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When President Trump said he would enact sweeping tariffs and crack down on immigration, dire warnings rang out in the construction industry.
The policies threatened to push up building costs and deprive the industry of a crucial pool of labor when high interest rates were already depressing building activity.
Those forces are converging on builders, weighing them down in a potential drag on the economy. Higher import taxes on steel, copper, lumber and other materials are lifting construction prices and interrupting some jobs. Immigration enforcement is worsening worker shortages and delaying projects.
“We get so many things thrown at us in the construction industry,” said Tony Rader, the chief relationship officer at National Roofing Partners, a commercial roofing company in Coppell, Texas. “It just seems like every time we turn around, we’ve got something else to fight.”
The rising costs and understaffing could impede the momentum the industry is expected to derive from lower interest rates, economists say. The effects could be most pronounced in the housing industry, where elevated mortgage rates have discouraged homeowners from moving and dragged down sales.
Mr. Rader said tariffs on products from China had pushed up the cost of screws, plates and other supplies. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had agreed to a one-year deal to reduce the overall tariff on many Chinese goods by 10 percentage points, to around 47 percent.
