are actually very similar. They both have similar climates (high desert) and have been attracting a lot of people who left relatively expensive coastal metro areas who were able to work remotely during COVID. As such, both cities have been experiencing a lot of growth in the built environment which means...tower cranes! So which city is winning the battle for who has more tower cranes? Let's start with Reno.

First up is a multi-family development downtown next to the Reno Aces ballpark at East 2nd Street and Evans Avenue. Multi-family has been a hot market nationwide and Reno is no exception. If you detect a trend as you read further, trust your instincts.

The project above is multi-family on podium parking and with the intended market being university students. This project is close to UNR (intersection of Enterprise and Valley Roads) and the general contractor is Plenium Builders. Student housing is also a hot market (check out my Austin post).

I'm cheating with this one, but it's my post so....
This tower crane was just recently pulled, hence the presence of the mobile cranes. This project was also aimed at students and is directly adjacent to the university (Virginia Street between West 14th and 15th Streets) and is being built by Clayco.

​So, as of this writing, Reno has two tower cranes on the skyline. If I had ventured to write this a few weeks ago, we would have had three. This is a strong showing for a relatively small metro market. So what's up Boise? Show us what you got.

As soon as you land in Boise, you are greeted by a tower crane at the airport. Looks like this is a parking garage expansion. While airports are not a traditional construction subcategory that gets a lot of attention, there is also a ton of work in that part of the economy.

Boise's downtown has seen a lot of building over the past few years (likely even before that, but my observations started three years ago when we visited Boise State and Ella fell in love with a rival to my alma mater. I may someday get over this). The general contractor on this project is Okland. I am not sure what this project will be other than I will make a relatively risk-free bet that it is multi-family or a hotel, both of which are popular products to build in Boise. Speaking of popular in Boise...

Hello student housing. There has been a ton of student-centric multi-family built near Boise State and this project at West Royal Blvd and Morrison Drive is the latest installment. This project is being constructed by Brinkmann Constructors. If you have not yet had your fill of student housing, then I offer just keep scrolling.

Here is another Brinkmann student housing project, this one at West Boise Avenue and West Beacon Street. It is close to Ella's apartment and I enjoy the regular updates from her. Apparently the love of tower cranes is hereditary.
So the final tally is Boise 4, Reno 2. This seems fitting given Boise State is, according to the latest info at ESPN, favored by 21 points and has an 84.5% chance of winning. Football aside, both cities are growing rapidly, with the growth accelerated by people being afforded the opportunity to work remotely. Reno has a history of being boom-and-bust and Boise's breakneck growth seeming to defy economic gravity, so we will see if the growth continues as the market cools.

As was reported in the AIA Architectural Billings Indices last week, design activity in the Midwest is fairly robust,,,for the moment.  I was able to check out Milwaukee and Chicago for myself and co-tower crane geek Bill Schmalzel reported from Minneapolis/St. Paul. We can confirm that those cities are busy and for subtly different reasons.
 
Milwaukee was slower the last time I was there, with only one tower crane in action. This time around, there were seven in action. Four (two at each project) were on multi-family projects, while one was on a hotel project strategically across the street from Fiserv Forum, home of the Milwaukee Bucks. The last two are on a large expansion of the Milwaukee Convention Center. While I am no means an expert on Milwaukee, I would consider all of these projects within the urban core of the city. This is different from Seattle (reported last month) and Chicago (see below) where most of the current construction is outside the core downtown area. My unsubstantiated hunch is that when construction moves outside the city core, it signals a topping in the market (or near topping) as developers move to less expensive land to build upon (the run-up in Sacramento is oftentimes an indicator that San Francisco is topping out and Sacramento is currently busy). Milwaukee doesn’t seem to be there yet, with the Couture project (#1 below) being built on what seems to be prime real estate. I threw in a pic of a project with two mobile cranes for kicks and another of some street art I found cool.

