Affordable Housing Starts in High School. Literally.

Everyone is yelling about affordable housing.Every city meeting. Every neighborhood group on Facebook. Every politician with a yard sign and a perfectly rehearsed look of sympathy.

“Costs are too high.”

“We need more homes.”

“The trades are short staffed.”

And everyone nods dramatically like they just cracked some national treasure level secret. As if the universe woke up one morning and said, “You know what would be hilarious? Let’s slowly erase all the electricians. That'll be a fun experiment.”

Meanwhile we quietly removed the single most important piece of the entire housing equation. The workforce pipeline. The people who literally build the buildings.

According to the Associated Builders and Contractors the United States needed nearly 650,000 additional construction workers in 2024 just to meet the demand we already had. That is not growth. That is just to break even. And the average skilled tradesperson is somewhere between “I have reading glasses now” and “I am looking at fishing boats for retirement.” The people who frame your house are closer to a pickleball league than high school.

Now here is where the circus music starts playing.

We want more houses.

We want them cheaper.

We want them faster.

But we underfund the programs that teach people how to build houses in the first place.

For decades we ran a national marketing campaign that made college sound like the golden ticket to human worth. College was the chocolate factory. Everything else was the parking lot out back with the dumpsters. We told kids that success lived in universities and that anything involving tools belonged to the rejects, the plan B kids, the ones who apparently did not have the mental stamina to sit in a lecture hall and pretend to care about medieval literature.

And now we are confused that no one is entering the trades. This is the part of the movie where the villain turns to the camera and says, “Do I really have to explain the plot to you?”

According to Advance CTE only one in five students nationwide has access to a high-quality trades program. High quality meaning modern equipment, actual certifications, and a path that leads somewhere other than disillusionment and a student loan bill. One in five. The rest are left with a garage full of hand me down tools from 1992 and a welding mask so scratched it might as well be a snow globe.

Meanwhile construction wages are rising everywhere. In many regions skilled trades wages have jumped twenty to forty percent in the last decade. Not because the trades suddenly got trendy like some TikTok coastal hobby. It is because when people are scarce their work becomes valuable. Welcome to Economics 101, which apparently, we are all required to forget when discussing housing policy.

We do not have a housing crisis.

We have a trade workforce crisis.

The housing crisis is the symptom.

The workforce crisis is the disease.

If we want affordable housing, we have to rebuild the workforce pipeline. And the pipeline starts in high school. Not with a brochure handed out by someone who has never touched a tool. Not with a motivational poster in the counselor’s office. Not with a career day where a plumber gets five minutes between an orthodontist and a park ranger dressed like Smokey the Bear.

It starts with real funding. Real training labs. Real instructors who are paid enough to not have to moonlight on weekends. It starts with certifications that mean something on graduation day. It starts with the understanding that building things is not a lesser calling. It is the foundation of civilization.

This is not complicated. This is not ideological. This is math.

If we do not train builders, we do not get buildings. That is the whole equation.

And let us be clear. CTE teachers across the country are not the villains here. Many of them are holding the entire future of the American workforce together with caffeine, stubbornness, and whatever tools they can personally afford to buy off Amazon. They deserve medals. They deserve raises. They deserve a parade.

What they need is support. Funding. Awareness. Community. And a culture that remembers that people who work with their hands are not plan B. They are the operating system of this country.

This is where GSD Built comes in.Not to complain.To remember who we are.

Because the world does not build itself.

How You Can Help Without Overthinking It

If you are still reading this, congratulations. You are already part of the solution whether you have admitted it yet or not.

And no, we are not waiting on the government to fix this. If we did, we would still be waiting for someone to “circle back after the next budgeting cycle.” The cavalry is not arriving. We are the cavalry.

Start with awareness.

If you are reading this, you are probably already following GSD Built. Good. Now send it to someone else. Tell them to follow. Not because we are chasing popularity, but because awareness algorithms move when people move. More people seeing this message means more voices, more pressure, more action.

If you are in the trades, step up.

Mentor a student. Speak in a classroom. Let a kid shadow your crew. Invite a teacher out to a job site so they actually see what the work looks like today instead of in 1988. And if your company can help financially, do it. New welders and saws do not appear through inspirational slogans. They require investment. Private industry built this country. Private industry will rebuild the workforce.

Apply political pressure.

Every politician uses “I want to solve affordable housing” as a campaign slogan. Then they get elected, blame the other side, and call it a day. Enough. If they are not expanding, funding, or strengthening CTE programs, then they are not serious. This is not left versus right. This is functional versus not.

Call, email, show up, and ask one direct question:

“What is your plan to expand and support trade education pipelines so we can build the housing we say we need?”

If they cannot answer, they do not get your vote.

The Bottom Line

We already know how to fix this.We just need to stop pretending the problem is mysterious.

Builders build the world.Now the world needs to build more builders.

Share this. Speak it. Pass it. Do not let this fade.

Because the world does not build itself.

GSD Built.