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.”
The U.S. Lumber Coalition has also been critical of Canada, saying that “ongoing unfair trade practices” by its lumber industry have been “extremely harmful to U.S. lumber producers, workers, and their forest-dependent communities.”
John Kalabich, the owner of Acme Lumber in Chicago, told Saberi he was able to keep prices relatively flat over the past 12 months because of the duty on Canadian lumber.
He has also heard from contractors that the demand for small repair work and big-ticket construction has gone down.
TRUMP ISSUES EXECUTIVE ORDERS ADDRESSING LUMBER PRODUCTION, NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS
Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau said single-family housing starts suffered a 2.1% decline from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 927,000 in April.
Sales of new single-family homes in April came in at a seasonally adjusted rate of 743,000, while sales of existing ones were 3.63 million.
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