Zoning. It’s what takes a perfectly good piece of dirt and subjects it to torturous forms of government overreach.

Still, timing being what it is, your average homebuilder is too busy trying to source lumber, EWP, and drywall at unit costs and delivery dates that don’t blow through a single-digit per-unit net margin to care much about anything out of Washington, D.C. right now.

Other than tariffs, interest rates, taxes, and a rescue program that looks for all the world as though it’s paying perfectly healthy and capable workers to sit home collecting a free check instead of encouraging them to show up at a job site or a distribution center or a warehouse, what Capitol Hill cares about doesn’t rank in many top 50-things-to-find-out-more-about lists.

But make no mistake.

The land builders build on; the people it takes to assemble the 18,000 or more pieces that go into the 2,200 sq. ft. home on the land builders build on; and even the flow of capital into each of the divisible parts of building’s start-to-finish building life cycle are in play with the eventual fate of the

The prize, in other words, would far outweigh the sacrifice and diligence it would take to attain it.

It’s just that, with all that’s going on on the ground right now, where builders and their partners are scrambling to keep their production lines secure and their delivery schedules somewhat intact, the next five days, or five weeks, or five months may mean more to most decision-makers than the next five years, or five decades.

That’s where National Association of Home Builders executive VP and chief lobbyist Jim Tobin likely reflects the broad sentiment of builders right now with respect to the pluses and minuses of the Biden infrastructure deal:

As we saw over the last couple of weeks President Biden has put forth his infrastructure plan. Again we support infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word, it’s important for us to open up new areas to develop, to redevelop old areas, but to make sure that our customers can get back and forth to their places of work, their schools, their ball fields as I’ve said, but with that comes a whole package of other things that are buried in there as well. Some things that we wouldn’t consider traditional infrastructure and while yes I can agree that maybe it’s not always roads and bridges and airplanes or runways, we do see a pretty expansive role for the federal government in this infrastructure plan and President Biden has talked about human infrastructure and that’s the next bill that we’re going to see coming out of the administration in the next few weeks and there I think not only will we see tax hikes, whether it’s on wealthy individuals.

I also think that we’re going to see the potential erosion of some of the tax breaks that our members enjoy, whether it’s 1031 like-kind exchanges, carried interest, capital gains, I think there’s a lot of areas that I know I’m worried about and our staff is worried about that’s going to have an impact on the industry, especially if it continues to accelerate into the recovery. There’s some clouds on the horizon I’ll say.

The big business opportunity – and pain – of the present moment lies precisely in this crux.

Can and will builders and their partners look up long enough from the intense demands and tricky, iffy, bumpy, delicate balances of today to reckon with the enormity and the unavoidability of a future that works quite differently than the present?

Join the conversation

More: