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Trump Has Found a Way to Exacerbate the Housing Shortage

With housing starts at a five-year low, his ICE agents deport hundreds of construction workers every day.

Housing starts hit a five-year low last month. What better time to deport thousands of construction workers!

Data released by the Census Bureau yesterday shows that there were fewer housing starts in May than in any month since the 2020 pandemic. Despite a housing shortage that has led to record levels of housing unaffordability, a host of factors are reducing supply even more. Canadian lumber has fallen prey to the Trump tariffs, mortgage interest rates remain high, and now the administration is hell-bent on deporting a sizable chunk of the home construction labor force. Immigrants, documented and not, dominate the roofing workforce, constitute a majority of drywall installers, and may be a plurality of carpenters as well. Housing construction contractors and subcontractors get a sizable share of their crews from the guys lining up outside the Home Depots—only, those crews aren’t so sizable these days, what with deportations and the threat of deportations hollowing out the shape-ups.

There’s more to this shortage than onerous regulations—indeed, in places like California, a deregulatory momentum in housing is building. But it’s more than offset by two facets of Trump’s xenophobic white nationalism—his tariffs and his deportations. If the “abundance” crew can refocus themselves on the present causes of the housing shortage, they should be out there with the demonstrators protesting the ICE raids that daily seize hundreds of workers proficient with hammers and nails. If they’re not, that means abundance is something of a false flag.

Given Trump’s particular focus on California, it should come as no surprise that the quarterly forecast for the state’s economy released this week by UCLA’s Anderson School of Management predicts that the state’s economy (which, if California were a nation, would be the world’s fourth-largest) will contract as the year goes on, due chiefly to Trump’s tariff and deportation policies. For a host of reasons, most prominently that “people are afraid to go to work,” Jerry Nickelsburg, the author of the report, told the Los Angeles Times, major sectors of the state’s economy, including agriculture and construction, will likely see supply falling even shorter of demand. The gaps created by the ICE sweeps of day laborers and other construction workers aren’t likely to be easily filled, Nickelsburg said. “The fact that California’s unemployment rate is going up doesn’t mean that those people can now just go and work in construction. They might not have the right skills, they might not have the physical strength and stamina. They might not be able to or they might be really disinterested in that kind of work.”

The lack of interest in that kind of work is a hallmark of the Trump administration. Not enough workers to build houses or harvest the crops? So, a whiter America comes with a side dish of scarcity. Don’t like it? You can leave, too.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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