I'm a little concerned that the downturn in that graph coincides with changing from measuring one financial instrument to another. But i dont know enough about those instruments to know if that's an issue or not :)
The price of lumber also was astronomical during Covid. I think it’s somewhat logical to expect a return to a more “normal” price as economics bounce back from a somewhat unprecedented couple years of crazy economics.
For the unfamiliar, a "board foot" is a unit of lumber volume representing a square foot of board with 1 inch thickness.
So an 8' long board 12" wide and 1" thick is 8 board feet. Or half as wide and twice as thick (6" x 2") in the same length is also 8 board feet. You get the idea.
Just like with board feet it doesn't say anything about the actual dimensions. Also, I don't think it's much better as a unit than board feet either, both have very unclear relationship to the actual amounts you need. You'll always need to do a pretty complex calculation to figure out how much you'd need to buy. The pricing is mostly useful as a comparison to look at relative or day to day pricing differences.
Unless you’re making infinitely thin two dimensional planes made of wood you always get a cubic volume of wood. Always. No exceptions. What do you think W x L x H stand for?
A board foot is a measure of volume - with an implicit third dimension.
So you could just use the SI unit for volume.
A board foot ~= 2.4 litres.
This seems a bit silly though, as timber is not fungible in the way you'd expect a volume of something to be.
As noted by sibling comments, you very much can buy timber in cubic metres - a convenience for costing / transport - but you're not going to buy timber without knowing dimensions of the individual lengths.
Just like temperature. F is easier for me to relate to. 0 is very cold. 100 is very hot. We like it pretty warm, so 70-72 is great. Also F has a much finer scale for adjustments. I don't have to set my thermostat to 22.5 degrees to be comfortable. I don't really care about the boiling point or freezing point of water in my day to day life.
I am quite interested in knowing if it is going to rain or snow, if there might be ice on the road, if my hot tub might freeze if it is not turned on, etc.
Board thicknesses are measured in the "quarter system" - 4/4 (pronounced "4 quarter", that is 4 quarters of an inch) is a 1" thick rough-rough sawn board; 8/4 (8 quarter) is a 2" thick rough board.
As this is rough sawn (super rough and unsightly finish), you usually lose at least 1/8" while finishing the board, so a 4/4 rough board gives you something around 3/4" finished product.
This leads to 5/4 being another fairly common dimension, as you can get a 1" finished board out of it. 6/4 and 12/4 are somewhat common as well.
It might seem like an "ugly dimension" compared to something like m^3, but its really built around speed. Watching someone skilled price out an enormous stack of mismatched lumber (width, thickness, and length) in seconds with a lumber rule is always a fascinating process to watch (https://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/the-lumber-rul...).
Usually the $/board foot increases slightly at higher dimensions as thicker lumber is harder to produce. I got some 4/4 black walnut for $12.80/bdft last week; 8/4 was closer to $16.
Edit:
This is also why 2x4s are actually 1.5"x3.5" - historically they were 2x4 rough sawn lumber, but .5" is lost in both dimension when producing finished boards you purchase in the store.
That is some of it and it varies a lot based on the species, though I'm a lot less knowledgeable there.
In the hardwoods I usually work with (walnut/maple/padauk) its fairly minimal. A nominally 4/4 board usually comes in about 1/16" small; which is a lot less than I lose running it through the planar. Some of that could be the sawmill skimping out too and cutting just a bit undersized....
No, and they rough cut fast closer to 6/4 (1.5") than the original 8/4 (2") they may have originally used, because we don't care about the quality as much. Part of that is the wood isn't as good. Part is our machinery is now more precise.
To get a 1" finished board you need to start with at least 5/4, because you may have some twist in the board and you can flatten alternating sides to make it flat. If you were just running it through a machine without paying attention, your might need to take that same board down to 0.75" to get it flat.
But they aren't wasting time like that for framing lumber. But when your lumber is expensive, it's worth a little focused labored to use more of the board
Historically 2x4 never had a standard and different sawmills produced different sizes. I've seen houses built in 1880 where a modern 2x4 fit perfectly, meanwhile a different house built in 1968 had a obvious size difference.
> It might seem like an "ugly dimension" compared to something like m^3, but its really built around speed. Watching someone skilled price out an enormous stack of mismatched lumber (width, thickness, and length) in seconds with a lumber rule is always a fascinating process to watch (https://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/the-lumber-rul...).
