Can a green industry create a boomtown that doesn’t fizzle?

Electric-vehicle maker boosts area with jobs, other investments.

NORMAL, ILLINOIS — When he bought a construction contractor called Weber Electric in 2018, Josh Mosier inherited about 20 employees. By the end of the next year, he was up to about 100 employees. By the spring of 2021, the number was over 225.

“Because of this boom,” said Mosier, whose company often works on large building projects, “we’ve grown exponentially.”

The epicenter of that boom is an electric-vehicle maker named Rivian, which brought in Mosier’s company and others in the Normal, Illinois, area to work on the city’s costliest construction project in decades: a massive auto plant.

As it prepares to deliver its first electric pickup trucks and SUVs this year, Rivian has spent around $1.5 billion renovating and expanding a factory once owned by Mitsubishi. On a typical day, the 3.3-million-square-foot plant hosts several hundred construction workers alongside more than 2,500 workers employed by the company, which expects to eventually double its local head count.

The effects are hard to miss in Normal and nearby Bloomington, a metropolitan area of about 170,000. Hotels are frequently booked up, pandemic or not; hundreds of housing lots are being developed; and many employers looking to hire a full-time plumber are basically out of luck.

“AtRivian, we’ve heard they’re hiring a lot of licensed plumbers,” said Lori Stickling, who operates a plumbing company with her husband. “We’ve had a post up for months with no qualified candidates.”

In recent years, makers of elec

tric vehicles and their components, like Tesla, Lucid Motors and Lordstown Motors, have collectively spent billions building or renovating factories in Nevada, Texas, Arizona and Ohio.

The challenges are enormous, given that few of these companies have brought a vehicle to market. But if some succeed, the impact could be many times greater than the thousands of manufacturing jobs they create directly.

They could transform places like Normal, a university town where high-paying blue-collar employment lagged until the late 1980s, when Mitsubishi partnered with Chrysler to build a factory. The plant, which employed more than 3,000 at its peak, and its suppliers attracted workers from across central Illinois. The resulting economic activity helped fill the city’s coffers and fund redevelopment.

When the plant scaled back production in the 2000s and closed in 2015, around the time of white-collar job cuts, Normal felt the pinch. Suppliers decamped, and many workers left in search of new jobs. Uptown, an elegant, brick-accented district with a restored 1930s theater and a pair of suddenly toobig hotels, became a monument to the city’s fading prosperity.

Local politicians and business leaders embraced Rivian, which is based in Michigan and has locations in other states, Canada and Britain, as a way to fill the vacuum. But in a place that has endured such changes of fortune, residents can be forgiven for wondering how long today’s good times will continue.

Electric vehicles require fewer workers to make than gasoline-powered ones. And while Rivian’s prospects appear strong — it filed for a public stock offering in August, seeking a valuation of roughly $70 billion — the company could be overwhelmed by a growing list of competitors. At some point, the spending spree will end, and the local industry will rise or fall on whether Rivian can build a sizable customer base.

The initial froth is already dissipating. After reaching more than 200 employees earlier this year, Weber Electric is down to about 100. “We kind of rolled it back a little bit,” said Mosier, the owner, adding that he hopes to add workers again as the plant green-lights more construction.

In this way, the electric vehicle boom is something of a microcosm for the larger transition to a low-carbon economy: As governments and investors funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into green industries, there is certain to be an initial jolt. But will it last?

Hiring began in 2016, when Rivian kept on a handful of former Mitsubishi employees who had been maintaining the shuttered factory, but it has accelerated in the past 1½ years. The company hired about 100 people a week in June and July.

The ramp-up has made labor, already in short supply during the pandemic, even more scarce. A branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which has helped contractors like Mosier staff up, says it has fully booked the roughly 280 licensed union electricians in the area.

To meet the demand, the union brought in a few hundred electricians from elsewhere in the country this year.

A nearby community college started a program this fall to train electric vehicle technicians, and Illinois State University, which abuts Uptown, is building an engineering school partly in response to Rivian.

The boom has also sustained the local travel and hospitality business. In October, after a four-year hiatus, Delta Air Lines resumed a nonstop flight to Detroit.

The visitors, including contractors, suppliers and Rivian employees from other locations, have helped keep the city’s restaurants and hotels afloat during the pandemic. “It’s really saved their bacon,” Mayor Chris Koos said. One indication of their reliance on Rivian: The company runs a shuttle service to and from a stop near the hotels from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

In principle, a factory like Rivian’s should provide a more lasting boost than a solar or wind farm, which creates a flurry of construction activity but requires relatively few employees to operate. An automobile factory could also provide a bigger stimulus than an e-commerce warehouse because its workers tend to be more productive and can therefore be more highly paid.

Such factories also attract more suppliers, said Willy C. Shih, an expert on manufacturing at the Harvard Business School.

Despite this potential, new factories do not benefit all cities equally. When a factory opens where much of the population is already employed, the net gain to the local economy can be muted, according to research by Timothy J. Bartik, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan.

But in an area like Normal that is suffering industrial decline, a factory’s effect on employment can be up to three times as great. The benefits can last for decades — if the factory survives.

“When the employment-population ratio is going up, it drives up earnings, and that goes on for 20 years,” Bartik said.

AKILAH TOWNSEND/ NEW YORK TIMES The race to make electric vehicles is turning some places — like Normal, Illinois — into growing areas. However, Normal has seen good times go sour in the past as plants and businesses shut down.

AKILAH TOWNSEND/NEW YORK TIMES When the Mitsubishi plant closed in 2015, the impact quickly rippled out through the town, squeezing local businesses, such as the theater.