Lumber Supply and Housing Affordability
Since the filing of the trade cases by the U.S. industry in 2016, U.S. sawmill investment and capacity expansion has been robust. The U.S. industry has produced nearly 30 billion additional board feet of softwood lumber since the trade cases were filed. That amounts to an average of 3.7 billion board feet a year of added production by U.S. producers. These increases have more than offset any decline in unfairly traded Canadian imports and are enough lumber to build 2 million single-family homes. The enforcement of U.S. trade laws will maximize long-term domestic production and lumber availability produced by U.S. workers to build U.S. homes.
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Lumber is in the spotlight as the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the U.S. Lumber Coalition disagree over what’s behind the U.S. housing market slump.
FOX Business correspondent Kelly Saberi reported Monday that the NAHB has pointed to tariff uncertainty and lumber prices as being partly responsible.
The U.S.’s current anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty on imported Canadian softwood lumber stands at 14.5%. It could potentially climb later in the year to nearly 35%.
Canada’s softwood lumber makes up roughly 85% of America’s imports and almost a quarter of the U.S. supply, according to the NAHB.
“I share President Trump’s desire to create fair and balanced trade across our borders, certainly would bring back as much production as we can,” NAHB CEO Jim Tobin said. “But until we do that, and it will take years and millions of dollars of investment, we need to make sure that we have a reliable, affordable source of lumber.”
Saberi reported that the U.S. Lumber Coalition “says that the price of lumber says something different about this story.”
Between May 2021 and April of this year, the random lengths framing composite price decreased 67%, she reported. It stood at $442 per 1,000 board feet as of May 23, per the NAHB.
Meanwhile, the price of new homes has gone up 21%, Saberi reported.
“Everything from regulatory costs to the cost of land and, quite frankly, also the cost of home builder profitability rates that have gone up, those are actually the driving forces of home affordability,” U.S. Lumber Coalition executive director Zoltan van Heyningen told FOX Business. “Lumber just isn’t one of them.”
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