Solving our valley’s workforce problem
I keep reading and hearing about the current activities in Whitefish regarding affordable housing. I have some observations:
Doesn’t it strike anybody that this is a valley-wide issue and not just a Whitefish issue? Doesn’t it also strike anybody that they are trying to solve the problem by coming up with an affordable housing plan in the town in the valley that has the highest land prices?
The affordable housing issue is maybe 50% of the problem. The remainder is just as impactful, if not even more so. Just because affordable housing is built in the valley does not mean that we will find people clamoring to move from somewhere else for the type of work for which affordable housing is designed.
In my view, we need to stop calling this issue an “affordable housing problem” and recognize that it’s way broader and deeper than that. I would suggest that “The Workforce Problem” is way more apropos and inclusive.
Other resorts are having a workforce problem that’s equal to ours even though many of them already have plenty of affordable housing. Look at Aspen, Vail, Banff/Lake Louise, Sun Valley, and many others.
We have a couple of factors that are going to make it significantly harder for us to recruit employees than in almost every single one of these other communities.
First, our addressable pool of employees is significantly smaller than the others: Aspen is 4 hours from 5 million people (front range); Park City is 38 minutes away from 1.23 million people; Vail is 2 hours from 5 million people, etc. Our valley is 2 1/2 hours from the nearest interstate, let alone any significant population center, and this is going to make it way, way harder than it will be in any of the other “comparable” communities to recruit employees.
To me, there are two things that we need to focus on if we’re ever going to have any success in solving our “workforce” problem.
The first is to expand the effort to the entire valley and to stop trying to focus only on Whitefish. This would allow us to tap into all of the resources that we have in the valley, including available land that’s way cheaper than what’s available in Whitefish, additional funding resources that could be brought to bear, and additional people resources that would have a broader perspective than just a Whitefish-centric program. Coordinating a valley-wide effort would supercharge the resolution of the problem, both for Whitefish and for the other communities in the valley.
The second item, as part of a valley-wide effort, is to develop what is going to be a difficult and complex marketing program to bring workers to the valley once additional housing is built. “Build it and they will come” has little relevance here. I can see a ton of money being spent on building affordable housing and then people scratching their heads wondering why so few workers have come to fill that housing.
Please don’t get me wrong – I think that developing workforce housing is extremely important, and I applaud the efforts of the various ad hoc groups are trying to do that. However, simply focusing only on Whitefish and then also not spending an equal amount of time developing a workforce recruiting program is not going to fall way short in solving this problem.
Marshall Friedman lives in Whitefish