On October 17th, 2025, Good Jobs First released their new report “Smart Growth and Good Construction Jobs: How Urban Density Benefits Union Density.” This report builds on the organization’s 2003 report, “The Jobs Are Back in Town: Urban Smart Growth and Construction Employment”, as well as five other resources that they list and describe on page 4 of the report.
The Takeaway
The report’s Executive Summary identifies eight separate conclusions about the impacts of smart growth policies. We can break those down into two separate categories: impacts of smart growth policies on population size and job quantity, and impacts of smart growth policies on the quality and union density of jobs.
When it comes to population size and job quantity, the results of this research should make any building trades union local more inclined towards smart growth.
Between 2000 and 2012, metropolitan areas with either smart-growth policies or geographic constraints that prevented sprawl grew their populations at a slightly faster rate — 7.3% compared to 6.9% — than sprawling metropolitan areas.
Those smart-growth metros also added construction jobs at a higher rate, with 56.9% more construction jobs in those areas in 2020 than in 2012. In sprawling metros, there were only 37.3% more jobs.
And when the cost of buying land is taken into account, fix-it-first options — restoration/rehabilitation, resurfacing, and reconstruction without added capacity — generated 7% more jobs than new construction options.
These findings are further supplemented by findings on the quality and union density of these additional jobs.
The density of a metropolitan area is correlated with stronger union representation in the construction labor force.
When denser housing is being built, that work leads to a greater proportion of work being conducted by Building Trades members, such as plumbers, electricians, and elevator mechanics.
Between 2012 and 2020, the aggregate wages earned by construction workers in smart growth metros grew 74.3%, whereas in their sprawling counterparts, it only grew 43.8%.
On an individual level, the average construction job wage in a smart growth metro grew 11.1% in this same time frame, whereas it only grew 4.7% in sprawling metros. This meant that the average construction wage in a smart growth area actually had gone from being over $2,500 less per year than the average construction wage in a sprawling area in 2012, to being over $1,000 more per year right before the pandemic started in 2020.
Unfortunately, these takeaways are not as neat as we wish them to be. Most importantly, the authors stress that most of these findings are correlation, not causation, despite the potential causes they identify in the report and the case studies they present that validate these causes. (Such causes are also discussed in this two-part podcast on the recent decades-long turn towards public austerity, which frequently contrasts the union-controlled public works projects of the 1970s with the explosion of largely non-unionized single-family home construction leading up to the sub-prime mortgage crisis).
Why You Should Care
This research is crucial because of the strength of the Building Trades unions. Although the introduction of this report highlights that although service unions have long joined transit workers’ unions in supporting smart growth policies — including getting a convention resolution passed by the national AFL-CIO in 2001 — that has not been enough to overcome the, if we’re being generous, ambivalence of the national Building Trades unions towards what projects they build, so long as they provide jobs for their members. More recently, we saw this dynamic in Minnesota. After passing nation-leading legislation in 2023 with the support of the Building Trades, those same unions switched their support in this year’s legislative session to try to delay the implementation of this law. If we seek to pass policies like Colorado’s and Minnesota’s in states across the nation, and eventually the GREEN Streets Act at the national level, it will almost certainly require the support of the Building Trades.
The position of Good Jobs First as an organization makes this even more important. In addition to being very fractured, unions are often hesitant to accept policy recommendations that they didn’t have a role in crafting. But as the authors note early in the report, a quarter-century ago Good Jobs First actually turned this research into a curriculum for the Chicago Federation of Labor, and they have continued many of these relationships in the years since. Although this isn’t the same as conducting research hand-in-hand with the AFL-CIO, it will be more immediately trustworthy than the (still excellent) “Jobs for More Mobility and Less Mining” report from the Climate and Community Institute. In other words, this report is a chance to get a foot in the door or to improve relationships with an ally we will need to win.
The Proof
