Deporting 20% of the already short handed workforce in residential construction, plus increased cost due to tariffs, will definitely affect prices, but housing prices aren’t going down.
No kidding.......
What seems to escape so many people is that there is literally no one out there to fill the void. A good living can currently be made in the trades, but I don't see parents pushing their children toward them.
A good question to consider is "What kind of annual salary would it take for me to encourage MY children to work on a roofing or drywall hanging crew?" $75,000? 100,000? $150,000? When you realize that plenty of those jobs are getting done for $40,000 per year it sort of brings the problem into focus.
Now I am a huge fan of professionalizing the trades, and the system needs reform. Perhaps the biggest reason is that a lot of employers are simply taking advantage of undocumented workers, with unsafe working conditions, no Workers Comp, etc. But the current trend makes me anticipate some real disruption. Folks could easily be waiting a year on a new roof at double or triple current rates, for example.
I'm fortunate in that my area doesn't have a lot of undocumented workers, and all of our crew and subcontractors crews are US citizens. Honestly the trend of deportation will likely make our work much more valuable, but at the cost of some serious inflation.
Part of me thinks there will be a token amount of deportation, quite well publicized, and then it will end when the consequences set in.
Americans have proven time and again that they want everyone else to teach their children to be willing to do manual labor, but their own are just too special.
Rant off.....
