If you want to buy a house today, you face a nightmare of high prices. Most people blame interest rates or greedy real estate agents. But a huge part of the problem comes from the global trade war. Governments keep placing massive tariffs on the materials you need to build a home. These taxes turn a simple construction project into a financial disaster.
To build a normal house, a construction crew needs a mountain of supplies. They need lumber for the frame. They need steel for the nails and screws. They need aluminum for the window frames. Very few countries produce all these materials locally. Builders have to buy them from foreign suppliers to keep costs down.
Then the politicians step in. A government decides it wants to protect local steel mills and logging companies. To do this, they slap a strict tariff on foreign lumber and foreign steel. They add a twenty percent tax to every load of wood that crosses the border.
The foreign lumber mills do not pay that tax out of their own pockets. The local construction company pays the tax when the wood arrives at the border. The construction company refuses to absorb that huge extra cost. So, they add the cost of the tax directly to the price of the new house.
Overnight, the cost of building a new home jumps by tens of thousands of dollars. The builder still does the exact same amount of work. The house uses the exact same amount of wood. But the buyer has to take out a much larger mortgage just to cover the cost of the government’s trade war.
Local lumber mills and steel plants love the tariffs. Because foreign wood now costs so much, the local mills can raise their own prices too. They know the builders have nowhere else to go. The builders must buy the local wood, even if the local mill charges a fortune. The tariff limits competition and gives local producers a license to print money.
These trade fights delay projects everywhere. When a builder orders specialized steel beams for an apartment building, the shipment might get stuck at customs. The border agents argue over exactly how much tax the builder owes. The beams sit in a warehouse for weeks. At the construction site, the workers have to pack up their tools and go home. They cannot build the roof without the beams. The builder pays the workers to stand around, wasting even more money.
When housing costs too much, the whole town suffers. Young families cannot afford to move out of small apartments. Companies struggle to hire workers because the workers cannot find affordable homes near the office. The politicians who signed the tariffs claim they saved jobs at the local steel mill. They completely ignore the fact that they destroyed the dreams of people trying to buy their first home.
