High mortgage rates aren’t the only reason homeownership remains out of reach for many Americans.

Behind the scenes, homebuilders are grappling with an overlooked challenge — a shortage of skilled workers — that is slowing construction and making it harder to close the nation’s housing gap.

Builders say the labor shortage is creating a ripple effect throughout the housing market, delaying projects, raising construction costs and limiting the number of new homes coming online at a time when demand continues to outpace supply.

BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION SURGE CAUSED HIGHER RENT AND HOME PRICES, FED STUDY FINDS

NAHB estimates government regulations add nearly $132,000 to the price of a typical new home. (Matthew Busch/Bloomberg/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“Labor is one of the largest and most expensive inputs when it comes to home production and land development,” Jim Tobin, president and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, told Fox News Digital.

He said that every month, the construction industry is short by approximately 250,000 workers.

“It’s been as high as 400,000 jobs short when we were really cooking along a few years ago,” Tobin said, adding that the labor gap “is a persistent shortage.”

And the industry’s labor needs are only expected to grow in coming years.

THE KEY STRATEGY RED STATES ARE USING TO LOWER HOUSING COSTS REVEALED

Housing industry leaders say states that have prioritized homebuilding have been better positioned to accommodate population growth and economic expansion. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

A recent Home Builders Institute and National Association of Home Builders report estimates builders will need roughly 723,000 new workers annually to keep pace with demand and help close the nation’s 1.5 million-home housing gap.

The shortage is already affecting how quickly homes can be built. According to Home Builders Institute President and CEO Ed Brady, labor constraints are extending construction timelines and driving up costs.

ONE TYPE OF PROPERTY IS QUIETLY SAVING AMERICANS THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

“This shortage adds nearly two extra months to building timelines, inflating costs and delaying delivery,” Brady told Fox News Digital.

Builders say replenishing the skilled trades pipeline is only part of the solution.

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An “Open House” sign in front of a home for sale in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on July 13, 2025.  (Eric Thayer/Bloomberg/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Tobin said many construction jobs do not require a four-year college degree and can provide stable, middle-class careers, but the home construction industry has struggled for years to attract enough workers to replace retiring tradespeople.

Puzzle fans working through Sunday’s New York Times Connections game have their solution: puzzle #1127, released July 12, 2026, sorted 16 words into four groups spanning fruit terminology, candy brands, a college-life motto and geographic wordplay tied to U.S. state capitals, according to multiple outlets tracking the daily puzzle.

Connections challenges players to organize 16 seemingly unrelated words into four hidden groups of four, with each group linked by a shared theme, color-coded by difficulty from yellow, the easiest, through green, blue and finally purple, traditionally the most difficult and often built around wordplay rather than straightforward meaning. Players select four words at a time and submit a guess, with the game indicating correct groupings by color and offering a “one away” warning when a guess is close but not quite right. Four incorrect guesses end the puzzle.

Sunday’s yellow category centered on the reproductive part of a fruit, grouping the words pip, pit, seed and stone, all terms describing the small structure inside various fruits from which a new plant could theoretically grow. The green group asked players to identify a bit of fruit-flavored candy, linking dot, nerd, runt and spree, each a reference to a well-known candy brand or product name associated with fruity flavors.

The blue category, one level up in conceptual difficulty, gathered verbs found in a familiar college-life slogan, connecting party, repeat, sleep and study, a set puzzle guides described as evoking the well-known “eat, sleep, study, repeat” or similar rhythm associated with the college experience. The puzzle’s purple group, traditionally its trickiest, required players to recognize the starts of U.S. state capitals, linking den, mad, pho and sac, corresponding to the beginnings of Denver, Madison, Phoenix and Sacramento.

One puzzle guide covering Sunday’s grid described the overall difficulty as balancing straightforward action words against trickier conceptual links, noting the board “balances straightforward action words with trickier conceptual links, making it satisfying once everything clicks.” The same source offered a general strategy tip for approaching similarly structured puzzles going forward, suggesting players lock in the more obvious verb-based groupings early before turning their attention to shorter word fragments that may require broader geographic or cultural knowledge to fully parse.

Connections was developed internally by the Times and rolled out widely in 2023 following a beta testing period, building on the momentum generated by Wordle, which the paper had acquired the previous year. Since its full launch, Connections has become one of the more popular entries in the Times’ expanding games section, which also includes Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword, Sudoku and Pips, part of a broader strategy by the paper to build a suite of daily puzzles that keeps readers returning to its games platform consistently.

The category names themselves remain hidden from players at the outset of each puzzle, requiring solvers to infer each group’s connecting theme purely from the 16 scrambled words presented on the board. That design choice has made the game notably prone to misdirection, since certain words are often deliberately chosen because they could plausibly fit into more than one category before a puzzle’s true structure becomes clear. Sunday’s board illustrated that tendency well, given that fruit-related terms and short word fragments both appeared in multiple categories, requiring players to look past surface-level associations to land on the puzzle’s intended groupings.

Beyond the standard Connections puzzle, the Times has also continued expanding into sports-specific content through its ownership of The Athletic. Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff format that resets daily at midnight Eastern time alongside the main puzzle, asks players to group 16 sports-related terms into four themed categories. Sunday’s sports edition, puzzle #657, covered plays commonly seen on a baseball field, terms associated with coming in first place, players connected to a particular Boston sports franchise, and vocabulary tied to breaks in play, according to puzzle guides tracking that edition separately from the main game.

For players who prefer working through Connections gradually rather than seeing the full solution at once, most puzzle-tracking outlets offer graduated hint systems that follow the game’s own difficulty ladder, presenting clues from the yellow category through purple in ascending order of difficulty. That structure allows players to request a partial nudge, such as a thematic hint for the purple category alone, without necessarily spoiling the remaining groups if they would still like to solve those independently.

Access to the daily Connections puzzle, along with Wordle and the Mini Crossword, remains free through the Times’ games app and website, while the publication’s full puzzle archive, including older Connections boards, requires a Times Games subscription to access. The paper has continued to build out tools surrounding its puzzle offerings in recent years, including performance-tracking features that let players monitor their solving statistics over time, similar in spirit to the Wordle Bot analysis tool available for that game.

Sunday’s puzzle followed Saturday’s edition, puzzle #1126, which puzzle guides also flagged as relatively approachable, continuing a stretch of moderately difficult boards heading into the new week. The Times typically varies puzzle difficulty across a rolling weekly cycle, with Mondays generally considered the easiest entry point and puzzles growing progressively more challenging as the week progresses, though that general pattern is not always consistent from week to week.

Connections has built a dedicated fan base since its official debut, with players frequently sharing their results, without revealing the actual answers, on social media in a format similar to Wordle’s now-familiar shareable grid. That format lets players display how many mistakes they made and the order in which they solved each category, without spoiling the puzzle for others who haven’t yet played that day’s grid. The game’s popularity has also spurred a wave of independent puzzle guides and hint sites, many of which publish same-day breakdowns within hours of each puzzle’s midnight release, catering both to players who want quick verification of their answers and those who prefer a more structured, hint-driven path toward solving the board themselves.

Monday’s Connections puzzle is scheduled to reset at midnight Eastern time, continuing the game’s daily rotation. Players looking for hints ahead of the next release can typically expect updated guides to appear across puzzle-tracking sites within hours of each new puzzle going live, following the same category-by-category format used to break down Sunday’s grid.

This article was written by

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