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O C TO B ER 20 17

DECLARING WAR ON THE LABOR SHORTAGE Some industry leaders are taking action—locally and nationally—to address the skilled workforce challenge. More need to do the same. BY J O H N M C M A N U S

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he cost of housing’s labor shortage is going up, and there’s no reason not to expect the price tag to do anything other than get higher. Builders normally rank land—access to building lots—as their biggest source of anxiety, and why not? It’s scarce. It’s expensive. It comes with rules that suck time and talent to deal with. They’re used to those challenges and that source of worry, as well as the long-standing issue of securing capital to buy and develop those lots, and to finance construction. What they’re not used to, in the past couple of business and housing cycles, anyway, is this post Great Recession challenge: a lack of human resources to do jobs that require skills for a predictable rate that maps to a profitable margin on a finished project. An inability to mobilize a sufficiently large force of such skilled workers wasn’t high on many peoples’ list of wicked problems coming out of the downturn. That kind of scarcity was not a big red flag until production started to pick up in 2013 or so, when plants started to reboot, materials started to be trucked to sites, and the purchasing directors at some of the bigger companies realized that the armies of workers who had been on the jobsites less than a decade earlier were not going to come back with the flip of a switch. And now, apocalyptic storms that have brought homeowners in large swaths of the U.S. to their knees will be an epic disruption to the country’s already attenuated skilled workforce. The question for housing’s business leaders is whether this latest series of convulsive climate-related events simply worsens an

already chronic challenge around skilled labor, or becomes a lever for the opportunity to change. The cost of not being able to secure skilled tradespeople committed to quality work plays out in countless ways. It’s projects that come in over budget. It’s work that needs to be redone, because it’s not done skillfully in the first place. It’s lost sales, because buyers can’t wait for a delivery that’s either unreasonably distant or unpredictable. It’s jobs that don’t get started, in addition to ones that don’t get finished when they’re supposed to. It’s a known issue, and every strategic industry leader at every company knows that it’s one that’s not going to take care of itself. The challenge of having to source sufficient skilled human labor capacity to deliver goods to a marketplace at prices that marketplace will embrace is ultimately a leadership challenge. Merely talking about it, or waiting for it to resolve itself are not options. The two options for leaders we’ve spoken to involve concerted, holistic, and transformational change in how to both replenish the aging and shrinking workforce, and how to offset some of the human labor with technology-enabled, off-site equipment. Neither option is right in the wheelhouse of instincts and proficiencies among our business community’s leaders. It’s time they recognize that they need to declare an all-out strategic war on the labor shortage and rally to bring a new stream of human and technological resources to bear on their plans to deliver new homes and communities to the markets they serve. B

John McManus

Editorial Director, Residential Construction

T HE QUES T ION FOR HOUSING’S BUSINES S L E ADERS IS WHE T HER T HIS L AT ES T SERIES OF CONV UL SIVE CL IM AT E-REL AT ED E VEN TS SIMPLY WORSENS AN AL RE ADY CHRONIC CHAL L ENGE AROUND SKIL L ED L ABOR , OR BECOMES A L E VER FOR T HE OPPORT UNIT Y TO CHANGE.

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