What has to be made in the U.S.? Buildings and infrastructure. If you want to deal with trade imbalances, build housing. Use bricks, wood, stone, lime mortar, glass, rock wool insulation, and metals from our country. Back in the 2000s, investment banker and diplomat Felix Rohatyn, one of the smartest political minds of all time, told us to create an infrastructure bank and use the money to rehabilitate every bridge, railroad, subway, power plant, and highway in the U.S. He proved, using basic economics, that the construction industry would jump-start the economy faster than any other endeavor. No one listened. We’re in the same sorry position today, but worse.

U.S. architects, urbanists, and engineers understand that we’re squandering our talent and labor by waiting to renovate all the buildings in the nation that can be reused for housing and public facilities. They also know that it would take only a few basic incentives to give private developers the green light to spend, spend, spend on these kinds of projects. What is wrong with our politicians? They have heard the obvious reasons why the economy would benefit from priming the pump in the construction industry. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill proved it could. Now the Trump administration is canceling everything good that came from that legislation. The nation’s engine is in reverse.

The housing crisis is real. Even Republicans acknowledge this. What’s keeping Congress from passing legislation to fund new housing, remove red tape, and green-light state sponsored initiatives in places like California, New York, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and Vermont, where housing is preventing people from working in good-paying jobs? Texas, for all its crazy politics, has built more housing than any of these states because it has fewer obstacles and more open land. How is the economy doing in Dallas and Houston? Pretty damn good, as they would say.

The U.S. has a robust lumber industry. It has plenty of clay for bricks, plenty of open stone and gravel quarries, and plenty of capacity for steel production—if there were a demand. It has thousands of miles of railway right-of-ways, and even the technology to make fast trains if the NIMBY environmentalists would get out of the way. New Urbanists have proven time and again that small and medium-sized new towns can be built efficiently if there are minimal incentives to do so in progressive states. New building materials, often from recycled ones, are hitting the market every few months, it seems. As an architect with less work than I would like, I can only drool as I think about what I could do with this stuff.

What if I needed to hire experienced staff? U.S. architecture and engineering schools are losing students at an alarming rate as smart young people run after M.B.A. degrees. Meanwhile, countries like India, Pakistan, and China are graduating thousands of people who can staff building and infrastructure industry positions in the near future. When our stupid politicians eventually recognize the crisis and want a trained labor force to construct new infrastructure and housing, we will be bereft and shit out of luck.

How about artisanal labor? We have unlimited capacity. Train people to use their hands. Stop selling university education for students who hate computers. Don’t privilege that kind of education. In Europe, as I have written on this website, there are programs that encourage young people to enter the traditional craft and building trades, offering them a path to a good income and job security. The U.S. has only a few such programs, though in states like mine, New Hampshire, preservation organizations are running workshops for high school students to encourage artisanal training. Stone masons, timber framers, and blacksmiths are offering to show their skills wherever they are welcomed. Vermont has for decades trumpeted its handicraft industries, and done well by doing so.

The message is so clear it slaps you in the face. Will politicians wake up when it hits them? I’m not so sure they will. Year after year, as the nation loses good jobs for working people, in state houses and in Washington, D.C., the politicians lament their plight. The Democrats search for ways to bring back working-class voters to their side, ignoring the obvious. Build, build, build—with U.S.-made products, local labor, locally grown food, clean environmental policies, and, most important, people in small towns and cities that are losing population and economic vitality. Do it now, while the country still has hope.