Q&A With … Don Greenwell, The Builders’ Association

Don Greenwell is president of the Builders’ Association in Kansas City, representing the interests of the construction sector in such matters as policy and work-force development.

Q. The construction sector nationally shed 29,000 jobs last month amid the pandemic slowdown; are you seeing much of that trend unfolding in the Kansas City region?
A. I don’t know about single-family residential and where they are, since the impact on consumers is much quicker. It takes us a good 18 months to feel what the consumer side is doing before it hits our product, commercial construction. But at the beginning of all this in early March, we had about 275 sets of plans for the region, all of western Missouri and into eastern Kansas. We’ve seen a cancellation of 10 to 15 percent of those plans, but that said, we’re still posting 75 to 80 new sets of plans each week. Work in the design pipeline does seem to be generally moving forward.

Q. That should be reason for optimism, shouldn’t it, especially as states begin to open up their economic activity?
A. The volume going in was a little higher than normal, so this basically leveled us off to more normal conditions. We are hearing from contractors that the production levels have dropped 10-20 percent because of social distancing and the way work has to get done. Not just the regular on-site jobs, but things like projects generalists who now have to disinfect sites.

Q. What do operational changes on job sites entail in this environment?
A. It can be simple things, like work in multilevel buildings, where a bunch of crew members used to crowd an elevator or bucket lift. Now, three or four are all that’s permitted. You cold be waiting much longer to get where you ned to go next, and it’s taking more people to do the project than originally estimated. Labor is being redeployed, since it’s taking more to get things done, so we haven’t seen a rise in unemployment.

Q. After the Great Recession cut construction employment by a third, that has to be an encouraging sign.
A. Some workers have opted out; clearly different people in diverse communities have different levels of concern about the virus, either getting it or spreading to others. So some people have opted out of the work force. Nationally, there is growing concern in some chapters of the association of General Contractors, particularly in other parts of the country that have more virus hot spots, that we will have a labor shortage. Not that we’re going to have much more work, but de-selection of people from the work force comes without readily available replacements, experienced people who know safety and processes. You can’t just walk off the street and start working commercial projects.

Q. Are you also optimistic that we could be looking at a short, sharp decline in overall economic activity and a solid rebound to where things were earlier this year, or close to it?
A. If we get more of a U-pattern in consumer spending, the general economy and unemployment, it’s possible that commercial construction could bridge across the “U” and not take a big hit. The consumer accounts for 70 percent of the economy, and the less they are able to consume, were more likely to experiences a substantial recession.

Q. More broadly, is the impact of the virus producing any longer-term changes in the sector?
A. There are other megatrends here, looking into next year and long-term, about what buildings and the built-space environment will look like, structures will be needed, as with office space, and how that will look different than what we had before the virus. There are a lot of conversations among developers, owners, designers and contractors about what that might mean in the way of opportunities and changes. But I do think work environments will change.