Read the brief below, or skip straight to the action.
The Numbers
$17,500 — added to every new home from tariffs on lumber, steel, and appliances
The country is short 1.2 million housing units. Nearly 75% of households already cannot afford a median-priced new home. The federal government’s answer to the worst housing shortage in a generation was to make building more expensive.
Trump’s tariffs hit the three largest material inputs for residential construction. Here is what each one costs homebuyers:
| Tariff Source | Duty Rate | Impact on New Home Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Canadian softwood lumber | 45% | ~$10,900 per home |
| Steel and aluminum | 25% | ~$3,600 per home |
| Appliances and fixtures (China, others) | 25-145% | ~$3,000 per home |
| Total | ~$17,500 per home |
Canada supplies roughly one-third of the softwood lumber used in U.S. homebuilding. A 45% duty on that supply does not encourage American logging — it takes years to permit, build, and staff new sawmills. In the short term, it just raises prices. Appliance costs are already up 4.3% month-over-month, the steepest increase since tariff rates took effect.
450,000 Homes That Will Not Get Built
The National Association of Home Builders projects that tariff-driven cost increases will prevent 450,000 homes from being built through 2030. That is not a rounding error. It is more than a third of the current housing deficit.
NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz put it plainly: higher material costs push projects past the break-even point. Builders cannot sell homes that buyers cannot finance. Lenders will not fund projects with margins too thin to survive a rate bump. So the homes do not get proposed, permitted, or built.
The math is simple. The national housing wage — what you need to earn per hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental — is $33.63. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Adding $17,500 to new construction costs does not land on developers. It lands on the family stretching to buy their first home, and it lands on renters when reduced supply keeps rents high.
Who Gets Hurt
Not investors. Not second-home buyers. The tariffs hit entry-level construction hardest because starter homes operate on the thinnest margins. A $17,500 cost increase on a $600,000 home is absorbable. On a $275,000 starter home, it kills the project.
That means fewer apartments, fewer townhomes, fewer modest single-family builds in the suburbs where working families are looking. It means the 1.2 million unit shortage gets worse, not better.
Renters take the hit too. Fewer new units means tighter supply. Tighter supply means landlords raise rents. The cycle is already running: 52% of renters spend more than 30% of income on housing.
What You Can Do
- Tell Congress to stop the tariffs on Resistbot. The petition targets the lumber and steel duties specifically.
- Call your representative and ask if they support the bipartisan bills to exempt construction materials from tariff increases. If they do not have a position, that is a position.
- Share this with anyone who has tried to buy a home in the last two years. The prices they are seeing are not natural market forces. They are policy choices.
The housing crisis is a solvable problem — but only if the federal government stops actively making it worse. Tariffs on building materials do the opposite of what working families need. They are a tax on shelter, collected at the lumber yard and passed to every buyer, renter, and family priced out of the market.
This is part of a broader pattern of economic policy that raises costs on working people while claiming to protect them.