Those doomsayers so fond of arguing that the worst is far from over and our recovery far from secure no doubt got a big boost last week with Evergreen Solar’s announcement that it would shutter its still-new Devens factory and eliminate roughly 800 local jobs.
It seems the entire Evergreen operation – once a mascot for Massachusetts’ surge into the 21st century green economy – is simply the latest example of a firm realizing it really is easier to join ’em if you can’t beat ’em, and moving operations to China.
Gone are the good-paying local jobs. Gone is yet another chunk of our rapidly diminishing manufacturing base. Gone is the foothold on the green economy, and the momentum it could have created by drawing other companies in and establishing a Massachusetts beachhead for all things new economy.
In this narrow instance, the doomsayers would be right to crow and scream “I told you so!” from their snow-covered rooftops. But we hope they don’t crow too loudly – they may not hear the inexorable sounds of progress being made in the commonwealth.
In the same week that Evergreen decided to cut and run to China, Steward Health Care System, parent company of Caritas Christi Health Care, announced a new lease for 101,000 square feet in Westwood.
Our seemingly Pavlovian response – conditioned as we are by the brutal, zero-sum commercial real estate environment of the past two years – was to immediately ask ourselves who was left with the 100,000-square-foot hole that must have been created by the move.
But our deep-rooted cynicism was misplaced. It seems Steward’s move wasn’t another round in the region’s ongoing commercial tenant musical chairs game, but was, refreshingly, motivated by simple corporate growth. The Boston-based company needed 100,000 square feet of additional space to house a newly created centralized call center and electronic monitoring system, according to a spokesman. It may not have made for the sexiest headline or most-read story last week, but we’ll happily take any occasion to report on honest-to-goodness growth.
This kind of growth is happening every day in Massachusetts. Not every company can occupy 100,000 square feet, of course, but dozens – perhaps hundreds – can, are, or soon will be able to occupy 10,000 square feet instead of 5,000; or 5,000 square feet instead of 1,500, and so on. From now on, we will we no longer assume the worst when a company moves or relocates – that one landlord benefited at another’s expense – and instead assume that one company moving out of its 5,000-square-foot space clears that space for another company looking to move out of its own 1,500-square-foot location. Movement is now creating opportunity, not liability.
We recently wrote about one Haverhill landlord that has seen the writing on the wall, and found success by focusing on landing eight smaller tenants instead of one big one. Baseball fans will see similarities in this approach to the San Francisco Giants’ “smallball” playing style – one which values consistency, base hits, walks and smart base-running just as much, if not more, than grand slams and late-inning heroics.
And the Giants just won the World Series.
In the new economy, absent the kind of back-office clerk and administrative jobs now handled by computers that used to support huge square footage leases, big landlords must stop waiting for that one home run tenant that’s going to take 100,000 square feet. Ten, 10,000-square-foot tenants accomplish the same goal.
Small companies are growing. Commercial lending and SBA loans are sources of growth for our local banks – so much so that they’ve resorted to poaching top lending talent from one another.
This smallball approach might otherwise be interpreted as death by a thousand cuts. And slowly but surely, we are cutting this recession to pieces.
We can feel it, far stronger than the sting left by Evergreen’s departure.
