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The American home is shrinking. Toll the bell for the McMansion.

After years of growth, the Census Bureau recently reported that median new home size fell to 2,135 square feet in 2009 after peaking at more than 2,300 earlier in the decade.

"Home buyers are asking for less, cutting back on options and reducing square footage," said Steven Pace of the North Carolina-based Pace Development Group, which builds both custom and tract houses ranging in price from below $250,000 to more than $2 million.

"They’re saying, ‘Maybe we don’t need that 5,000 square footage;" he said. "’Maybe our bath doesn’t need to be big enough for our whole family and all our neighbors to take a shower at the same time.’"

Kermit Baker, chief economist for the American Institute of Architects, pointed out that consumers don’t ask for as much for spaces devoted to single purposes, such as media rooms for watching videos and game rooms for shooting pool. Instead, the requests are for rooms with shared uses.

"We continue to move away from the ‘McMansion’ chapter of residential design," he said.

Now, the typical U.S. owner-occupied home has six rooms, with three of them being bedrooms, according to the Census Bureau’s annual American Housing Survey cheap business cards. The most common number of baths is two or more.

For those who remember the days of long, hot summers. Those are over, too. Nearly 90% of all new homes now have central air conditioning. And 63% of all homes are now cooled.

These are a big increases from even 10 years ago, when only 52% of owner-occupied homes — i.e. non-rental properties or second homes — boasted central air.

More than three-quarters of all homeowners now load up dishwashers, up from 65% a decade ago. And garbage disposals can be found in nearly half of owner-occupied homes, up from 46%.

On a broader scope, the survey revealed that, despite the recent hoopla about the new urbanism and return to cities, most Americans still lead a "Leave it to Beaver" lifestyle.

Of the more than 76 million owner-occupied homes in 2009, 63 million were traditional detached, single-family residences. And city dwellers, you’re outnumbered: Far more homeowners live in the suburbs than in cities.

Regionally, the South, held the largest number of owner-occupied units, followed by the Midwest, then the West and finally the Northeast.  

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Solar is making the news this morning in Arizona with three announcements:

* The city of Surprise put out a news release saying a major solar energy company is creating a U.S. headquarters and manufacturing facility in West Valley city with details to be announced Wednesday.

* Arizona Public Service Co. and SunPower Corp. of California signed an agreement to build a 15-megawatt solar photovoltaic system at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale. About 550 jobs will be created during construction with completion scheduled for next summer. The facility is expected to generate the equivalent of 50 percent of the base’s energy use, or enough to power 3,750 homes. Construction is set to begin in January saving account pay day loan. Early talks about this plant were reported in the Phoenix Business Journal in May.

* Solon Corp., a silicon solar module manufacturer and provider of turnkey solar power plants, signed an agreement with Tucson Electric Power Co. to bring a 1.6 megawatt solar plant to the city. The University of Arizona will house the 1.6-megawatt system at UATechPark’s SolarZone, a 200-acre project designed to bring together industry, research and solar demonstration components. Construction is scheduled to be completed by December.

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Three internists have left Monroeville-based Premier Medical Associates to join the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, according to spokesman Paul Wood.

Drs. George Wahal, Andrew Margolis and Kahir Ariff will become UPMC doctors next month, Wood said. The move was in the works before Premier reached agreement July 8 with West Penn Allegheny Health System to accept 30 primary care doctors who were employed by the health system, Wood said.

The West Penn Allegheny-Premier deal followed nine months of negotiations, which will increase Premier’s heft as a medical care provider in the city’s eastern suburbs while helping West Penn Allegheny cut losses associated with its employed physicians’ group. Premier is the biggest independent physicians’ group in the region; UPMC is the dominant hospital network, followed by West Penn Allegheny.

In May, UPMC reported its operating income rose 16 percent year-over-year for the first nine months of 2010. West Penn by contrast, saw an operating loss of $5.2 million between January and March, and announced last month it planned to trim 1,500 jobs and close the emergency room at its hospital in the city's Bloomfield neighborhood.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is hosting four public information meetings in the coming weeks on hydraulic fracturing, used in natural gas drilling, to look at its impact on drinking water. One of the meetings is scheduled in Canonsburg, south of Pittsburgh.