The convention center expansion is particularly impressive with the amount of activity currently happening. Check out the sea gull buzzing the towers! BTW, I love the streamline moderne architecture of the UW Milwaukee Panther (fromerly The Mecca) arena acraoss the street, 

​My wife and I traveled the 1.5 hours from Milwaukee to Chicago via train. As we entered the city, I saw a lot of construction activity, but it seemed way outside the city core. It turned out to be the West Loop, and I’ll focus specifically on that later in this post. The downtown core near the river was very quiet and much different from when I was in Chicago several years ago. That said, there was plenty of multi-family housing under construction, some of which is funded by Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-backed financing, giving the clue that it might be subsidized housing. Those projects (six total with seven tower cranes) are located in the map below and followed by site pictures.

​I threw in a couple of bonus pix below that warrant discussion. First, check out the hoist at the 720 South Wells Street project below. While taking the Architectural boat tour (my third time, my daughter’s second. I highly recommend!), we concluded that materials are being delivered on barges. Seems pretty smart given that the other side of the building is Wacker Street which seems perpetually jammed with traffic.

​Next, I had to throw in the obligatory picture of Wrigley Field, which is undergoing an expansion. My daughter and I had to check it out (she’s a construction management student at Boise State, so she also has the bug) before we went to see the Zac Brown Band for my wife’s birthday. 

​Moving on to the West Loop area. It. Was. Booming! The West Loop strikes me as the neighborhood my oldest daughter would love to live in, as would I but it would reveal my thirsty nature to come across as young. There were a lot of younger-looking adults walking around with doodle-bred dogs heading to yoga classes or fancy brunches. There happens to be a large Google office in the neighborhood, so you can probably picture the multi-cultural/high disposable income demographic of the neighborhood. Seriously, those are my spirit animals.
 
The construction looks overwhelmingly multi-family and commercial office (which Captain Obvious tells me is oftentimes the case when tower cranes are near and there’s a housing crunch). There are astonishingly nine tower cranes in this neighborhood right now.

Author's note if you are curious about the order of the pix, that's the route I took when running my routes through Milwaukee and Chicago. I catch a lot less ridicule if I tell people I'm going for a run as opposed to going to look at cranes. Plus I get to burn off all the Midwestern food I gorged on throughout the trip.

​​Lastly, Bill Schmalzel came in from the bullpen to give an update on Minneapolis/St. Paul. He’s a fellow tower crane/construction fan and he happened to be in the Midwest approximately when I was. He provided the three pictures below and the approximate locations. I have never been to MSP (it is definitely on my list and I hope to get there soon), so I hope I don't butcher the location/descriptions.

Bridge rehabilitation just upstream from St. Anthony's Falls.

Two luffers on a multi-family project new the Minnesota Twins baseball park.

Multi-family project in St, Paul close to the 1925 Ford Model T plant and very close to the Mississippi River.

Bill is so hard core he has sent me pix from Italy! I love it and he was the first person to do so. Now I get pix from friends and family all over the country. Keep them coming!

I have visited Seattle four times since 2019 and I have been constantly awed by the number of tower cranes I viewed. So it shocked me that when I searched the annals of this blog, this is the first specific post I have made regarding Seattle. Until just recently, Seattle was the undisputed heavyweight champion in terms of number of tower cranes in the United States (Toronto's response: "hold my beer"), only having recently been usurped by Los Angeles. This is a serious dereliction of my duties and I sincerely apologize. 

