Signals: What We're Tracking
California's potential quartz ban is pushing builders and fabricators toward surfaces that don't release crystalline silica dust, which is thought to be the cause of silicosis in workers. Alternatives include amorphous silica slabs, which perform almost like quartz, and recycled glass composites made mostly from crushed glass. Some brands are also selling low-silica lines of quartz. See which surfaces the ban would cover→
Naples and Miami were attracting a surge of new residents, but both markets are now cooling, and Cotality attributes the shift to weather risk, with both ranking among the top three U.S. cities for homes simultaneously exposed to three natural disaster threats over the next 30 years. Read Cotality's home-value weather-risk analysis →
Data centers are boosting the sales of ... gray paint. PPG, which supplies data centers with fire-, rust- and static-resistant coatings in shades of gray, expects its data center paint sales to triple this year. According to a JLL data center manager, coatings can total $3 million to $8 million for a single building. Sherwin-Williams said in July that data center work helped lift its own sales as well. Read more (NYT link) →
And yet: Pickleball have come up in more in town meetings around the country than data centers have. Hamlet, which tracks local government meetings, found the sport came up in 468 places over the past two years (most instances in favor), compared with 358 instances for data centers (with most, no surprise, against them). Browse the rankings of what towns are debating→