I imagine there are people all over the world doing the same tricks with metric measurements.
The chart in the article does a nice job at illustrating that prices are roughly speaking back to essentially pre-pandemic levels after giant spikes. This seems healthy to me.
That... and grubby land grabs, cavalier/deranged development (Lennar), and ignorant newcomers who think making a subtropical keystone ecosystem conform to their hell of previous residence is justified by exorbitant checks and brutal disregard.
It would be more difficult to expound on a single issue than multiple, and usually a lack of dynamic isn't well received here on HN. I'm confident that most folks know little of Florida and care even less. My comment made reference to the reckless development occurring here (and elsewhere) by eg Lennar. The aesthetics are self explanatory, but the tangible consequences are perhaps more insidious, particularly for those coming in from elsewhere who have minimal understanding of 'natural' Florida to compare to. Florida, before retention ponds and sewage reservoirs were lobbied to qualify as substitutes, comprised of extensive wetlands. Lennar and others will grab huge tracts of land and install the antithesis of what they removed. Vast arrays of identical, shoddily constructed 'homes' stacked tightly beside themselves. The landscaping consists of hybrid grass that requires heavy maintenance and the plants are often growing in a layer of imported construction sand which requires never ending fertilization. Beyond the glorified retention ponds that pose as lakes, no efforts are made to retain any vestige of the original landscape. Wildlife is severely displaced and an alien, and I think verifiably hostile terrain, now sits beside a formerly natural terrain, which is usually scheduled for additional projects of identical quality.
Considering that books are written on the subject, it's not reasonable to summarize what's happening in Florida in single comment. The subject may be easily dismissed here as trivial in the carbon tunnel vision of wondrous 'hackers', but it's very real and recognized by many.
If you're young enough, you'll see the future look back in great disgust at what has been done to this state and others. If all newcomers to Florida were constrained to visit only Disneyland, they'd probably and understandably think it was an accurate representation. Lennar is Disney, without any of the cool stuff.
Seems this is could be a direct result of warming:
"The Asian form, Ca. L. asiaticus is heat tolerant. This means the greening symptoms can develop at temperatures up to 35 °C. The African form, Ca. L. africanus, and American form, Ca. L. americanus, are heat sensitive, thus symptoms only develop when the temperature is in the range 20–25 °C."
I still don't understand how you arrive at this conclusion. I just did a quick pivot table of the data for 1901-2021 for Ft. Pierce, Florida, the region with which I am most familiar regarding the greening crisis. While the mean temperature has been increasing, the days spent between 20-25ºC seem to have no clear trend.
I have no idea if that's true or not, but I wonder how long it would take to establish orchards further north - time to realize it's possible and time to get the trees to production.
Yes there are citrus groves in Georgia. I don't think it's that they hadn't previously been able to so much as the agricultural dynamics makes it more reasonable now. It may be short lived though as the solar farms seem to be the fastest growing land usage now.
Welcome to climate change: Citrus trees take a while to bear fruit, so uncommon weather patterns lead to bad harvests.
Something similar happens with Spanish olives, and with them, olive oil. Most Olive groves are not irrigated, because they historically don't need to be, and we've had two very dry years. Production is down to 50% of what it was, and irrigating isn't cheap or easy. And again, replanting isn't a sensible choice, as the trees don't mature in a season. We can plant different kinds of corn and wheat in different places as weather changes: A winter that is a little too short, and too long, and big ag will sell you a different bag to adapt to your updated planting date with minimal yield losses. But not with trees.
Or really many if not most fruits where I am. Apple picking? Better be fast. Pears? None left. Plums? You wanted plums?
Same with my own cherry trees. Beautiful flowers. Looked like it would be just as good as last year's awesome harvest. Then frost at just the wrong time. I had maybe a couple handfuls of cherries. Not even enough on the trees to warrant putting up the bird netting.
What is the deal with plums? I have wild plums growing all over my backyard and there's like one day a year when they're ripe but still on the tree! Otherwise they're either not ready to eat or lying on the ground.
Let's hope being stuck at home for a year is not a cyclical event! That's what drove a lot of it, not FOMO. Building a home office, using a kitchen multiple times a day, schooling from home...
