Vice President Kamala Harris offered an ambitious plan to build more: “Right now, a severe housing shortage is part of what’s driving up costs,” she said. said last month in Las Vegas. “So we’re going to cut red tape and work with the private sector to build 3 million new homes.” Included in her proposals is a $40 billion innovation fund to support housing construction.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has also called for deregulation, but he emphasizes mostly a different way to approach the housing crisis: the mass deportation of immigrants he says are flooding the country and whose need for housing he claims is responsible for the huge jump in prices. (While some studies shows some local impact on the cost of housing due to immigration in general, the effect is relatively small and there is no plausible economic scenario in which the number of immigrants in recent years accounts for the magnitude of the increase in house prices and rents. in much of the country.)

The opposing views offered by Trump and Harris have implications not only for how we try to lower home prices, but also for how we see the importance of construction more and faster. Moreover, this focus on the housing crisis also reveals a larger problem with the construction industry in general: the sector has been averse to technology for decades and has become less productive over the past 50 years.

The reason for the current rise in house prices is clear to most economists: a lack of supply. Simply put, we’re not building enough houses and apartments, and haven’t for years. Depending on how you count it, the US has a shortfall of approx 1.2 million TO over 5.5 million single-family houses.

Allowing delays and strict zoning rules create huge obstacles to building more and faster, as do other widely recognized problems like the political power of NIMBY activists across the country and a continued shortage of skilled workers. But there’s another, less talked about problem plaguing the industry: We’re not very efficient at building, and it seems to be somehow making us worse.

Together, these forces have made it more expensive to build homes, driving up prices. Albert Saiz, a professor of urban and real estate economics at MIT, calculates that construction costs account for more than two-thirds of the price of a new home in much of the country, including in the Southwest and West, where much of the building is spent -se. Even in places like California and New England, where land is extremely expensive, construction accounts for 40 percent to 60 percent of the value of a new home, according to Saiz.

Part of the problem, says Saiz, is “if you go to any construction site, you’ll see the same methods used 30 years ago.”

Productivity issues are true in the construction industry, not just in the housing sector. From clean energy advocates dreaming of renewables and an expanded power grid to tech companies racing to add data centers, everyone seems to agree: We need to build more, and do it fast . The practical reality, however, is that it costs more and takes more time to build anything.