State doesn’t always make it easy on job growth

Amid yet another COVID-19 outbreak and with the annual holiday break nearly here, job growth is not quite top of mind for many state residents. But it’s an important metric to watch as Connecticut tries to rebound from the worst of the pandemic and as Gov. Ned Lamont runs a reelection campaign. As news this week showed, there is a lot of work to do.

Unemployment is down and job numbers are up, which is always welcome. But the shock that accompanied the coronavirus outbreak was severe, especially in a state that had struggled to recover from the Great Recession that began more than a decade ago. Employment levels had not yet reached prerecession levels when the pandemic hit, putting us in an even deeper hole.

The type of jobs the state is seeing are changing, too. With the decline of many higher-paying financial sector jobs, especially in Fairfield County, a replacement by lower-paying, less-stable service sector jobs has left the state at a disadvantage. In many cases, a job is a job, but in the big picture, we need to be focused on the types of jobs we’re attracting to the state, and making sure we’re an attractive home for the economy of the future.

As might be expected, the leisure and hospitality sector has taken a big hit since the pandemic’s outset. These are jobs that usually can’t be done from home and require plenty of person-to-person contact, which is just the kind of situation many people were avoiding through the pandemic’s worst months. It’s no surprise that jobs in that sector suffered, and the latest outbreak shows there could be a ways to go before people feel fully comfortable engaging in the activities that would demand job growth in that field.

Construction, too, suffered in the pandemic economy, in contrast with much of the rest of the nation. As the Connecticut Mirror reported, while manufacturing and construction have been slow in Connecticut, “construction jobs grew by about 40 percent, and manufacturing was up more than 10 percent between January 2011 and January 2020.”

There are many factors to explain these discrepancies, and to explain why Connecticut has lagged the nation in job growth both before the pandemic and since it started. It’s a high-cost state, certainly, but that’s true for our neighbors, as well, and New York and Massachusetts have done comparatively well, as has California, in coming out of the economic doldrums.

What sets Connecticut apart is how difficult we make it for newcomers. Housing is scarce, and the obstacles to building new housing, particularly in the suburbs, are severe. Whatever it means to roll out the welcome mat, Connecticut does the opposite. The effect is to make it harder on companies that want to grow their employment rolls and others that may want to move here, because they know that any new workers will have a tough task finding an affordable place to live.

There are solutions to these problems. Opening up suburbs to more affordable, multifamily housing options has been a major focus at the Legislature in the past year, but progress to date has been halting.

If we want to grow our job numbers, we could start by making it easier to move here.

Housing is scarce, and the obstacles to building new housing, particularly in the suburbs, are severe.