Nonsense. The lumber pipelines were interrupted. It was simple supply and demand unlike all this insane price gouging the grocery stores are pulling off now.
The useful question isn't that fraction, though I'd bet it's larger than you'd expect, but how much free money was injected into the economy this way. I'm sure that's a consequential sum, especially if you expand the money we're looking at to include corporations paying other corporations inflated rates, coordinated by having execs/board members in common.
The context of my remark was in response to how "money being printed left and right..." --> "...end up in the hands of regular people doing renovation or home builds?"
Just because "lots of people not being able to go to their job and get paid" doesn't mean all or even most were in the same situation; the numbers[1] tell a different story, and that doesn't even begin to account for the aggregate impact of nationwide loan pauses, or the irrational exuberance in equity/crypto markets at the time.
No, people had more time, DIY projects exploded, and that was compounded additionally by supply chain issues (and closures) like everything else with COVID.
You best believe it wasn’t free. Especially for smaller jobs like flooring it’s often priced based on material. Everyone I know in construction was making $$$ in pandemic
I think they were talking about DIY. People couldn't really travel or do things outside the house so they might start home improvement projects themselves where as you might be more inclined to hire if you're busy with outside things.
I assume it varied greatly by region, but my experience was that it was extremely difficult to find workers during the pandemic response.
It seemed like a combination of fear and restrictions, plus free money at least in the US. I saw hourly rates for physical labor jobs go through the roof, double the pre-response rates and still couldn't fill positions.
I wonder how much of that remodeling was to accommodate a newly required home office due to WFH. If you really needed to have a separate office (eg kids), you simply had to grit your teeth and bear the cost.
Also there was little else to spend your money on. It is easy to spend ten thousand on a family vacation and for a couple years you didn't take one. Plus all the eating out you didn't do, movies you didn't go to and whatever else people stopped doing.
It sucked but plans were in motion pre-covid and waiting a year (or two? Who knew back then) would have meant missing the window that minimized disrupting our kids' school lives.
It's only healthy if prices have been relatively stable for the 5 years prior to that as well. If prices were on a steady rise and then only back to pre-pandemic, this is losing ground to where they should be.
However, in addition, we can see that nominal prices remain stable over multiple 5 year periods. So yes, healthy.
Too bad that this very good presentation on a decent blog has such a clickbait headline. I guess that's the world we live in. Someone somewhere is going to say this is the death of lumber or other such drama, based on just the title of the post though.
Not really because its so regionally dependent - prices can vary dramatically within even 100 miles. I just picked up a bunch of of black walnut for $12.80/bdft, but I could get it for around $8 if I drove a couple hours south.
I've yet to find a restaurant, however, where menu prices for wings aren't at least 20% higher than 2019 or so -- often much higher. Similarly, I have a hard time believing that lower lumber prices will reduce new construction costs.
I hope they come down -- I have reduced my restaurant spend considerably since restaurant (even chain) prices went up by 30-50% in my area compared to pre-Covid.
Maybe I'm too price-conscious, but I'd expect demand to go down over time as the rising interest rates affect daily life.
It's not gonna happen. Labor costs determine the price of restaurant meals way more than wholesale food costs do. Those have gone up and probably are not ever coming back down; wages are a one-way ratchet in all but the most extreme circumstances.
I'm like you, however it sure seems that the proliferation of DoorDash and the rest proves that plenty of people are entirely price-insensitive. Expensive base prices + 20-30% in fees.
Personally, I think there's a lot of overlap between heavy DD users and people on social media complaining publicly about how tough it is to make ends meet. Just a guess.
Yeah I agree, it will make prices stay flat for a few years, but I highly doubt there will be a massive decrease in construction cost unless we see another 2008 style economic crisis. Although, labor shortages in the construction industry might make still allow prices to stay high.
Labor prices for skilled labor have increased so much that even when you do the “how much is my time worth” calculation as an overpaid engineer, DIY has become the only way to go. It’s nuts, but a fun learning experience.
Not a lot of people are willing to work in the food service industry in general, nor at 2019 wages specifically, also rents, and real estate skyrocketed. Food costs are generally only about 1/3 of menu revenue, with wages and overhead being the other ~2/3. Profits are generally very thin in restaurants.
