Raids crush economy, slow L.A. fire recovery

Trump's 'golden age' of prosperity feels like another lie

- STEVE LOPEZ

CONSTRUCTION crews work on rebuilding properties after the federal cleanup last week in Altadena.

The crew had just poured a concrete foundation on a vacant lot in Altadena when I pulled up the other day. Two workers were loading equipment onto trucks and a third was hosing the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.

I asked how things were going, and if there were any problems finding enough workers because of ongoing immigration raids.

“Oh, yeah,” said one worker, shaking his head. “Everybody's worried.”

PROGRESS on a home being rebuilt near a cleared lot in Altadena.

The other said that when fresh concrete is poured on a job this big, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that’s been hard to come by.

“We're still working,” he said.

“But as you can see, it’s just going very slowly.”

Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a ways off from any major rebuilding, and so is Pacific Palisades.

But immigration raids have hammered the California economy, including the construction industry. And the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last week that green-lights racial profiling has raised new fears that “deportations will deplete the construction workforce,” as the UCLA Anderson Forecast warned us in March.

‘There was already a labor shortage in the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, by various estimates. As deportations slow construction, and tariffs and trade wars make supplies scarcer and more expensive, the housing shortage becomes an even deeper crisis.

And it’s not just deportations that matter, but the threat of them, says Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist at the Anderson Forecast.