While some contractors dismiss the plan as political rhetoric, many say they can’t afford to lose more people from an aging, immigrant-dependent workforce still short of nearly 400,000 people.
Both presidential candidates promise to build more homes. One promises to deport hundreds of thousands of people who build them.
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” would hamstring construction firms already facing labor shortages and push record home prices higher, say industry leaders, contractors and economists.
“It would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems,” said Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. The trade group considers foreign-born workers, regardless of legal status, “a vital and flexible source of labor” to builders, estimating they fill 30% of trade jobs like carpentry, plastering, masonry and electrical roles.
There’s currently 15,000,000 houses in the US that aren’t even being lived in right now. We in no way have to increase the production rate of building more houses in order to house everyone.
And are all those houses in areas where there’s enough jobs to support the people living in them? Are all of those houses in livable condition? Further than that, what makes you think that Society needs one house to one person? If you don’t have a surplus of houses you don’t have the ability to move from one city to the next to pursue new opportunities. You always need a large surplus of houses so that Mobility is possible. So I think you’ll find that when you look a little closer at that number it’s not quite as advantageous as you think.