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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. to pay ppl enough $ to entice them to do carpentry is not profitable, hence so few of them. I remember climbing a 4,000 ft mountain in a day in the hot sun..you could not pay me enough $ to ever want to do that again, and even if you could, it would never be profitable. That's why things are airlifted.

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Yeah but carpentry has to be done and is getting done. It’s not so expensive you stop the job and wait for a lower price. My guess is you just use other unskilled labor and go for good enough. Maybe a true skilled carpenter isn’t worth the premium or the value isn’t clear to the buyer

The way it works is you have a subcontractor pay an immigrant under the table and get it done.

The US clamped down on Mexican border crossings. Guess what? There’s no labor. Who would have thunk it.

This along with the cyclical nature of the housing industry are definite negatives for carpentry as a long-term career for citizens in the US. The fact that the article doesn’t mention the under the table nature of illegal immigrant work crews and how that puts downward pressure on wage rates is a blatant omission.

>The US clamped down on Mexican border crossings.

Now, the border is more porous than ever. There's plenty of labor -- go to any home improvement store parking lot. And that's just the illegal labor -- boost wages and you could recapture legal workers.

But for now, go to any construction site in California, and you'll hear only Spanish spoken between the carpenters, roofers, etc. and their supervision.

Those people were around in 2020 (outside Home Depot here in Seattle) but are all gone now. I guess they are all just really busy rather than being deported or something.

I wouldn’t assume all or even most labor on constructions sites are illegal immigrants just because they speak Spanish, if only because the USA has a lot of legal first-gen Hispanic immigrants.

So the angry man on the radio says.

Back here on earth, roofers are making $36/hr. My brother’s restaurant is paying $28-32/hr for line cooks and dishwashers.

Housing starts are very cyclical, they absolutely can and do stop building things when it stops being economically favorable to do so. This is one of the reasons we have so few carpenters. It’s a boom and bust industry.

>they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable.

They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".

The market is efficient. You raise prices and pay workers more -> Fewer people are willing to purchase at that price -> You make less profit -> You don't make enough profit to pay people more. It's a complex problem. You could make the same market argument as: if it was profitable to charge more and pay workers more, why doesn't anyone just start a company that does that and outcompete the others?

> The market is efficient.

The market is more efficient, on average, than other methods of price setting. It’s not perfect efficiency (or even close to it).

Supply and demand are always in flux, and the repeated attempts to match these is what causes market efficiency. It is frequently possible that prices are not keeping up with supply and demand, and there exists arbitrage opportunity that requires people knowledgeable about the market to act on.

> if it was profitable to charge more and pay workers more, why doesn't anyone just start a company that does that and outcompete the others?

They do (sans outcompeting). We just call them luxury goods. It's a different market.

Yes, and figuring out how to get orders of magnitude more housing production at dramatically lower prices is one of the most socially and morally important problems in the world today.

Not really. Most of the cost of housing is land anywhere it’s expensive. We have the technology to stack dwellings vertically. Where that’s illegal and there’s lots of demand housing is expensive. Otherwise not.

Is construction labor really a big factor in the final selling or rental price of a home?

Apparently labour is ~35% of the cost of a house [1] though I imagine this varies a lot depending on the house being built, type of construction, location etc. Still, seems safe to assume labour is a large part of the cost.

[1] https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/how-much-does-it-cost-...

>Still, seems safe to assume labour is a large part of the cost.

Does it? I've read time and again that land is the largest part of the cost - in any place where cost is significant.

Just to clarify, Im saying labor is a large part of the cost, not necessarily the largest. I agree land is probably a bigger cost in a lot of areas.

Yeah, I would think in a city with a runaway housing market (like Vancouver), it's more like 5%

Idk labor rates have also run away

then you lose to cheaper competitors.

there is a market for hand-made furniture but Ikea stuff dominates.

> there is a market for hand-made furniture but Ikea stuff dominates.

And boyyyyy is there a gap between these. I feel like I’m either paid $100 for shitty pressboard or thousands upon thousands for hardwood.

Thankfully, there are some decent pieces left from 50 or so years ago that are both solid and dirt cheap at thrift/antique shops.

Haha, very good timing, I just climbed a 4k mountain today in a Virginia heatwave. It was almost 100F real feel in the valley, and if I wasn't doing it for my own satisfaction I'd definitely want a good amount of money for it!

Funny to hear the mountain example. One of my favorite hikes was a 115F climb up the Flatiron.

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