But labor is, essentially, a fixed cost. Once a cook is working a shift, it costs the restaurant nothing extra (or a very small marginal amount) in labor to cook one additional order of wings. Most restaurants' problem is not the cost of labor, but the fact that expensive labor is idle much of the time. Lowering prices to increase volume would, in many cases, be a much better strategy, especially for a local restaurant which is starting out at a disadvantage compared to chains, which can purchase much larger volumes of food at lower prices.
There was a weird blip of time during the pandemic where cabinet grade plywood was cheaper than CDX sheathing at my local Home Depot. If I was building a house then it would have been cool to sheath it in oak veneer plywood.
Real world ecconomics doesn't act like the simplified models in econ 101. Anyone with significant supply is adjusting how much supply they produce based on expected demand to keep prices where they need them. Sometimes someone chooses a lower price to take business from competition, but that is still a complex analysis.
This often backfires on your game design. Like in escape from tarkov, where booming bitcoin prices made any player with GPUs very rich ingame. (also, tying the weather system to moscow weather led to people being annoyed at the constant rain)
I'd be interested to see someone attempt market manipulation IRL to affect their game though.
A few factors - labour markets are very tight generally, new housing construction has increased, WFH and hybrid has increased the demand for renovating existing housing to make space for home offices (and improve the amenity of housing more generally).
Used vehicle markets seem to have slowed, after a dramatic and surprising spike during the pandemic. Specialty vehicles in particular.
For new cars, there was a dealer/scarcity dynamic that seems to have allowed dealers to charge more than RRP, and consumers were paying it. I wonder if that has had an impact.
Treating "price" purely as a supply signal, and not as "value" or "worth it" I think it's true the price of lumber worldwide related to supply chain shock, and the consequences for just-in-time dependencies in the building sector.
I am a little surprised things like chip and plywood suffered, I guess when you cannot get timber, you go to manufactured wood (which in some circumstances actually has better mechanical strength, but most people think has lower aesthetics although opinions differ on this) and maybe even as a downstream (sometimes, waste+, certainly different cuts/grades of timber go in) informed component of construction it "costs more" in these times.
The whole Price/Value/Worth thing is really confusing. Timber is amazing. Burying it inside the carcase of a home feels at first glance like "why not something else" but the entire tooling of construction crews can be built around "its wood" not "erect this premade steel form" or "lower the entire wall with insulation, wires windows and pipes into place" as they do on 'grand designs'
The problem really is that price isn't just a pure supply signal. People treat the ratchet up and down as distinct arcs with their own dynamic. It goes up faster than it comes down unless you know something about the future to make it worth dumping at any price. With wood, there isn't much surprise in the future driving price down, only suprises driving price up.
"Building codes to forbid wooden housing due to giant space termites" wasn't on my roadmap for 2024 but you never know...
i thought timber wasn't the bottleneck here, at least not in the US? from what i know, US timber has a glut of supply, something like 40 years worth of inventory.
Yes. I think the fine-grained differences of meaning here matter. Good call.
I am less sure why the same thing happened here in Australia because we have a huge logging, processing and distributing system domestically and for export, but we also had massive shortages of framing supplies. I suspect it was the timber/lumber distinction, maybe the woods available on-shore weren't being directed into framing and this depends on cheaper sources off-shore, which just disappeared.
Our cost of construction has gone up so much a lot of builders are going bust. It's causing angst in a hot market, house prices and rents out of control, and the government intervening but the industry says it can't build that much more than is on the table, its not lack of desire, it's lack of capacity in construction overall.
Most of the fixes simply increase housing cost inflation. But this glitch on framing wood and related products, was really bad for us.
Europe also has a shortage, as it turned out a lot of both timber and lumber came from Russia. This has pushed up demand for imports from North America, which I guess has a knock on effect to other regions.
Prices in Europe still haven't dropped back to their original levels. In my country pellets for heating were €150 per ton in 2021, €600 per ton (and much worse quality) in 2022, and now are around €300 per ton.
Amazing how counterproductive this is, and how the Federal Reserve refuses to see this.
High prices are their own cure. Given high demand and high margins, people will increase production to meet demand. And yet this is not going to happen because interest rate hikes have doubled the price of new construction.
High interest rates may lower or slow real estate appreciation in the short term, but they also increase it in the long term by killing production increases.
