Boston no longer needs to hold city workers hostage to residency requirements
There was a time when Boston was so intent on enforcing its rules requiring municipal workers to live within the city limits that it hired teams of investigators to track down scofflaws. Residency compliance could easily be weaponized — by a grumpy neighbor or a grumpy mayor. It wasn’t a pretty time.
Today the landscape is much changed, with the city begging to fill essential jobs from police to city planners — along with a number of equally critical lower-wage jobs, including 911 dispatchers, bus monitors, and cafeteria workers, many of whom can’t afford to live in a place now ranked as second only to San Francisco as the most expensive city in the nation in which to live.
So Boston has begun to chip away at longstanding policies that have clearly outlived their usefulness — doing so not in any particularly organized way, but as each hiring crisis arises. That’s left the city with a patchwork of ever-changing residency rules that vary by city department and can look an awful lot like double standards to the workers subject to them.
As the world of work in the private sector has shifted, as entire office buildings remain vacant, isn’t it time the city government takes a look at whether residency requirements in a relatively small city with a hot real estate market and high rents make any sense at all?
“The labor market has changed in the last 18 months,” said City Councilor Kenzie Bok, who also serves as a member of the Boston Residency Compliance Commission, which has granted a number of waivers in the past several months, allowing the city to fill jobs with non-residents. “But the [Wu] administration doesn’t want to abandon the [residency] policy and I don’t want to either.”
If too many city workers live elsewhere, she argued, “it can erode the sense that we’re all in this together.”
But earlier this month, the commission granted the police department a waiver allowing it to hire police officers from departments outside the city and giving them six months to find local housing.
Police Commissioner Michael Cox told the Globe Editorial Board Wednesday that turnover has become a problem and the department is down about 200 officers.
As for recruitment, he added, “you kind of want to open that up. I just want to get the best people possible.”
Police officers, like many other city employees, are required under their current collective bargain agreement to live in the city for the first 10 years of their employment. The Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association is looking to lower that figure to five years in the contract now being negotiated.
As for that more permanent fix, Cox said, “That’s mostly a political call.”
And while there’s a lot to be said for knowing that one of your neighbors is on the force, it’s also true that young officers have been known to skirt the law with crash-pad addresses, and older ones who became part of the department’s command staff often lived elsewhere.
The police department is hardly the only city agency up against a hiring problem. The Boston Planning and Development Agency issued its own revised policy in October for a pilot program, granting new hires a six-month waiver to find housing in the city.
“While identifying qualified candidates is always a challenge, it has been particularly difficult over the last year,” wrote Michael Kerr, the agency’s human resources director. The policy switch was made, he noted, “in an effort to widen our pool of potential candidates.” The agency currently has 23 vacancies to fill, according to a BPDA spokeswoman.
But, as Bok pointed out, it’s really at the lower end of the city’s pay scale that the biggest problem exists. And so in September the residency commission granted three-year waivers for 911 dispatchers and civilian call takers at the BPD, along with Boston Public Schools bus monitors and cafeteria workers. The waivers will remain in effect either for three years or until 85 percent of the vacancies are filled, whichever comes first.
Also on that waiver list, but far better-paying, are jobs for the arborists the city will surely need as it contemplates a redo of Franklin Park. The three jobs listed on LinkedIn have yet to be filled.
Does anyone really care whether the city’s arborists reside in Sudbury? Does it detract from our sense of civic togetherness if bus monitors commute from Malden? Teachers in the BPS system are exempt from residency requirements under state law and somehow the high heavens haven’t fallen. But cafeteria workers were not until the waiver. Does it make any sense for teachers to be exempt, but not librarians at the Boston Public Library who are looking to have their residency requirement revisited in their next collective bargaining agreement?
The residency policy dates back to 1976, when middle-class families were abandoning the city in droves. Maybe the rules made sense back then. But as collective bargaining agreements come up for renewal, the issue of residency ought to be on the table for a fresh look. Boston is now a vibrant, thriving albeit expensive place to live. It should no longer be in the business of dragooning city workers into living here.