The Rise of Greenflation

The McMansions of the mid-2000s might be the most American form of housing, but they were not, in general, grown in America. Although the United States is home to more than 200 billion trees, the type of lumber harvested from North Carolina to Mississippi warps and twists when used as a vertical stud. Eventually it will pop your drywall. So for our home-framing needs, Americans rely on northern spruce and fir felled up north, milled into lumber, purchased by men like Stinson Dean, a Colorado-based lumber trader, and placed onto railcars bound for Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.

In that last boom, Dean remembers, the U.S. built 2 million homes a year, and lumber prices never got much above $450 per 1,000 board feet, within the tidy range they’d stuck to since he entered the business nearly a decade ago. Now, the U.S. can’t find enough lumber to complete more than 1.3 million homes a year. Meanwhile, lumber is back up to $1,200. “The price of lumber has tripled, but we’re producing 40 percent less homes,” Dean told me. There has not been a bigger gap, in fact, between the number of homes that builders are starting and the number that they’re finishing in decades.

Since the mid-aughts boom, the North American economy actually productive capacity. Dean has little doubt about what is to blame. “The lumber-price story is a climate story,”