Scarcity of skilled labor in the early years of the city enabled wages for construction workers to shoot erratically at moments to astronomical heights. Merchants and builders were forced to pay top dollar to men willing to give up the opportunity to try their fortunes with a pick and pan. Laborers at construction jobs could make ten to fifteen dollars a day for a while.

As wages declined in the gold fields (by 1853 miners were averaging five dollars per day), the price of labor in the city tended to fall as well. But the cost of living continuously overshadowed wages. When bread went for a few pennies a loaf elsewhere, in San Francisco it sold for a dollar. Construction materials, too, went for exorbitant rates: bricks, like eggs, could also cost a dollar apiece. This inspired the genesis of several brickyards south of Market Street, along with foundries, a stone quarry, and lumber mills.

One way around the high cost of construction labor was to import it. A banker paying to build an office building at the corner of Montgomery and California streets in 1851 purchased granite cut in China. But when the stone blocks appeared, they could not be assembled: the instructions had come in Chinese. The banker sent across the sea for Chinese stonemasons. Working from sunrise to sunset, each day they received a dollar, a half pound of rice, a quarter pound of fish, and an hour lunch break. Here began a California employment tradition: import foreign labor to undercut local labor costs.