The state's grid already had the interconnection built. That is the whole pitch.
Construction Costs, Tariffs & Labor
The cost side of every project decision. Tariffs on key materials, skilled-labor shortages, and rising insurance are reshaping what pencils.
Construction cost is where many projects live or die. Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, a structural shortage of skilled trades, and climbing insurance premiums have pushed hard costs up and compressed the margins developers underwrite to.
These pressures do not hit evenly. They change which product types and markets pencil, and they push developers toward value engineering, alternative materials, and phasing. Cost trajectory is now a core timing input, not a fixed line.
This hub tracks the cost side: material and tariff moves, labor, insurance, and what they mean for feasibility.
Go deeper: read the guide.
The developers on this beat
The firms our construction costs, tariffs & labor coverage names, most-covered first, with the number of stories naming each one.
Latest coverage
The Park Hill Owners Association settled a construction-defect suit over its 10-unit Winter Park townhome complex for $26.5M, about $2.65M per unit.
Our permit wire caught the Design District's marquee-architect office and retail project moving from render to steel.
Related Ross's twin CityPlace office towers are climbing out of the ground, with steel and slab now visible above downtown West Palm Beach's skyline.
A vacant Edgewater assemblage just got a $61 million vertical permit, the first hard construction milestone on the site the county's tax roll still lists as empty land.
A nine-floor, 450,000 square foot office permit is new construction, not a renovation, at $350 a foot in a market where fresh office supply has been scarce.
The permit itself, not a survey, gives builders a current Miami-Dade hard-cost number: $192,750 per unit on an 80-unit workforce project.
The staff report concedes the mall's main entrance closes. The product answer is to turn the pad inside out and give it its own front door.
Taking data center work means running four times the monthly volume through a safety program built for something else, and the exposure lands on your EMR.
Agents disclose it, builders quote against it, and the 2026 expansion bill never made it out of committee.
Duty is assessed on the date of entry, not the sailing date. That makes the gap after July 24 a customs scheduling question, not a procurement strategy.
Moratoriums are a zoning risk. Attaching labor conditions to the utility rate is a different failure mode: the project still gets approved, it just stops penciling.
Power gets built first and the load follows. Mississippi County, Arkansas is the clearest example yet of generation-led site selection.
One month of falling oil masked a year of tariff-driven escalation in the metals that actually build towers.
If the math holds, workforce housing stops being a subsidy product and starts being a cost-basis product.
The former Pfizer HQ was deemed stable, but the near-miss puts a price on the diligence conversions of aging stock now demand.
A $25M funding gap and tariff-driven cost pressure stalled the 357-unit project, testing mass timber's economics.
Frequently asked
- How do tariffs affect construction costs?
- Tariffs raise the price of imported materials like steel, aluminum, and copper, and they can pull up domestic prices too as suppliers follow the market. Because those materials run through structure, facades, mechanical systems, and wiring, even a targeted tariff can lift a project's overall hard costs by a meaningful margin, squeezing the developer's margin.
- Why is skilled construction labor in short supply?
- The trades face a structural shortage: an aging workforce, fewer young workers entering the field, and demand from large projects competing for the same crews. Shortages lengthen schedules and raise labor costs, and they hit hardest in booming markets and for specialized work, which factors directly into feasibility and timing.
- How are rising insurance costs affecting development?
- Property and casualty insurance has climbed sharply, especially in markets exposed to climate risk, and higher premiums cut directly into net operating income. That compresses values and can make otherwise viable deals fail to pencil, which is why insurance has moved from a line item to a real underwriting variable.