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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> The US may import a lot of things... but probably not shelter.

Housing requires construction materials, tools, and fixtures. Tariffs increase the cost of all of these, including domestically produced materials due to the second order effects.

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It also requires human labor, which isn't impacted by tariffs directly, but may be impacted by other government actions in the US. Such as the ongoing high profile crackdown on illegal immigrant labor.

Look at the actual deportation numbers. It’s barely on track to meet deportation rates from a decade ago.

Don’t believe the political rhetoric. They’re making a big show and behaving poorly with the masks and other abuses, but they’re not actually doing abnormally high deportations.

Note that any large country will have a steady flow of deportations due to basic enforcement of immigration laws.

Deportation numbers can be highly misleading because of changes in how border interactions were recorded. There have been changes at various times to count as a deportation turning someone back at the border, or to count it as a refusal of entry.

Deporting 100 people working at a factory has a different economic impact than deporting 100 people at the moment they were trying to cross the border.

The goal for them is to scare immigrants out of the country, make a spectacle of deporting 10 and hope another 20 get scared and self-deport, and another 100 decide not to try and illegally enter.

How is that working out so far?

Looking at the border numbers, very successfully

Crackdown != deportations. If workers stay away from job sites, the labor is off the market even if they don’t leave the country.

> It also requires human labor, which isn't impacted by tariffs directly, but may be impacted by other government actions in the US.

If people think prices will go up they will insist on bigger raises. It's why expectations can be as important as what 'actually' happens:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage–price_spiral

Do they have power to insist on bigger raises?

> Do they have power to insist on bigger raises?

Depends on the "they". These folks seem to have:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_port_strike

I agree! But the US only adds about 1% new dwellings each year.

So I'd naively expect that 99% dwellings are existing housing stock and so might not to be sensitive to increased construction costs, because they've already been constructed.

I was wondering if BLS might use a model of estimated replacement cost in their CPI estimate, incorporating construction costs, but from a quick skim read it doesn't sound like they do that.

For estimating rental costs, they ask people how much rent they've paid this month:

> “What was your total rental payment for this month for this unit? Include any extra charges for garage or parking facilities, but do not include direct payments by local, state or federal agencies.”

+/- a lot of stuff about weighting that I didn't follow.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

>Housing requires construction materials

ie wood

But house prices did not increase.

According to Redfin, the median home sale price was up 1.2% YoY in July 2025. [1]

[1] https://www.redfin.com/us-housing-market

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