Photo by Gus Chan for Crain’s Cleveland Business

By Jay Miller

Solon, an affluent suburb in southeast Cuyahoga County, has a problem.

Many of its 900 businesses are struggling to keep their production lines moving and their workstations occupied. Part of the problem, city leaders found, is that it is difficult to attract job candidates looking for work. The reasons for the struggle to fill jobs — in Solon and elsewhere in Northeast Ohio — are varied. Health issues related to the COVID-19 outbreak are a factor; so, too, are low wages, difficulty finding and keeping childcare, and workers who have retired early.

Solon is not alone in this problem. Continuing sprawl — and its impact on matching workers with available jobs — is an intractable problem that continues to plague our region. Over the next year, Crain's Cleveland Business in a monthly Forum series will explore issues like this at the intersection of public policy and business. First up, we look at how employers are struggling to fill jobs and the impact of continuing sprawl has had in Northeast Ohio, where the number of jobs near the average resident has continued to fall.

Generations ago, after the Civil War, the industrial age brought jobs to the Cleveland and Akron business districts and to the steel mills, rubber factories and other industrial businesses on the edges of those downtowns. Then after World War II, came urban sprawl.

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Sprawl was a response to economic growth that fattened wallets and allowed the newly affluent to leave cramped neighborhoods for bigger homes in the suburbs. But it also created the loss of green space and wildlife habitats and induced higher car dependency and longer commuting times.

Getting workers to the jobs is a particular concern in Solon, which has a population of 22,858, according to the last census.

A 2020 study by Team NEO, an economic development nonprofit focused on Northeast Ohio, found that of the nearly 27,000 people who work in Solon, 25,000 lived outside the Cleveland suburb. And of those, some traveled from as far away as Vermilion to the west and Farrell, Pennsylvania, to the east, both an hour's drive in good weather — 90 minutes on a snowy Northeast Ohio day.

And that's for workers who can commute by car. The Fund for Our Economic Future, in a 2015 report called "The Geography of Jobs" cites research showing that a job in Northeast Ohio that is 20 minutes away for a car commuter is almost 75 minutes away for a typical transit commuter.

So, in 2020, along with city officials, Solon companies, including its two largest employers, and the Solon Chamber of Commerce, created the Solon Mobility Task Force. The suburban community had been growing as business center for nearly 50 years — a beneficiary of the urban sprawl created by the development of freeways and a population yearning for more elbow room. But while its population more than doubled in that time, its business community had grown 600% from 1978 when it had only 150 business employers.

The goal was to find ways to attract job candidates to the many open jobs in Solon.

Swagelok Co., its largest employer, makes valves and fittings for fluid systems products and has nearly 3,000 employees in Solon, according to the city's count. It recently had 209 postings for Solon-based jobs such as tool crib operator and customer service manager on its website. Nestle Prepared Foods, Solon's second-largest employer, with more than 2,300 workers, had postings for 79 job categories, including ingredient handlers (on three shifts) and procurement specialist.

The Solon task force found that the rising cost of transportation was making job seekers think twice about the time-consuming commute to an outlying suburb, whether it is owning and maintaining a car or the cost of public transit or other forms of alternative transportation.

To attack the problem, the task force is working with the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) to find ways to expand or realign public transit. It also is exploring vehicle-for-hire and other micro-transit solutions and is researching funding options for making these workforce mobility improvements.

Broadly, the availability of skilled personnel is high on the concerns of the business community, wherever they have operations. Executives surveyed earlier this year by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found that only the impact of inflation was considered a greater challenge facing the business executives. That survey found that 82% of respondents said their companies had some difficulty recruiting and retaining employees. Because of unfilled positions, the respondent companies were delaying service expansions, limiting new projects and bids, and restructuring staff.

What qualities an employer is looking for in a potential employee varies from job to job. Past experience in the job can be a plus, but so might things ranging from communication skills and working in a team to the ability to lift 70 pounds. One consistent element, though, is something that is often called dependability, and being able to get to the job every day, on time, is a key factor in dependability.

Before sprawl, the concentration of jobs in a city like Cleveland helped stabilize careers for many workers. "You could jump between jobs in downtown Cleveland and your entire life wouldn't change logistically," said Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution think tank who lives in Shaker Heights.

Similarly, bus lines connected many neighborhoods to factories. Residents of what is now Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood could walk to the steel mills along the Cuyahoga River. Now, however, Northeast Ohio has dozens of "job hubs" like Solon. Independence, for example, near the intersection of two interstate highways, has a population of about 7,300 but a daily workforce of more than 21,000.

What the dispersal of jobs means is that too often, job seekers can't get to the job sites, and for employees, getting to work every day, on time is harder.

