Big stories

need to deliver products quickly. As an air and highway hub, metro Atlanta is an inviting location.

Shifts in manufacturing have also had something to do with it, as smaller, just-in-time factories need temporary storage for parts and materials.

Amazon Fresh launched a warehouse in Gwinnett and UPS is developing a massive ground hub near the Fulton County Airport. Other companies opening big distribution centers in the area included apparel-maker Tory Burch and Home Chef, the meal delivery service that announced a 1,200-job project in DeKalb County.

New warehouses tend to be larger, with wider spans for easier movement of products. That’s made many older ones obsolete and created opportunity for real estate developers, who sometimes adapt the older buildings into loft office space.

Housing rebounds

For housing, 2016 was a year of living paradoxically.

Sales and prices rose, foreclosures and delinquencies fell. It’s easy to argue that most areas are rebounding solidly from the painful housing bust of last decade.

Just look at the core counties: November is typically not the time of bustling sales, but in Cobb, there were 667 closings, in DeKalb 586, in Fulton 833 and in Gwinnett, a robust 819 — all up from 2015. Median prices rose, too: 6 percent in Cobb, 9 percent in DeKalb, 4 percent in Fulton and 9 percent in Gwinnett.

Yet one critical component refused to cooperate: inventory – the supply of homes listed for sale.

Despite hopes that higher prices and a better job market would spur sellers, inventory still lagged in 2016, especially at the lower end of the market where the firsttime buyers gather. Supply was off 16 percent in Cobb, 17 percent in DeKalb, 7 percent in Fulton and 22 percent in Gwinnett.

Once again, brokers are looking hopefully toward spring. But if inventory doesn’t rebound, the market will remain unbalanced, muting the benefits of rising values.

Drama at PulteGroup

Homebuilder PulteGroup is one of metro Atlanta’s newer corporate citizens, having moved to the area in 2014 from its former home of Detroit.

Turns out it brought along a simmering pot of boardroom drama. The pot boiled over last spring when the company abruptly announced that CEO Richard Dugas would step down next year because founder and major shareholder William Pulte was unhappy with the company’s performance and direction.

That didn’t satisfy the 83-yearold Pulte. He launched a barrage of public attacks on Dugas, along with demands that a new CEO be installed sooner. Among Pulte’s gripes was the Dugas-led Atlanta move, which he said “cost the shareholders tens of millions of dollars with no apparent benefit ...”

Eventually the company founder got his wish. Although PulteGroup’s board had called the founder’s criticisms “misguided,” Dugas relinquished the CEO post in September and was replaced by 15-year company veteran Ryan Marshall. Pulte’s grandson, meanwhile, joined the company board.

Airport lines gone wild

Business fliers are used to occasional airport logjams, but security checkpoint lines at Hartsfield-Jackson got out of hand last winter. Record passenger counts, along with efforts to tighten security, had lines snaking through the terminal and sometimes into baggage claim.

Then-general manager Miguel Southwell in February threatened to privatize security screening unless the federal Transportation Security Administration took action to fix things.

Officials warned that the problem, which occurred at other big airports as well, wouldn’t be quickly solved. But then it was.

Faced with a barrage of media reports and political pressure, the TSA shifted workers and adjusted practices. One of the highest-profile steps was the test of so-called “smart” screening lanes at the Atlanta airport’s South security checkpoint. That checkpoint was shut down for three weeks while the new lane was built, briefly making things worse.

But by July, after the new lanes were opened and other measures were in place, wait times had shortened significantly. Fears of summer gridlock subsided.

Hartsfield-Jackson is now adding another 20 smart lanes throughout the terminal, a $12.5 million project that will extend into mid-2017.

Delta melts down

A lot went right for Delta in 2016, with strong profits and performance measures. But the year also included a major faceplant.

A computer outage in August cascaded into a shutdown of Delta’s entire flight operation during a critical Monday morning rush hour, with disruptions rippling across the rest of the week.

The cause was a loss of power at an Atlanta server facility, and inadequate backup power that left Delta unable to smoothly reboot its network.

The resulting meltdown was epic: more than 2,300 flight cancellations over several days, stranding travelers at the Atlanta airport and other airports around the world. Miserable encampments at Hartsfield-Jackson and other Delta hubs played out live on cable news and social media.

In September, the airline disclosed that the outage took a $150 million financial toll, including $100 million in lost revenue and $50 million in extra costs. New CEO Ed Bastian publicly apologized and Delta issued $200 vouchers to marooned customers. They’re good until Aug. 8, 2017, so the outage continues to reverberate.

The great gasoline hunt

Colonial Pipeline, operator of 5,500 miles of crucial pipelines across the eastern U.S., used to be one of the most important local companies you’d never heard of.

But everybody with a gas-burning car learned Colonial’s name in September, when repairs on a leak in one of the Alpharetta company’s main regional gasoline pipelines went horribly wrong. An explosion and fire at the work site in Alabama shut down the line for several days, leading to a sudden and severe supply cut that left many metro Atlanta stations with dry pumps.

Motorists hunted anxiously for working pumps, and paid more when they found them. Prices jumped more than 35 cents a gallon. The episode put a spotlight on Colonial’s business and on the importance of such infrastructure to Americans’ mobility.

Colonial built a bypass around the leak site to get the flow going again, but suffered a second shutdown in November after another mishap on a related work project in Alabama. The shutdown was shorter and the effect on supply milder, however.

Colonial no doubt hopes for a return to anonymity in 2017.

New parent for Turner

Homegrown Atlanta broadcasting company Turner, owned since 1996 by New York-based Time Warner, could soon become part of a bigger media-telecom empire based in Texas.

Dallas-based AT&T wants to buy Time Warner — including its Turner brands CNN, TNT, TBS and others — in an $85 billion-plus, blockbuster deal announced in October.

It’s unclear if the deal will get done. President-elect Donald Trump slammed it on the campaign trail, saying it would concentrate too much media power. But political criticism has since softened and AT&T, which has moved aggressively into the pay-TV arena, argues it is a sensible combination that should survive regulatory review.

What does the deal portend for Turner and its several thousand Atlanta workers?

“I don’t anticipate it will have any impact on the Atlanta operations at all, “CNN boss Jeff Zucker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a few days after the deal was announced.

Perhaps, but Turner’s strategic center of gravity has already shifted toward New York, raising questions about how “Atlanta-based” it really is at this point. An AT&T takeover would only fuel the drama.

Ga. Power defends nukes

Georgia Power defended its over-budget nuclear expansion at Plant Vogtle and disclosed it is considering building another nuclear plant near Columbus someday.

In July, Georgia Power won approval from state utility regulators to spend $99 million by-mid 2019 to study a site south of Columbus for the proposed nuclear plant, part of its longterm plan for future energy production in the state.

The utility had originally asked for $175 million.

Meanwhile, back at Plant Vogtle the utility grappled with delays and contractor disputes that have pushed up costs and extended timetables.

Just before year-end, the state Public Service Commission approved a settlement that would eventually pass on most of $1.7 billion in cost overruns at the Vogtle plant to customers.

Georgia Power owns about half of the project to build two new reactors at the plant. It is more than 3 years behind schedule and more than $3 billion over budget.

In exchange, Georgia Power agreed to a lower profit margin for the next four years, and tougher penalties if it doesn’t complete the plant by the end of 2020.