We apologize for our rude headline, but there’s really no other conclusion to draw from a new Massachusetts Business Roundtable survey that’s rightly setting hair on fire across the state.
Fully three-quarters of firms surveyed are finding it hard to recruit workers, from proverbial floor-sweepers to the C suite, so much so that 21 percent are expanding their workforce outside Massachusetts, over just 7 percent last year, at the cost of growing their companies here.
Why? Seventy percent said the state’s talent pool, kept small by an exorbitant cost of living and a lack of homes to live in, is the biggest driver of their recruiting struggles. And 43 percent said their inability to find candidates willing to move to the state.
“I can give [multiple] examples of roles in Boston where we’ve tried to get folks to move here from Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago… When they do the math, they can’t seem to make it work even with increases [in compensation] that we give them to move here,” one anonymous respondent said, citing housing and taxes.
The value companies see in Massachusetts is so strong that not one firm said they were planning on leaving the state in the next two years, despite the Sturm und Drang tumbling forth from some upper tax brackets about the Fair Share Amendment. One respondent called Boston “one of premier cities in America.”
But that’s not thing to take for granted. The share of companies in the survey that cited the cost of living here as a major factor in their thinking about whether to stay here literally doubled in one year, to 53 percent, as the full weight of skyrocketing rents and home prices finally hit home.
It’s painfully clear that decades of under-building has brought us to a crisis point, and equally clear that hold habits of bowing down to the usual packs of kvetchers who have fainting fits at the mere mention of apartments can’t go on.
Massachusetts has a long and strong tradition of home rule and local democracy. But everyone – Beacon Hill included – needs to recognize that many parts of that vaunted democratic apparatus are routinely captured by a small minority of people who would rather pull up the drawbridge and declare their towns “full” despite all evidence that more and denser development is good for property taxes, good for the economy and good for the climate.
The MBTA Communities zoning reform legislation was a good start, but by itself it won’t build all the housing we need. Bold actions are needed, like legalizing multiple ADUs on single-family lots statewide, generating new revenue for the state’s existing housing finance programs or looking for every way possible to grow dense, new towns on major opportunity sites like Southfield and Devens.
It will be a long road, but if legislators in states as diverse as California and Wisconsin show us, it’s far from too late.
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