Fracing is a process which involves pumping millions of gallons of water mixed with friction-reducing chemicals and fine sand into a well at high pressure to break up the dense shale and release the natural gas trapped inside. The technique, along with the advent of horizontal drilling technology, has made the gas-rich shale formations economically possible to develop, but it also has led to new challenges when it comes to ensuring the water is cleaned up properly after use.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is an area where fracing is of particular interest, due to the widespread Marcellus Shale natural gas play in the area.

The EPA meetings will provide public information about the scope of a proposed study on fracing, and will solicit public comment. Those wishing to participate should contact the EPA at least 72 hours in advance.

The meetings are scheduled as follows:

• July 8 in Fort Worth, Texas
• July 13 in Denver, Colo.
• July 22 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn in Canonsburg
• Aug. 12 in Binghamton, N.Y., for three sessions

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One unit of Duke Energy Carolinas’ McGuire Nuclear Station is likely to be out of service through this week following a problem with control rods in the reactor.

Duke reported the outage to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Saturday. The utility said the plant had been running at 44 percent of capacity because a control rod dropped in the reactor. Then operators received indications that a second rod had dropped, and the plant was shut down.

Duke says the plant is stable after the shutdown, and control rods have been inserted. The company could not say when the unit would return to operation.

Reuters quotes unnamed electricity traders as expecting the plant to return to service within a week bad credit payday loans.

The second unit at McGuire is unaffected and is producing power normally.

The McGuire station has two 1,100-megawatt nuclear units. The plant is on Lake Norman, north of Charlotte.

Duke Energy Carolinas is a subsidiary of Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp. (NYSE:DUK), which operates utilities in the Carolinas, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.

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The city of Phoenix has received $423 million to date through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Mayor Phil Gordon said Friday.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport $26.6 million for two baggage screening systems.

“The city of Phoenix continues to work hard to stimulate our economy and put our residents back to work,” Gordon said in a prepared statement. “Surpassing $400 million in ARRA funds is a significant accomplishment and demonstrates our commitment to secure funds for critical projects and create jobs.”

Gordon noted other ARRA-funded projects, including $25 million for energy-efficiency improvements to neighborhoods along the Metro light rail system. He wants to call that the “Green Rail Corridor.”

Phoenix has also received stimulus funds for house weatherization grants for low-income homeowners, and for transportation projects.

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Foreclosure activity in the St. Louis region spiked in April as banks pulled the trigger on more repossessions after several months of delay.

The number of houses either set for a foreclosure sale or actually taken back hit its highest level since September, according to data from RealtyTrac, and jumped 21 percent from the same month last year. In all, 1,090 houses were given an auction date and 789 repossessed in the 17-county metro area.

It’s a troubling sign after several quieter months on the foreclosure front but one that housing advocates have been warning about. Banks have been delaying foreclosures and offering trial modifications, with mixed results. And stubbornly high unemployment means more borrowers are strapped for cash to pay their mortgages, regardless of interest rates.

The rough month for St. Louis comes as national foreclosure rates appear to be plateauing. RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure activity nationwide fell 2 percent from last April, its first year-over-year decline on record.

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In the rich tradition of April Fool’s Day pranks, Google has renamed itself after Topeka, Kan., accompanied by an absurd explanation from the company’s chief.

On Thursday morning, the company’s home page was titled "Topeka" instead of "Google," although still in its distinctive blue-red-yellow-green font.

Why? Because in March, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten announced that he was informally changing the name of his town to "Google," just for one month. He told CNN that he was doing it for "fun." This is Google’s tit-for-tat explanation, according to its official blog, posted by CEO Eric Schmidt.

"Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore," blogs Schmidt.

April Fool’s Day carries a long tradition for pranks and punks, which affect every aspect of life, from the school yard to the board room. Since the advent of the Internet, companies and individuals have gotten inundated with funky e-mails making wild claims, on this day in particular.

Google has made a name for itself as one of the more proactive pranksters in the business world. Every year on April 1, the company tries to punk its followers with a new prank.

Past pranks

The naughtiness stems back to 2000, when Google claimed that its "MentalPlex" could read your mind through your computer screen, allowing users to conduct searches on sheer brain power.

