Arizona’s Homebuilding Revival Sparks Bidding Wars for Workers

While D.J. Hughes hunts for carpenters to join his team at a Phoenix-area house-framing company, competitors are tracking down his workers at building sites and offering them more money. “Everybody is trying to pull crews from everyone,” said Hughes, 43, a project manager for J.L. Baugh Construction in Gold Canyon, Arizona, who admits to a couple attempts at poaching framers from rival contractors. “I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century and this is the biggest shortage of skilled laborers I have ever seen.” After being decimated by the housing crash, Arizona’s builders are now scrounging for workers as demand for new homes climbs. Building permits are at an almost three-year high, creating a scarcity of framers, roofers and masons, many of whom moved elsewhere when work dried up. Laws aimed at curbing illegal immigration only added to the shortage by pushing experienced laborers out of the state. Construction jobs, which also include commercial and government projects, increased 9.3 percent in May from a year earlier to 120,300, the biggest gain of any industry in the state, according to Arizona’s Office of Employment and Population Statistics. Nationally, industry employment rose 0.4 percent.

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