By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report
LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles was already short an estimated 70,000 qualified construction workers before last year’s Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. A state analysis now puts the region’s total need above 100,000 workers, with median pay just under $30 an hour depending on trade and experience.
The state’s response has been to fund training capacity rather than wait for the private market to close the gap on its own. Last year California awarded $5 million split among five Los Angeles-area community colleges; the money only recently reached Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, where it is funding supplies and updated curricula for programs in carpentry, electrical maintenance and welding.
The human angle is straightforward: one Trade-Tech carpentry student enrolled less than a week after his own Palisades home burned down and his high school graduation, drawn by both the personal stakes and the job market. Completed certificates in the field can lead to pay above $40 an hour, and Pasadena City College is using its share of the state award to build a 55,000-square-foot construction training center nearby.
The pipeline still faces real friction. Only about a third of students who start Trade-Tech’s construction certificate programs finish them, and a separate $20 million federal training grant was cancelled last May by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration after only about $88,000 had been disbursed, tightening an already constrained funding picture.
History argues for patience on the recovery timeline. California communities hit by major fires in 2017 and 2018 still have only a fraction of destroyed homes rebuilt years later, a reminder that workforce capacity, not just insurance payouts or state funding, will set the pace of Los Angeles’s rebuild.
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