The Associated General Contractors says this industry is short somewhere between 380,000 and 450,000 workers. The spread on that estimate is roughly the population of Cleveland, and it doesn't much matter which end is right, because both ends mean the same thing: the houses aren't getting built.
And the BLS backs it up from the other side. Construction employment has been basically flat since 2019 while housing starts kept trying to catch demand and kept missing. You can rezone every parcel in America, you can drop rates, you can hold all the press conferences you want. A house is a pile of sticks until a framing crew shows up, and nobody's been training framing crews.
You want to know where they went? College. From about 1998 to 2018, every guidance counselor in America ran the same play: kid has a pulse, kid goes to a four-year school. The shop programs got shut down or gutted to make room. The generation that would be journeyman framers right now — running crews, training the next batch — is instead sitting on a marketing degree and $47,000 in student debt. I don't say that to dunk on them. Somebody they trusted handed them the map. The map was wrong.
Meanwhile the wage signal is sitting out in the open and nobody in DC will read it. Framers in Denver, Phoenix, and Nashville are pulling $38 to $52 an hour as W-2 employees, plus overtime. That's better money than most mid-level office jobs. And you'll still hear the trades called “undervalued,” because that fits the story. They're not undervalued. They're understaffed. Those are different problems, and only one of them gets fixed with a hashtag.
Which is why the whole zoning fight makes me tired. Fine — upzone everything, tomorrow, every city in the country. Great. Now the permits sit in a drawer until 2029 waiting on a crew, because zoning was the political fight and labor was the actual constraint the whole time. You can't legislate a guy onto a top plate.
What actually moves the needle is boring, which is probably why nobody campaigns on it. Community colleges putting trades programs back. Employers funding real apprenticeships instead of complaining that nobody wants to work. Immigration rules that let the guys who are willing to do this work stay legal and on the books. And parents telling their kid, out loud, that a two-year apprenticeship is a better bet than a four-year sociology degree.
Houses aren't expensive because of zoning maps. They're expensive because there's nobody to swing the hammer. Fix that first and watch what the price does.