I will get to my most recent trip to Seattle on June 10-12, 2022 in a moment, yet let's set the scene by discussing my trip in November 2019. Those were quaint times...we visited my nephew Max at Seattle University and went to Husky Stadium on the campus of the University of Washington (the most beautiful athletics venue in the country in my humble opinion). This was pre-COVID and the the construction world was on fire with Seattle being the blue center of the flame. It seemed like every downtown corner had a tower crane on it, with the Washington State Convention Center being the centerpiece of the renaissance. It was truly unbelievable. Since then, we have (largely) emerged from the COVID shutdowns and the convention center is almost complete, yet it is still unbelievably busy in Seattle. The major change from my pedestrian point of view is that downtown is cooling and the building is moving to the periphery of the city. Don't get me wrong...downtown is still a beehive of activity, yet the action is radiating outward. This is a natural progression as a market tops out and developers start looking for less expensive land and demand extends outside of the expensive city core. Given those dynamics, I am going to split the pictures below into groups of neighborhoods:

• Downtown (which includes the neighborhoods of Downtown and Pioneer Square)
• South Lake Union (which includes the neighborhoods of Lower Queen Anne, lower Westlake, lower Eastlake, South Lake Union and Belltown)
• Capitol Hill (which includes the neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, First Hill, International District and the western edge of Central District)

If the above just sounds like a word salad, refer to the following handy interactive Seattle neighborhood map.
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Let's start with my favorite stop. This will be the Seattle Aquarium Oceanfront Center, on the site of the former elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct. There was a mammoth concrete pour going on this day. Turner is the general contractor (GC).
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This picture was taken from a distance and the site is in the Pioneer Destrict neighborhood. The homes of the Seahawks and Mariner are in the background.
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The last of the tower cranes at the Washington State Convention Center site. Lease Crutcher Lewis is the GC on this project.
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3rd Street and Virginia Street. BuildGroup is the GC.
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Four miscellaneous downtown tower crane pictures. 

​ CAPITOL HILL
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8th Avenue and Columbia Street. The GC is Anderson Structures. In a twist of fate, I met a soon-to-be superintendent on this project at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Superintendent Training Program (I'm talking about you Dakota!).
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A Hail Mary long distance pic at 8th Avenue and Dearborn Avenue. If you squint, you can see the original Rainier Beer factory in the background. My grandfather drank Vitamin R (if you know, you know).
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Yesler Way at South Washington Street. You can see Smith Tower (left) and Columbia Towetr (center) in the background.
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622 Rainier Avenue.
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Triple play at Yesler Way and 12th Avenue.
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Pride Place at 1519 Broadway. Walsh Construction is the GC.
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Boyleston and Spring Streets. Turner is the GC.
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Somewhere in the Seattle Central District neighborhood. The cylindrical building is the Alhadeff Santuary(?). The picture was taken from a parking structure on the Serattle University campus.
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Somewhere in Capitol Hill. I need to take better notes...

SOUTH LAKE UNION
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Double play at rhe intersection of Taylor and Thomas Streets. Both tower cranes have Seattle Kraken signage. Interestingly (to me anyway), the hotel across the street is the ugliest building I have seen in a very long time.
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228 Dexter Street.
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400 Westlake Street. The base of this building is the saved remements of a Firestone Tire Center which is a cool preservation project.
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412 1st Avenue North in Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, right across the street from the Climate Pledge Arena. By the way, the chocolate chip cookie at the Metropolitan Market a few blocks away live up to the hype.
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Southern end of the Westlake neighborhood. This was the most disorganized project site I saw.
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long shot photo of a luffer in the southern part of the Eastlake neighborhood (southest corner of Lake Union).

BONUS
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Random project between Seatac and downtown. If you go to Seattle, lightrail is a good bet to beat the horrible traffic. You're welcome.

Those are the cranes I saw with my own eyes. I'm sure there's more in the area given that there are some major Microsoft and Amazon projects in Bellevue and cranes visible at the University of Washington. That said, this should give some indication of the crazy level of construction going on in Seattle. Up next: rolling through the Midwest.

I was going to try to come up with some sort of dad joke-like title for this post (Tower Cranes in Vegas = Jackpot -or- Tower Crane Count in Vegas is Scorching) but I just don't have in me right now. That said, I do have a few cool pix to share, particularly regarding the MSG Sphere, so let's start with that. Before looking at the pix below, keep in mind the following stats that I picked up from this article at casino.com:

• One of the crawler cranes used on this project is the fourth largest ever assembled, taking 18 days to set up.
• The arena will seat 17,500 people.
• The project cost is $1.8 billion and is scheduled to open in 2023.
• The interior screen will be the size of three football fields and is 100 times clearer than the best HD TV you can buy today.

