From a small northwestern observatory…

I pulled up behind another car at a stop light yesterday and couldn’t help but notice a license plate surround for the local construction laborers union, plus a labor bumper sticker in the back window.  This attracted my attention because the vehicle in question was a late-model Cadillac Escalade.

Admittedly this may have been an outlier, but all across the U.S. there is a huge demand for entry level construction trainees.  Here in Seattle (a high-wage, high cost-of-living area) entry level “no experience, no education” wages are in the high-teens per hour, rising rapidly to $50k per year with a modicum of experience.  Take some winter months to go get trained in plumbing, electrical, or HVAC and the annual income gets into the high 5 to low 6 figures pretty quickly.  (The average plumber in Seattle makes $95,000 per year, according to Salarylist.com.)   Some sources put this number somewhat lower, but you get the point.

Ironically, these jobs are going begging, and the reasons are varied.  Many young people are scared off from a job that evidently requires a lot of outdoor work and physical stamina.  Yet, as one young woman in a carpenter training program noted, “If you work hard and you put in your effort, they’ll take you over somebody else who is muscle…” Baby boomers seem to think that if their children don’t go to college, they’ve failed as parents, and so the percentage of construction workers under age 24 has declined in 48 states since the peak of the housing boom.

Wall Street Journal has a great article this morning called “Young people don’t want construction jobs. That’s a problem for the housing market.”  It is indeed.  It is one reason why home construction per household in America is at its lowest level in 60 years of keeping records, according to the article. The reasons include lack of vocational programs in high schools, although many of these are coming back. The Home Builders Institute, affiliated with the National Association of Homebuilders, has as many as 6,000 young people in their training pipeline at any given time.

I’m not suggesting — nor is the WSJ, that flooding young people into construction jobs will change the housing affordability metric overnight.  The homebuilding industry is still replete with problems such as a trade war with our principle material suppliers, a lack of housing infrastructure, and short-term financing issues.  Nonetheless, young people might want to be reminded that a surprisingly large number of CEOs in the construction field got started with a hammer in their hands.