Written by Amanda Angulo
California legislators have introduced many bills regarding housing. These plans include rezoning empty box stores and strip malls to allow for new housing development across the state, without lengthy and costly local approvals. Two of the bills are currently sailing through the Legislature and are doing well due to the support of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, the most powerful entity at the Capitol in regards to housing issues.
Affordable housing developers hoping to get into abandoned Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us claim that the provision will make projects impractical, especially in areas with low union membership, such as Los Angeles and outside the Bay Area.
The Building and Trades Council, representing more than 450,000 construction workers in 160 different local unions in the state of California, claimed that it needs the provision “skilled and trained” to grow the workforce and lift low wages.
“You cannot address poverty and housing by driving construction workers and our families into poverty” said the president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, Robbie Hunter.
The provision of “skilled and trained” is one of the issues of debate. While the provision requires that every contractor and subcontractor hire graduates from apprenticeship programs. Most people, through the apprenticeship program, enter construction unions, and 90% of these students who graduate from a state-approved apprenticeship program do so through a union-run program, according to data from the state Department of Industrial Relations.
This could also mean that many contractors will not even be given the opportunity to hire their own workers, but will instead have to go through a third party and take from their pick, as claimed by Larry Florin, the CEO of Burbank Housing.
Another issue discussed would be the shortage of labor. Due to the pandemic, there have been many regions and trades that vary in worker shortages, and the share of workers who are unionized is low.
As stated by Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, the attempts to build more housing will die “by a thousand cuts” and worries that the “skilled and trained provision” will cause the bills to die. He also states that the ones that are getting hurt are not the rich, but the “lower-income folks because they’re the ones getting crushed by high housing costs”.