And companies in the business are still using supply chain as an excuse for prices. Recently experienced this when going through quotes for an 800 foot cedar fence.
>> $2.50/box today relative to $2.00/box in 2019 represents +25% inflation...so nowhere near purported pre-COVID levels.
Annualized, that is 5.7% inflation. (1.25 increase ^ 0.25 for 4 years elapsed). So not pre-covid levels, but not nominal 25% annual inflation. Still a little over 2x desired annual growth rate.
Construction prices are still elevated due to labor shortages, lumber is only a minor component.
And don't say "so pay labor more" because there is a labor shortage in every single industry. If you pay more for job x, job y will also go up, until everyone goes up and then inflation is higher.
There is no labor shortage. US prime age employment is far below that of other rich countries. We have a huge amount of slack.
And yes, "just pay more" is the solution. There is no shortage of Lamborghinis, but there is a shortage at $1000. Machine operators near me are paid $12/hour, the equivalent of 2009's minimum wage after inflation adjustment.
Yes, wages are too low. Yes, it's good to pay more money and for everyone to be forced to pay more money for wages. If you want cheap services built on extreme inequality, you're free to move to a 2nd or 3rd world country.
> Yes, it's good to pay more money and for everyone to be forced to pay more money for wages.
You might not have thought that through - if you actually did that, then everything costs more, and there is no net change in affordability. All you did was cause inflation.
If you want to help everyone, without drawbacks, then increased productivity is the way to go. Then things are cheaper. Services are harder to improve though.
> There is no labor shortage.
Unemployment is historically low, so that's not correct.
> You might not have thought that through - if you actually did that, then everything costs more, and there is no net change in affordability. All you did was cause inflation.
Is your mental model of goods and services that 100% of the cost is labor, and that everything is sold at-cost?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Unemployment is a flawed metric. Prime age employment captures everyone, not just those who fall under the government's many convenient exceptions.
155 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadSo an 8' long board 12" wide and 1" thick is 8 board feet. Or half as wide and twice as thick (6" x 2") in the same length is also 8 board feet. You get the idea.
Just like with board feet it doesn't say anything about the actual dimensions. Also, I don't think it's much better as a unit than board feet either, both have very unclear relationship to the actual amounts you need. You'll always need to do a pretty complex calculation to figure out how much you'd need to buy. The pricing is mostly useful as a comparison to look at relative or day to day pricing differences.
A board foot is a measure of volume - with an implicit third dimension.
So you could just use the SI unit for volume.
A board foot ~= 2.4 litres.
This seems a bit silly though, as timber is not fungible in the way you'd expect a volume of something to be.
As noted by sibling comments, you very much can buy timber in cubic metres - a convenience for costing / transport - but you're not going to buy timber without knowing dimensions of the individual lengths.
Dimensional lumber is the original shrinkflator
So in a 10ft long 2x4 it would be the actual size of a 2x4 (1.5"x3.5"x10').
A standard board foot would be (1"x12"x12"), or any other math that makes up the same volume.
Board thicknesses are measured in the "quarter system" - 4/4 (pronounced "4 quarter", that is 4 quarters of an inch) is a 1" thick rough-rough sawn board; 8/4 (8 quarter) is a 2" thick rough board. As this is rough sawn (super rough and unsightly finish), you usually lose at least 1/8" while finishing the board, so a 4/4 rough board gives you something around 3/4" finished product.
This leads to 5/4 being another fairly common dimension, as you can get a 1" finished board out of it. 6/4 and 12/4 are somewhat common as well.
It might seem like an "ugly dimension" compared to something like m^3, but its really built around speed. Watching someone skilled price out an enormous stack of mismatched lumber (width, thickness, and length) in seconds with a lumber rule is always a fascinating process to watch (https://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/the-lumber-rul...).
Usually the $/board foot increases slightly at higher dimensions as thicker lumber is harder to produce. I got some 4/4 black walnut for $12.80/bdft last week; 8/4 was closer to $16.
Edit: This is also why 2x4s are actually 1.5"x3.5" - historically they were 2x4 rough sawn lumber, but .5" is lost in both dimension when producing finished boards you purchase in the store.
In the hardwoods I usually work with (walnut/maple/padauk) its fairly minimal. A nominally 4/4 board usually comes in about 1/16" small; which is a lot less than I lose running it through the planar. Some of that could be the sawmill skimping out too and cutting just a bit undersized....
