Think deportations and construction labor force (not housing demand), and tariffs and construction costs.

On the first point, Ben Zipperer‘s comment on the impact of removals in “Secure Communities”:

(Click on image to enlarge)

On the impact of tariffs on housing costs:

Figure 1: PPI for construction materials (blue), construction costs for single unit houses, Fisher index (tan), and average hourly earnings for construction workers (production and nonsupervisory) (green), all in logs, 2025M01=0. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Census, and author’s calculations.

It is interesting that PPI-construction materials — while not including tariffs — reverses the pre-tariff downward trend, and starts rising. This makes sense insofar as domestic producers raise prices in line with import plus tariff prices.

Interestingly, in his recent diagnosis of why housing is unaffordable, EJ Antoni mentions neither the lack of construction labor nor the high costs of inputs.

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