"With MentalPlex, you just project a mental picture of what you want to find," explained Google, in its 2000 posting, accompanied by a hypnotic spiral.

Last year, Google claimed its site was featuring the world’s first 3D browser, but this was just another case of April Fool’s bunk.

The strange tradition of April Fools’ mass media pranks goes back to 1957, when the BBC broadcast a weird and untrue television segment about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees.

Naturally, many of the viewers mistakenly thought the BBC story was real. 

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BRUSSELS — The sinking euro and a downgrade of Portugal’s debt put renewed pressure on European leaders Wednesday to come up with a bailout plan for Greece and stem the government debt crisis undermining their shared currency.

But agreement remained elusive as today’s summit meeting approached. Markets increasingly expect any bailout for Greece to involve the International Monetary Fund — and EU governments are discussing whether they would permit that and add financial help from eurozone nations.

Germany is holding back a deal, reluctant to put taxpayer money on the line for Greece. But failure to help an indebted eurozone country would be an admission that Europe can’t halt the crisis in its currency union.

The latest vote of no confidence in vulnerable eurozone economies came with Fitch Ratings’ downgrade Wednesday of Portugal’s debt faxless cash advance. The credit ratings agency said that Portugal’s prospects for recovery were weaker than others in the eurozone and that it faced problems shrinking its deficit.

The euro hit a 10-month low against the U.S. dollar on Wednesday on the Portuguese downgrades and the uncertainty over Europe’s dithering over Greece — which says it will need eurozone or IMF help if markets keep charging it painfully high costs to borrow.

Greece’s debt crisis has undermined the euro by showing that the rules supporting it have not prevented governments from overspending, hitting public accounts. Athens’ woes are also putting pressure on other eurozone countries with troubled finances, such as Portugal and Spain.

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New Zealand’s economy lost some momentum as retail spending and the property market slowed in the first months of 2010, according to the Treasury Department.

Leading indicators suggest January retail sales may decline and the housing market has slipped, the department said in a report posted on its Web site. The monthly update doesn’t contained new forecasts.

Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard last month said he is looking for evidence that the economic recovery has become self sustaining before he will start to raise interest rates from record lows. The Treasury said forward-looking indicators such as immigration and business confidence remain upbeat, matching the view of economists who expect Bollard will raise the official cash rate in June.

“The potential for a strong acceleration in gross domestic product is suggesting the Reserve Bank should keep to its stated tightening track” of a rate increase around the middle of 2010, said Craig Ebert, senior economist at Bank of New Zealand Ltd. in Wellington.

Nine of 12 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News expect Bollard will raise the official cash rate from 2.5 percent in June. Two forecast an April increase and one tips July. None expect any change in policy at the next review on March 11.

Indicators of retail spending suggest sales volumes declined in January, the Treasury said. Consumer confidence fell in February, according to an index compiled by ANZ National Bank Ltd. and Roy Morgan Research.

House Sales

The number of house sales plunged 16 percent in January, the department said, citing its analysis of Real Estate Institute figures. The market is likely to remain steady in face of rising home-loan interest rates, it said payday loans.

Extra new listings of properties for sale could depress prices, said Ebert. Listings rose 24 percent in February from a year earlier, Web site realestate.co.nz said today.

Business confidence rose to a 10-year high last month, according to a second ANZ Bank survey published on Feb. 25. The economy could expand 4 percent this year, based on the survey’s responses, the Wellington-based bank said.

“The results were consistent with the economy continuing to expand over 2010,” the Treasury said today.

Buoying the economy, immigration is rising and New Zealand’s currency has fallen 3.8 percent against the U.S. dollar in the past three months. Exports including milk powder, cheese and meat make up 30 percent of the economy.

Commodity Prices

“The lower exchange rate in recent months is providing more confidence for exporters,” the Treasury said.

Commodity export prices have surged 7.9 percent in New Zealand dollars from January, according to an ANZ Bank index published today. Prices for six of nine commodities monitored by the bank rose in February.

Annual immigration growth was the strongest in more than five years, according to a government report today.

The number of permanent migrant arrivals exceeded departures by 22,588 in the 12 months ended Jan. 31, up from 21,253 in the 12 months through December. That’s the highest since May 2004.

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