I'm finding quoted numbers between 2-8% volumetric shrinkage (https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/dimensional-shri...), which is still quite a bit less than you find in the small dimension of a 2x4 (2"-> 1.5%, or ~33%)
To get a 1" finished board you need to start with at least 5/4, because you may have some twist in the board and you can flatten alternating sides to make it flat. If you were just running it through a machine without paying attention, your might need to take that same board down to 0.75" to get it flat.
But they aren't wasting time like that for framing lumber. But when your lumber is expensive, it's worth a little focused labored to use more of the board
I imagine there are people all over the world doing the same tricks with metric measurements.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber
Considering that books are written on the subject, it's not reasonable to summarize what's happening in Florida in single comment. The subject may be easily dismissed here as trivial in the carbon tunnel vision of wondrous 'hackers', but it's very real and recognized by many.
If you're young enough, you'll see the future look back in great disgust at what has been done to this state and others. If all newcomers to Florida were constrained to visit only Disneyland, they'd probably and understandably think it was an accurate representation. Lennar is Disney, without any of the cool stuff.
Seems this is could be a direct result of warming:
"The Asian form, Ca. L. asiaticus is heat tolerant. This means the greening symptoms can develop at temperatures up to 35 °C. The African form, Ca. L. africanus, and American form, Ca. L. americanus, are heat sensitive, thus symptoms only develop when the temperature is in the range 20–25 °C."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_Places
Something similar happens with Spanish olives, and with them, olive oil. Most Olive groves are not irrigated, because they historically don't need to be, and we've had two very dry years. Production is down to 50% of what it was, and irrigating isn't cheap or easy. And again, replanting isn't a sensible choice, as the trees don't mature in a season. We can plant different kinds of corn and wheat in different places as weather changes: A winter that is a little too short, and too long, and big ag will sell you a different bag to adapt to your updated planting date with minimal yield losses. But not with trees.
Same with my own cherry trees. Beautiful flowers. Looked like it would be just as good as last year's awesome harvest. Then frost at just the wrong time. I had maybe a couple handfuls of cherries. Not even enough on the trees to warrant putting up the bird netting.
[1] https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/news/articles/update-three...
Just because "lots of people not being able to go to their job and get paid" doesn't mean all or even most were in the same situation; the numbers[1] tell a different story, and that doesn't even begin to account for the aggregate impact of nationwide loan pauses, or the irrational exuberance in equity/crypto markets at the time.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=19GH4
And during a pandemic, that is almost free, since many people are stuck at home with nothing to do.
It seemed like a combination of fear and restrictions, plus free money at least in the US. I saw hourly rates for physical labor jobs go through the roof, double the pre-response rates and still couldn't fill positions.
Could do the same even if you did..
Not insignificant but not the majority either.
It sucked but plans were in motion pre-covid and waiting a year (or two? Who knew back then) would have meant missing the window that minimized disrupting our kids' school lives.
Sometimes timing matters more than other factors.
However, in addition, we can see that nominal prices remain stable over multiple 5 year periods. So yes, healthy.
Too bad that this very good presentation on a decent blog has such a clickbait headline. I guess that's the world we live in. Someone somewhere is going to say this is the death of lumber or other such drama, based on just the title of the post though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumber_Cartel
Is it because most lumber volume is performed under commercial contracts? The DIY market is too small to chase?
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/chicken-wing-price...
I've yet to find a restaurant, however, where menu prices for wings aren't at least 20% higher than 2019 or so -- often much higher. Similarly, I have a hard time believing that lower lumber prices will reduce new construction costs.
Maybe I'm too price-conscious, but I'd expect demand to go down over time as the rising interest rates affect daily life.
Personally, I think there's a lot of overlap between heavy DD users and people on social media complaining publicly about how tough it is to make ends meet. Just a guess.
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-the-price-of-lumber-has-s...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/stinson-dean-on-the-lumber-cr...
You used to be able to get 3/4 maple 4x8 for ~$50, now it's $85 at Home Depot and over $100 from the local lumberyard.
or would the economy be the fun part of the game, automating and driving down prices?
I think games like factorio, the fun comes from automating and being less of a mental burden.
I'd be interested to see someone attempt market manipulation IRL to affect their game though.