At a June 16 luncheon meeting, the Fund for Our Economic Future released results of research it called "Where Are the Workers." The research found that while low pay and health and disabilities issues were key barriers to employment, according to the unemployed surveyed, 27% considered a lack of transportation an important barrier to finding and keeping a job.

These commuting concerns are only now emerging as a problem for business owners, Tomer said.

"Employers may not see the direct transportation costs, but the transportation network for workers is absolutely connected to the business," he said. "It will touch the bottom line through lack of dependable workers. Workers unable to show up is not good."

This problem is especially acute in Northeast Ohio. A 2015 Brookings study found that of the largest metropolitan areas, the Cleveland Metropolitan Area had the largest drop in the number of jobs near the average resident between 2000 and 2012. It ranked in last place, at 96th, with a 26.5% drop. The Akron metro area was in 84th place with a 14.4% drop.

In other words, while employment may be growing in places like Solon, the commute is discouraging people who want to work from making the trek to a work site.

"What we found was, as you go further from central business districts, as the street network gets less dense, the distances people travel grow and grow," said Tomer, who researches infrastructure policy and urban economics, with a particular focus on transportation. "The challenge with those distances is those distances effectively make it difficult to travel (to work) by any means besides a car."

Part of the problem, too, is the need to commute long distances takes its toll on household budgets.

Tomer said that because of the need to travel long distances to work, people tend to pay more for transportation than they do for food or health care — unless they have serious medical issues — making it the second-highest household expense after a mortgage or rent.

And Northeast Ohio is a relatively low-cost place to be commuting.

A study by Clever Real Estate, a national real estate education resource, estimated the average annual cost to commute in the Cleveland metropolitan area to be $6,745, fifth lowest among cities surveyed. It used federal data, including from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Highway Administration, to compile the commuting costs in the country's 50 largest metro areas. At the top of the list was Detroit, at $12,801, due in large part to the high cost of insurance. The average cost among the 50 metros was $8,466.

Photo by Gus Chan for Crain’s Cleveland Business

Patricia Harris, an employee at Lakeland Community College, rides the Laketran bus to the Frank J Polivka Transit Center. Harris rides the bus from downtown Willoughby to campus.

As workplaces have moved outward, reaching jobs has been especially difficult for low-income people and those struggling with unemployment who may not own cars. The "Geography of Jobs" report cites research showing that a job in Northeast Ohio that is 20 minutes away for a car commuter is almost 75 minutes away for a typical transit commuter, putting many jobs out of reach.

"We know from a lot of the business growth and attraction work that's happened getting the talented people to those locations is critical," said Marty McGann, executive vice president for advocacy and strategy at the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the regional chamber of commerce.

Not every family can afford the upfront cost of a car, especially one that sits in a company parking lot all day. They must rely on public transit, or other services such as Uber, Lyft or van pooling services. But alternative transit to a job takes longer and can cost nearly as much as commuting by car.

That makes it hard to hold a job or reliably get to job interviews.

"Having a good operating automobile can be part of maintaining employment," Tomer said, adding that people who are struggling financially may have a used car that is always at risk of breaking down, jeopardizing their job. "This is real stuff. It's extremely stressful to either not be able to afford a car or to barely be able to afford it, or to lose it and potentially lose your job."

Economic development organizations in Northeast Ohio have begun to think more about the access to jobs, in part because of the Fund's focus on the subject.

The "Where Are the Workers" research, cited above, is only the latest in a series of reports that began in February 2018, when the Fund released its "The Two Tomorrows" report. That research argued that maintaining and growing the region's economic vitality depended on the region's ability to connect people to good jobs. And getting people to the vacancies and keeping those jobs was a key part of that.

The Two Tomorrows report contended that economic development, land use and transportation planning at the local and regional levels have been uncoordinated and that the region can no longer afford to spread jobs across the region in a no-growth or low-growth environment.

Since then, the Fund has kept up its quest to find solutions to the job creation and access problems.

In June 2019, it raised $1 million for a contest to find innovative ways to connect people to jobs and employers to the talent they need. It called that competition "The Paradox Prize" and explained the paradox with the catch phrase "No car, no job; no job, no car." In other words, if an unemployed person has no car, he or she can't get and hold a job. The problem, of course, is that if you don't have a job, you can't afford a car.

Since 2019, the Fund has awarded eight programs financial assistance that created pilot programs to help put worker mobility solutions to work.

"The pilots made a significant impact on real people and businesses and went a long way in improving mobility in Northeast Ohio — but the long-term objective of The Paradox Prize was always about solving the 'no car, no job; no job, no car' paradox for good," Fund president Bethia Burke told prize winners at the June 17 awards program. "The work ahead of us is to build on these ideas with employers, transit agencies and policymakers. Transportation is everyone's business."

