The redevelopment of public housing on Syracuse’s Southside is not impervious to a nationwide problem: the labor shortage plaguing the construction industry.
Competition posed by the ongoing construction on the Interstate 81 project and the anticipated arrival of Micron has stretched thin the workforce, said Allyson Carpenter, the vice president of development at McCormack Baron Salazar. MBS is the Missouri-based development company in charge of the billion-dollar project with Syracuse Housing Authority.
Recently, contractors MBS found were willing to partake in the project but often did not have immediate availability, Carpenter said.
“This is a good problem for the city to have, but we need more contractors, more firms, more subcontractors,” Carpenter said.
Over the weekend, MBS, SHA and other groups involved in the project — including Hueber-Breuer Construction — collaborated with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to help residents get jobs on construction sites. The goal was to boost the pool of workers who could work on the redevelopment of public housing.
Nationally, the construction industry has faced a labor shortage. Deloitte, a multinational professional services organization, found that 41% of the construction industry is expected to retire by 2031. Only about 10% of current workers are under 25 years old, meaning the industry has a smaller pipeline to counter the attrition, according to the report.
“When you talk about constructability and cost management, one of the things that really drives the costs up is the labor shortage that we’re having,” Carpenter said.
The free OSHA-10 training was offered in addition to existing apprenticeship programs. Participants were offered free transportation to the training and the first attendees were given a gift card to incentivize participation, Carpenter said.
MBS and SHA didn’t expect the overwhelming response: 150 city residents signed up, including 15 Syracuse Housing Authority residents, Carpenter said. They changed the training location from Almus Olver Towers to Hueber Breuer’s office at 148 Berwyn Ave. to accommodate the trainees.
The first cohort of 20 people — a mix of both men and women — attended two five-hour OSHA-10 training classes on Saturday and Sunday. The next classes are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday and have 40 signups, Carpenter said. The remaining trainings will be held in the coming weeks.
“We’re just going to have to sponsor those trainings to help residents get to a point where they can be hired on site,” Carpenter said. Stakeholders are also providing additional operational support to smaller minority- and women-owned businesses, including with invoicing and paperwork compliance.
Josh Bryant, the owner of JB Builders and a project manager working on the East Adams project, was one of the two trainers at the OSHA-10 training this weekend. He said that development projects like Micron offer higher pay and privatized work, often making it a more challenging market for public housing redevelopment projects to outfit each project with the required skilled workers.
Bryant said they have to hold these trainings to be “intentional about building the next labor force” and to ensure its representative of those who live in the public housing.
The training could help SHA meet its federal grant requirements for workforce representation and economically uplift a community that bore the brunt of harm following the construction of the highway in the 1960s. The highway split the old 15th Ward, displacing 1,300 families who saw their neighborhood razed. The fallout had socioeconomic and health impacts on the residents who stayed in the area and for the predominantly Black residents who were displaced.
“So, of course this project should be about more than just building new buildings, of course it should be about economic empowerment, of course, it should be about helping businesses get their footing and grow and thrive,” Carpenter said.
One of the key grants SHA obtained to make construction possible mandates a certain number of residents be employed within the program and that a certain percentage of the project labor hours support resident-owned businesses.
“It’s a good thing for us to build the bench of contractors who can work on these projects and also kind of help create this workforce pipeline,” Carpenter said. “Once they are certified, even after all these projects end, they can keep working.”
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