BFSSSS
BF Strategic Site Selection Services

Bob's Blog

Introduction

In my non-professional travel and everyday life I often view things through the prism of a site selector. In this blog I share some observations and thoughts that might be of mild interest to the larger community of site selectors, economic developers, and corporate managers. I am not a frequent blogger (more often doing client work), and when I do so I may add a post with a link in LinkedIn. I use my twitter account, @BFSSSS, more as a rant about poor customer service or what seem to me to be non sequiturs. Actually, I have found twitter to sometimes yield quicker responses than via customer service kiosk queues or phone calls when those media are backed up or unavailable, for example after a flight cancellation, while overseas, or after one of several hurricane evacuations from my summer home on the Outer Banks.

Help wanted: A new paradigm in economic development and site selection

Post pandemic, help wanted signs are showing up and down Main Street, and many businesses are being forced to curtail their hours.

 

For site selection consultants, one of the latter phases of a project is to interview local employers regarding the quality and availability of talent. These interviews are usually arranged by local economic development agencies with larger employers with whom they have developed (a possible symbiotic) relationship.

 

 We know that 44% of economic activity is generated by small businesses, and that they can be more active than multi-jurisdictional businesses in giving back to the community. These businesses are struggling to find employees. Accordingly, my proposition is that economic developers should be more focused on attracting or developing qualified workers rather than wooing job vacuuming projects.

 

How can they do this? In locales where appropriate, they can eschew incentives for new employee job creation and tax abatements for incoming employers. Rather their resources, which are largely funded through taxes paid by local businesses and their workers, should be directed to attracting a larger workforce into the region. One way to achieve this is to increase the supply of affordable housing. Other initiatives include expansion of educational opportunities from pre-K to community college, infrastructure development for both local transportation and telecommuting, making the community more inclusive to incomers, and overall quality of life enhancement programs targeted towards new graduates and other millennials. Perhaps even cash incentives to relocating new employees could be considered.

 

This is not to say economic development is a zero sum game. However, at looking at the tax revenues that may eventually be brought in by a new business, economic developers and site selectors need to weight the net effect of the business on existing businesses and the impact of the project on the affordability of living and quality of life of the local population.  The resistance Amazon faced in establishing a second headquarters in Long Island City, NY, although probably more local political than economic,  is still an indicator of how mass job creation projects can backfire in today’s environment if the larger impact on the community is not considered.

Bob Frederickson