At a sprawling construction site barely 15 minutes from downtown Denver, workers move ground, pour foundations and frame walls and windows, but the work goes slowly because of the slim workforce.
Homes here take about two months longer than normal to build, and, in some cases, contractors are doubling their wages just to keep workers from skipping to the next site.
Housing industry veteran Gene Myers says he could be adding 50 percent more homes if he just had the people to build them.
Thousands of construction workers left the industry during the recession, many of them heading to the energy sector. The assumption was that they would return when energy lagged and homebuilding recovered. They did not. The labor shortage in building actually worsened in 2016 ? a surprise to most analysts.
Immigrants make up about a quarter of the overall construction workforce, but that share is likely higher for residential homebuilding, partly due to a large number of undocumented workers. Builders say they make sure their contractors are legal to work, but they have less control over the subcontractors who often move from site to site. Even that group is shrinking, as President Donald Trump tries to impose travel bans and threatens to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
