The housing upturn has strained a greying, shrinking pool of skilled tradesman, with few young laborers ready to pick up the slack If you want a view from the front lines of the residential construction industry, talk to Randy Strauss. Seated in the front of his pickup truck and mobile office, with blueprints and files strewn about the passenger seat, Strauss calls me from a job site near Amherst, Ohio, roughly 40 miles east of Cleveland, where his firm, Strauss Construction, is based. He?s been part of the industry since he was a kid. His grandfather was a cabinet maker, and his father was a homebuilder who worked alongside his son from the year they started the company in 1979 to a month before he passed away at age 83.
When Strauss discusses the labor issues facing his industry, he likes to talk about a job site he was on last spring. While working on one of the Lake Erie vacation homes that are his bread-and-butter, he looked around at the nearly two dozen tradesman working on the site, from carpenters and plumbers to electricians. Of the 22 workers there, the youngest was 42. Many of the workers were the same ones Strauss had worked with for more than 30 years. ?Who?s going to build these homes 10 years from now"? Strauss says. ?I?m 63. Ten years from now, it won?t be my problem. But I don?t know who?s going to be working in this business then. I sit in meetings with others in the construction industry, and ask, ?who told their kids to be a carpenter"...