Building in America - Is the Housing Crisis a Labor Issue?
Written by Gabriela Passos (January 2025 - some edits to this text made April 2025)
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In a packed atrium, eager parents and their high school-aged kids wait eagerly to explore the grounds of Thomas Edison High School of Technology in Silver Springs, Maryland. Lining the atrium are the six classrooms home to the six construction cohorts: carpentry, electricity, HVAC, masonry, plumbing, and architecture that Thomas Edison offers its students. As students began exiting the room and heading to their respective meeting areas, the remaining construction students eagerly peeked inside the rooms lined with machinery and handheld tools.
The Thomas Edison Construction Technology Program is one of many Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs in the United States designed to encourage high school students to think about careers in technical fields ranging from advanced manufacturing and construction to digital technology and marketing. Roughly 17% of high school students in the U.S. have access to a CTE program like Thomas Edison’s.
Despite an increase in CTE programs at the high school and college level over the last decade, industries like construction still face challenges in attracting young people. Today, about one in five construction workers is 55 or older.
Unfortunately for the industry, construction is seasonal and consists of long hours, and during challenging economic times, the industry slows down. All of these factors discourage young Americans from entering the field.
So much so that in 2023, 90 percent of single-family builders in the U.S. reported a shortage of skilled laborers. The National Association of Home Builders estimates the industry needs approximately 723,000 new construction workers yearly to meet demand.
This labor shortage, coupled with inflation, rising interest rates, and a global pandemic, has significantly handicapped residential builders' ability to build homes. Before 2008, U.S. developers were building around 2.2 million homes a year. Today, they are building just under 1.43 million homes a year.
The result is a housing market with too few homes for the number of buyers looking to purchase. Economists estimate that the gap in the housing supply has reached 2 to 3 million and is the reason homeownership has become unattainable for most Americans.
The Democratic and Republican parties have both proposed plans to address the housing crisis that will decrease zoning regulations and increase access to federal lands for builders to build new homes. However, both parties fail to address the construction industry's biggest underlying challenge today: labor.
The goal of the Construction Technology Program is to get young people in Montgomery County, Maryland, to think about the various career paths available to them within the construction industry. “Not every kid needs to go to college. We try to show them that if they are interested in construction, there is so much that they can do in this industry and make a good living doing so,” says Don Wheatley, the carpentry teacher at Thomas Edison. Wheatley, a Thomas Edison alum, has passed down his passion for carpentry to students for over 20 years.
Some of his students have gone on to pursue higher education in the field of construction. Still, the educator understands that these programs are not a direct funnel into the field but rather an opportunity for students to learn practical skills and understand the steps by which homes are built in America.
Even before President Trump was set to take office in January, construction industry leaders such as the CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, Jim Tobin, had expressed concern over Trump’s promises of mass deportations and the effect it could have on the supply of homes in the U.S. given that a third of the home building industry’s labor is foreign-born particularly Central American immigrants.
While continuing to advocate for mass deportation, President Donald Trump has also promised to make housing affordable again. The former president has asserted that the reason housing has become so unaffordable for Americans is in large part due to the increased number of immigrants coming into the U.S. since President Joe Biden took office.
“Without immigrants, Florida would not be building at the rate that it is today,” Pedro Passos, a Brazilian-American residential builder in Orlando, FL., explains (Full disclosure: Pedro Passos is the older brother of the author of this piece). In states like Florida, California, and Texas, immigrants account for 38% of the construction industry’s workforce.
“Every single one of our guys is an immigrant. Very few people who pick up the hammer are from the United States,” Passos explains. The heavy reliance on immigrant labor in states where there is a large immigrant population has allowed builders in these markets to continue to build more consistently than builders in other states.
The Center for American Progress estimates that today, more than 1 in 10 construction workers are undocumented, an estimated total of 1.6 million undocumented immigrants working in the construction industry. Despite being undocumented, these individuals and their households work to fill the gaps in the construction industry and contribute $12.9 billion a year in federal taxes and $7.7 billion in state and local taxes. The majority of these taxes are collected as payroll taxes and go towards services like Medicare and Social Security that undocumented immigrants are barred from accessing.
Organizations like the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a national construction industry trade association representing more than 23,000 members, have started to push federal government officials to make changes to the U.S. legal immigration system to solve the immediate shortage of labor. In a statement put out by the CEO, Michael Bellaman, in January of 2024, he calls for an “all-of the-above approach to worker development” to address the industry’s outsized retirement levels and the urgency to fill the labor gaps while also encouraging young people to enter into the construction industry.
With the rise in home prices, the Thomas Edison Construction Technology Program has been able to put a higher price tag on their student-built homes. The students accepted into this year's incoming Thomas Edison Construction Technology Program will be a part of an MCPS’ 44-year tradition, the Young American Design/Build Project, where students in each cohort work with industry professionals to design and build a home in their community. The first home built by Thomas Edison students in 1976 in Bethesda, Maryland, is now worth almost $1.2 million.
Unfortunately, the program is not immune to the downsides of the residential construction industry. Wheatley explains how, over the years, rising land and material costs have forced the program to bus its construction students farther away from campus. And despite selling their homes at market value, their costs continue to rise, threatening the program's ability to operate independently and continue to teach students about the opportunities available to them in construction.