ORLANDO, Fla. — As Florida’s housing market tanked seven years ago, construction worker David Rager saw jobs dry up. So he left construction, along with 2.3 million others nationwide during the recession, and got a job installing traffic signals and street lights.
“I couldn’t afford to sit at home for a month here and a month there,” said Rager, 53.
Now Rager is back in construction, working with a crew on a custom-built home in Orlando, framing walls “and doing a little bit of everything.” In the past four years, hundreds of thousands of workers have returned to construction, making it among the nation’s fastest growing job sectors.
In the busiest markets, there aren’t enough construction workers to support the pace of building. In a recent survey by Associated General Contractors of America, 83 percent of contractors said they were having trouble filling craft positions. The most difficult positions to fill were carpenters, roofers and equipment operators.
Given the amount of building going on, “it’s going to be interesting because we’re going to have a labor shortage here in South Florida,” said Scott Moss, president of Moss & Associates, a South Florida-based construction firm with offices in California, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Hawaii.
Returning workers such as Rager are finding a different business from the one they left.
Apartment buildings are going up at a faster rate than single-family homes, a trend fueled by tighter home-lending standards, an increase in people choosing to live near urban centers and a drop in the rate of new households being formed.
Fewer public buildings have been built lately, on account of government cuts. Shopping malls are falling out of fashion.
Not only are the projects different, they’re in different places. During the real estate heyday of the mid-2000s, the building of single-family homes in Florida, Nevada and California led the construction boom, and then the bust. In the past year, while California, Texas and Florida saw the biggest increases in raw numbers of construction jobs, the fastest growth rates for such work were in North Dakota and Utah.