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/tough-immigration-laws...
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-rele....
It doesn't mean 2 million people stay illegally per year.
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2023/10/vehicles-sales-in...
Not necessarily a sign of health, but playing catcup with hisotrical trend.
For new cars, there was a dealer/scarcity dynamic that seems to have allowed dealers to charge more than RRP, and consumers were paying it. I wonder if that has had an impact.
Definitely come down, but still quite elevated
I am a little surprised things like chip and plywood suffered, I guess when you cannot get timber, you go to manufactured wood (which in some circumstances actually has better mechanical strength, but most people think has lower aesthetics although opinions differ on this) and maybe even as a downstream (sometimes, waste+, certainly different cuts/grades of timber go in) informed component of construction it "costs more" in these times.
The whole Price/Value/Worth thing is really confusing. Timber is amazing. Burying it inside the carcase of a home feels at first glance like "why not something else" but the entire tooling of construction crews can be built around "its wood" not "erect this premade steel form" or "lower the entire wall with insulation, wires windows and pipes into place" as they do on 'grand designs'
The problem really is that price isn't just a pure supply signal. People treat the ratchet up and down as distinct arcs with their own dynamic. It goes up faster than it comes down unless you know something about the future to make it worth dumping at any price. With wood, there isn't much surprise in the future driving price down, only suprises driving price up.
"Building codes to forbid wooden housing due to giant space termites" wasn't on my roadmap for 2024 but you never know...
i thought timber wasn't the bottleneck here, at least not in the US? from what i know, US timber has a glut of supply, something like 40 years worth of inventory.
maybe you meant "lumber"?
I am less sure why the same thing happened here in Australia because we have a huge logging, processing and distributing system domestically and for export, but we also had massive shortages of framing supplies. I suspect it was the timber/lumber distinction, maybe the woods available on-shore weren't being directed into framing and this depends on cheaper sources off-shore, which just disappeared.
Our cost of construction has gone up so much a lot of builders are going bust. It's causing angst in a hot market, house prices and rents out of control, and the government intervening but the industry says it can't build that much more than is on the table, its not lack of desire, it's lack of capacity in construction overall.
Most of the fixes simply increase housing cost inflation. But this glitch on framing wood and related products, was really bad for us.
Prices in Europe still haven't dropped back to their original levels. In my country pellets for heating were €150 per ton in 2021, €600 per ton (and much worse quality) in 2022, and now are around €300 per ton.
High prices are their own cure. Given high demand and high margins, people will increase production to meet demand. And yet this is not going to happen because interest rate hikes have doubled the price of new construction.
High interest rates may lower or slow real estate appreciation in the short term, but they also increase it in the long term by killing production increases.
Box of gloves is very close to pre covid level.
Used to be $2/box in 2019. now you can get it around $2.5 box.
CPI less food and energy[1] over the same period increased +17.3%...so currently priced worse than nominal inflation.
Of course, this baseline reference assumes shrinkflation hasn't impacted your "box" unit.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=19FTW
Annualized, that is 5.7% inflation. (1.25 increase ^ 0.25 for 4 years elapsed). So not pre-covid levels, but not nominal 25% annual inflation. Still a little over 2x desired annual growth rate.
And don't say "so pay labor more" because there is a labor shortage in every single industry. If you pay more for job x, job y will also go up, until everyone goes up and then inflation is higher.
And yes, "just pay more" is the solution. There is no shortage of Lamborghinis, but there is a shortage at $1000. Machine operators near me are paid $12/hour, the equivalent of 2009's minimum wage after inflation adjustment.
Yes, wages are too low. Yes, it's good to pay more money and for everyone to be forced to pay more money for wages. If you want cheap services built on extreme inequality, you're free to move to a 2nd or 3rd world country.
You might not have thought that through - if you actually did that, then everything costs more, and there is no net change in affordability. All you did was cause inflation.
If you want to help everyone, without drawbacks, then increased productivity is the way to go. Then things are cheaper. Services are harder to improve though.
> There is no labor shortage.
Unemployment is historically low, so that's not correct.
Is your mental model of goods and services that 100% of the cost is labor, and that everything is sold at-cost?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Unemployment is a flawed metric. Prime age employment captures everyone, not just those who fall under the government's many convenient exceptions.
In Asia, for example, they have doubled.