Substack author The Emergent City, who writes about Australian housing policy, says that low supply of skilled tradespeople and construction workers is slowing down new construction of housing. In part, those is because there are other major building projects (non-housing) that are bidding for their services. Is insufficient supply of tradespeople/construction workers a big issue for US housing policy?
This is a great question. There is some evidence that there is insufficient supply, quoting Glaeser and Gyourko 2025:
“Real construction costs increased by 25% over the past two decades. A large fraction of the employees and establishments in the homebuilding sector left the sector after the GFC.”
But it is something we would love to dig more deeply into.
The advertising campaign to encourage youth to enter trades sounds promising. However, I can anecdotally tell you that in high-education families (everyone with university degrees), there's an irrational "snob factor", whereby a 22-year-old adult child getting a BA in art history is celebrated but one getting a trade certificate is encouraged to go onto university--even if the art history grad is unemployed and the "tradie" cousin has a highly-paid job on a construction site.
Substack author The Emergent City, who writes about Australian housing policy, says that low supply of skilled tradespeople and construction workers is slowing down new construction of housing. In part, those is because there are other major building projects (non-housing) that are bidding for their services. Is insufficient supply of tradespeople/construction workers a big issue for US housing policy?
This is a great question. There is some evidence that there is insufficient supply, quoting Glaeser and Gyourko 2025:
“Real construction costs increased by 25% over the past two decades. A large fraction of the employees and establishments in the homebuilding sector left the sector after the GFC.”
But it is something we would love to dig more deeply into.
They instituted a media campaign called Tradies Get the Ladies. I don’t know how much it actually helped housing affordability in Australia.
The advertising campaign to encourage youth to enter trades sounds promising. However, I can anecdotally tell you that in high-education families (everyone with university degrees), there's an irrational "snob factor", whereby a 22-year-old adult child getting a BA in art history is celebrated but one getting a trade certificate is encouraged to go onto university--even if the art history grad is unemployed and the "tradie" cousin has a highly-paid job on a construction site.
Thank you for the suggestion on coloring! We can definitely produce you a map of the Minneapolis-St Paul Metro area. Running the code right now :)