I know I'm going off script with crawler cranes, but these beasts are engineering marvels and were actually to big to adequately capture in a single picture. You should also know that I risked life and limb to get these pictures. A security guard told us we could not take pictures whereby a buddy I was with said "we're standing on a public sidewalk, we'll take all the pictures we want." Please note that previous quote was edited so that i can keep this post family-friendly. Without further ado...

View from the adjacent Venetian parking structure. Not sure which of these was the fourth largest crawler crane, but they are both huge.

These crawler cranes act like mobile luffer tower cranes. I assume they used mobile cranes because the size of the dome necessitated repositioning.

A view of the beast from the bottom. I found it odd that they needed to place the crane tracks on dunnage given the incredibly hard nature of Las Vegas caliche soil (ya, I just went full geotech nerd on you.)

View from the entrance to the Venetian Convention Center. Notice the soon-to-be-completed enclosed elevated walkway to the MSG Sphere that ducks just below the elevated monorail.

Oh yeah, there were also some other tower cranes that were infinitely less cool than these crawlers.

Two luffers at the Venetian. By now it should be completely clear that there is a lot of work going on at/around the Venetian Hotel.

The last crane I saw was this tower crane working on a ho hum renovation project at the Hilton Grand Vacations time share.

While the crowds on the strip were a bit rough (Seriously, who takes little kids there? And who pays to have a picture taken with someone wearing a soiled Spider Man costume? Actually, never mind, I would prefer not to know.), but it has been years even before COVID that I had been down there and I was glad I got to see the MSG Sphere under construction and I'm intrigued to see a show there when it is done.

It has been seven months since my last Sacramento update, so perhaps I should relabel these biannual updates...oh well. Since November, Sacramento is down a tower crane, leaving the overall count to five. I just returned to Seattle, where five seems like a colossal letdown (more on that in a separate forthcoming post), yet five is pretty good for Sacramento, historically speaking. Since November, here are the cranes that were removed from the Sacramento skyline:

• Multifamily at S Street between 16th and 17th Streets (up for what seemed to be a hot minute)
• The AJ, Railyard Boulevard between 6th and 7th Streets, Brown Construction
• CalSTRS second tower at 3rd and E Streets in West Sacramento, DPR Construction (which seemed to be up for several years)

Two new cranes replaced the three above. The details are as follows, moving from north to south:

​Two tower cranes at the Sacramento County Courthouse replacement project, 6th and G Streets. Clark Construction is the general contractor (project info in the link).

New addition to the skyline at 7th and I Streets and looks to be a multifamily project. Tricorp Group is the GC.

 Cathedral Square multifamily project on J Street and 11th Street. DesCor Builders is the GC. For an inside look at this project, click here. The owner for this project is Anthem Properties, which leads us to...

...Another Anthem Properties multifamily project at 15th and S Streets. Brown Construction is the GC.

I was in Austin the week before last for a few days of rest and relaxation. I was in Austin in 2015 and was impressed by the number of tower cranes back then. The current skyline is even more impressive. By my count, I could see 24 tower cranes one the following types of projects:

• Student housing: 9 (all of it looking privately-funded)
• Residential: 6 (with one on the way)
• Hotel: 4
• Commercial/office: 5

I typically use my morning run as a means to see city landscapes and construction projects. Given the amount of tower cranes, I put in more miles than expected. As such, I needed to replenish and "rehydrate" and Austin did not disappoint on that front. The evidence of Austin's awesomeness are below.
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I wasn't able to get back to Franklin BBQ, but Terry Black's was pretty damn good (and 20 minute wait vs. 2.5 hours). But hands down, I highly recommend a visit to Still Austin for some bourbon. Bonus points if it's Drag Queen Bingo Day.