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The cities building the most homes rely more heavily on immigrant labor.Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles TimesThe cities that build and remodel the most homes rely the most heavily on immigrant workers.Dallas-Fort Worth led the US in building permits. Its construction workforce was 61% foreign-born.Mass deportations and restrictions on immigration threaten to deepen the worker shortage.The American homebuilding industry relies heavily on immigrant workers. That's especially true in the cities that build and remodel the most homes, according to new research from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.In the seven metro areas that issued at least 150,000 residential building permits between 2019 and 2023, an average of 54% of construction trades workers were foreign-born, the Harvard report found. The metros building and remodeling the most homes — from Los Angeles and Washington, DC, to Dallas and Houston — rely on a workforce that's often more than 60% foreign-born.The construction industry faces a nationwide worker shortage in the hundreds of thousands. Given its reliance on foreign-born workers, President Donald Trump's mass deportations and restrictions on immigration threaten to deepen the worker shortfall, said Anirban Basu, the chief economist at Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group that endorsed Trump in 2024.As a result, economists and housing researchers expect the most dynamic US housing markets will be hit the hardest by rising construction costs — driven by higher labor costs and delays, in part due to the worker shortage."These places that are most reliant on immigrant labor are going to feel those effects most acutely, and may then have a hampered ability to respond to housing supply and demand needs," said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Harvard Center and the author of the report.Metros that build fewer homes tend to have far fewer immigrants as a share of their construction workforce. In metros that granted between 75,000 and 149,999 permits, an average of 40% of the workers were foreign-born. And in metros that permitted less than 75,000 homes, 22% of the workforce was foreign-born. Still, immigrants made up a disproportionate share of the construction workforce in those places, too.Are you a contractor or worker in the construction trades affected by worker shortages or immigration enforcement? Reach out to share your experience with this reporter at erelman@businessinsider.com.The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area led the country in issuing new building permits between 2019 and 2023. During that period, 61% of the area's construction workers were immigrants. In that same period, nearly three-quarters of construction workers in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach area were foreign-born."There's demand for labor in these places because there's so much homebuilding activity, and that is what creates the economic opportunity for immigrants to come in and fill these positions, especially if they're positions that native born people aren't as likely to work in," Frost said.A recent survey by the Associated General Contractors of America found that 28% of construction firms say they've been affected, either directly or indirectly, by immigration enforcement. More than 90% of all firms that were hiring said they were having trouble filling open roles, and 45% of all firms said they experienced project delays because of a shortage of workers."There's no question in my mind the stepped-up immigration enforcement is serving to drive up construction delivery costs," Basu said. "If all of a sudden these communities are no longer able to supply as much new housing, then their economic growth will tend to stagnate."At the same time as the administration is cracking down on legal and illegal immigration, it's not doing enough to boost domestic construction…

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI"There's two things that I care about the most: the gym and my work," says Mahir Laul.The 18-year-old took a leave of absence from New York University this past fall to work full-time on his HR tech startup, Velric. While his classmates are taking shots and hooking up, Laul is coding and lifting. That means almost no time for romance."I am obsessed with work," he tells me. "My love life is in the gutters."His young founder friends are a similar story, he says. The few who are dating found their partners before they started their companies, while the rest are "locked in" on building — and locking themselves out of the dating pool.Silicon Valley has long been the land where mixing work with play was seen as crucial to its growth. While Google and Facebook were being built, their staff were also tripping on ayahuasca and canoodling in "cuddle puddles." Now, amid the white-collar job apocalypse and the cutthroat AI race, tech has gone hardcore. Ramp has seen a spike in corporate card purchases on Saturdays in the Bay Area. Foot traffic at San Francisco office buildings was up 21.6% year over year in July, per Placer.ai, the highest uptick among major cities. And as I found in conversations with more than two dozen young tech professionals, the industry's upstarts are pounding through hourslong coding sprints, working 996 schedules (9 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week), and proudly telling their investors and X followers how they've gone "monk mode" in service of scaling their startups.For many in Silicon Valley's young hustle class, "it's time to build" means there's no time to bone. They're on one type of grind, and it's not on the dance floor, which shuts down early in San Francisco anyway. Tech's dating scene, never particularly hot, has frozen over.Hackathons, pitch decks, scrambling for investors — the life of a startup founder has never been amenable to a rich dating life. Lauren Kay, a former dating app founder who now runs a literary business, tells me that when she was a member of the 2014 Y Combinator class, she had to ask her cofounder for permission to go on a first date at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. Still, she did meet her husband in that YC class. Douglas Feigelson, a member of that same class, says "there was opportunity to drink and date when I was in YC."The opportunity cost is really high. Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startupAnnie Liao, 24, founder of the AI learning startup Build ClubA decade later, many founders feel like they can't afford to make the time.A good relationship is like a good startup, says Daivik Goel, the 27-year-old founder of the payroll platform Shor. "It takes a lot of time to nurture at the beginning if you want to do them right." For now, he only has the bandwidth to nurture one. Like many of his founder friends, he says, he's not on any dating apps, and he doesn't seek out hookups at bars. "I haven't had the time to really invest yet."Several founders I spoke to described dating in founder terms. "The opportunity cost is really high," says Annie Liao, the 24-year-old founder of AI learning startup Build Club. "Every night you spent out is time you could have spent building your startup." She adds, "Most founders wait until the startup is more stable, like Series B."Liao says her founder roommates aren't dating either. They hook up sometimes for fun — so long as they don't get "emotionally attached." For those working seven days a week on their startup, opening Hinge is "a big, big distraction," she says.Some blame the dating recession on tech workers treating dating like an extension of their work. Liao says her male friends often give women ratings, "like KPIs." These ratings are out of 10, and offer a "numerical…