Comment by Permit
4 hours ago
The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.
More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.
You don't work in construction do you?
Lack of skilled tradesmen is a widespread problem and a major source of project delay (on top of massively higher housing production costs).
I assume next comes the zoning-causes-all-shortages and if only we could fix zoning then we'd solve housing – a thesis for which there's zero evidence.
That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.
If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.
Yes, the labor supply for skilled tradesmen is very inelastic. Which is one reason it sucks to have so much of it drawn into a probably-speculative boom.