McGann, who was a member of the Paradox Prize advisory committee, said he was intrigued by the concepts behind some of the pilot projects. "You know, 'How do we, as businesses find unique relationships with mobility providers,' " said McGann,. "I think the real trick here is scaling those.

With the final awarding of Paradox Prize money, the Future Fund is moving on to the broader "Where Are the Workers" project.

Photo by Gus Chan for Crain’s Cleveland Business

The Regional Transit Authority route 41 bus waits on a traffic light on the corner of SOM Center and Aurora roads. RTA extended the line to the center of the suburb’s business district.

The goal, said Burke in a later telephone interview, "is to tackle the tight labor market in the wake of the pandemic to see how employers can pull sidelined workers back to the job. We have enough of a talent gap that we need a bunch of different strategies to fill it.

"It's much easier to connect people who already live here to jobs than it is to try to import a bunch of people to the region."

Transportation, Burke said, will be a component of this developing strategy.

"Maybe you've heard the term transportation demand management (TDM). It's those strategies that companies can pursue that enable people to get to work more effectively," she said. "It's understanding who within your organization takes the bus and reflecting on whether shift times match bus schedules and, if not, (does) changing the schedule or changing the shift time work" to attract workers.

Dennis McAndrew, president of Silverlode Consulting, a Cleveland site selection and economic development firm that helps businesses evaluate locations for expansions, said worker commuting concerns are only slowly becoming a factor in site decision making. His clients, he said, "tend to be looking for shovel-ready sites, maybe on an interstate or they're looking at an existing building that has the modern amenities of high ceilings and adequate parking, things like that."

Local tax policies also play a major role in site decisions, said Mark Zannoni, director of smart cities strategy for Oracle Corp. and a former research director for the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), the planning agency that maps out planning and federal transportation spending for Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina counties.

>A business owner thinking about taxes in Ohio might choose to live — and locate his or her business — in a township because in Ohio, "townships can't levy income taxes; they rely on property taxes," said Zannoni, a longtime transportation consultant based in Cleveland. "So, if you are going to open up a factory and you want to be 10 minutes from your house you don't live in a municipal corporation where you're taxed, you live in a township where you pay zero tax."

Zannoni is skeptical that pilot programs like those highlighted by the Paradox Prize can have a significant impact. He called the Paradox pilots Band-Aids.

"If you're providing transportation with, you know, 20 vans or seven vans, and you're driving 16 people or 20 people from an inner-city neighborhood like Hough, to Solon, it's good for those people, yeah, but that's not really solving the greater issue," he said. "I think we should get to the root of the problem: Why is the factory being located in Twinsburg when the labor's in Hough?"

Grace Gallucci, NOACA's executive director and CEO, agrees that jobs should be brought close to the existing labor pool, but she also believes that efficient, affordable transportation to job opportunities is important. It's a key goal in NOACA's recently adopted economic development strategy.

"I think what we're seeing is the recognition that people and jobs need to be closer together," Gallucci said. "There has to be development of housing near the jobs, or there has to be jobs locating or relocating near where the people are."

Under its new strategy, NOACA will prioritize funding for access by transit and other alternatives, to job hubs and support a more regionalized public transit system to expand inter-county transit routes and park-and-ride systems. It also has joined with other transportation focused organizations in Ohio that have created a service that will link to TDM programs.

Gohio Commute, offered by both NOACA and the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation Study (AMATS), offers carpool and vanpool services as well as bicycle and pedestrian options. Through Gohio Commute, employees, as a benefit, can set aside up to $260 a month to cover commuting costs, including public transit and vanpool expenses.

Team NEO, which is a key point of contact for businesses looking at Northeast Ohio for expansion, also has begun a program to put these issues before site selectors and their clients when they consider an expansion or a new site in the region. Called ESGP, it brings the issue of commuting, as well as other environmental, social and governance issues, into site selection. By entering a site, the program will, for example, identify the size of the labor pool within a 30-minute commute, by car and by public transportation. It also will provide racial and ethnic demographics and the impact of environmental emissions.

For example, the program calculated that there were 894,993 potential workers within a 30-minute drive from the Nestle distribution center in Solon, but only 21,928 within a 30-minute transit commute. By comparison, there were 1,027,893 potential workers within a 30-minute car commute of Public Square in Cleveland and 322,137 in a similar transit commute.

"One of the things that comes up more and more is while most people drive to work, in a very tight labor market, we're seeing companies ask for public transit connections — 'so tell us where the nearest bus stop is'," said Bryce Sylvester, Team NEO's senior director of site strategies. "If you're a company CEO and you're looking to reduce your risk on getting the right labor, then we believe that proximity to public transit and even going to places where you can potentially even want to work, are competitiveness issues."

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