Boston Jobs Plan

Job creation is part of a holistic strategy -- which also includes transforming our schools to deliver an excellent education for every student, prioritizing housing priced for the middle market and our poorest residents, creating safe and healthy neighborhoods, and improving transportation options -- to improve Boston’s quality of life, strengthen our city’s economy, and keep people here. 

The Boston economy is doing remarkably well in many respects. Home to many world-class resources, including our colleges, universities, hospitals, and laboratories, the Boston area is a global capital for innovation. Among U.S. metros, Boston is third in the country in venture capital investment. Boston-area inventors were granted an average of nearly 4,000 patents per year between 2007 and 2011, putting us in sixth place in the nation, according to the Brookings Institution. Our success is primarily due to the talented people who work and live here: Nearly 43 percent of Bostonians have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with roughly 28 percent of the U.S. as a whole. As a result of our economic strengths, Boston weathered the Great Recession better than much of the United States. 

Yet our successes only tell one part of the story of the Boston economy. Over the past several generations, Boston -- mirroring the U.S. as a whole -- has grown more and more unequal. We are increasingly a city of the very rich and very poor where the bottom can fall out on our poorest residents at any time. It is harder and harder to maintain a strong middle in the city to bind us together.

Income inequality reached its highest point in 50 years in 2010, when Boston ranked as the third most unequal among the 50 largest cities in the country. There are too many Bostonians who can’t find jobs that allow them to make ends meet or can’t find stable employment at all. For workers at the low end of the income ladder, they have watched their wages stagnate. Despite all the change our city has seen in recent years, Boston’s poverty rate of 21.4 percent in 2012 was higher than it was in 2000 and 1990. And because Boston’s cost of living has outpaced the federal poverty level, the “‘officially’ poor are poorer today than they were 20 years ago,” according to the Boston Foundation. Our city will not be as strong as it can and should be if the income gap keeps widening. 

As mayor, I will advance a jobs and economic agenda that strengthens our economy, creates jobs, and helps all Bostonians benefit from our economic advantages. My jobs and economic agenda includes four key areas:

1. Strengthen Boston’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and support new and small businesses
2. Support good jobs for all Bostonians
3. Establish a hospitable environment for business
4. Collaborate with regional partners on economic development

#1: Strengthen Boston’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and support new and small businesses

Support Boston’s innovation ecosystem. The innovation economy is critically important to Boston’s future. Economist Enrico Moretti reports that, for every new job created in the innovation economy, five more jobs are created at a variety of skill levels. Start-ups are key to job creation: A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the younger companies are, the more jobs they create. A separate study from the Ewing Marion Kauffman found that startups accounted for all net new job creation between 1977 and 2005. I am committed to making Boston an even better place to start and grow a company. As mayor I will regularly come together with innovation and business leaders to hear directly from them, and I will work them to recruit more entrepreneurs and start-ups to Boston.

Address the high commercial rents that make it difficult for startups to find affordable space.MassChallenge and dozens of other accelerators in the region give entrepreneurs free or discounted space when their companies are starting up. In an expensive city, office space becomes one of the biggest costs when entrepreneurs seek to expand. With high commercial rents in Kendall Square and the Seaport District, young, growing businesses need to be able to find lower cost, suitable locations to expand. We should create mixed-use innovation hubs around transit stations in other parts of the city. We should also link incubators like Crop Circle -- which works with culinary businesses -- to the city’s Main Streets program, to help entrepreneurs find vacant storefronts when they are ready to move into their own locations. And for businesses that want to participate in the Main Streets ReStore program in order to make signage and storefront improvements, the city will create a loan fund to pay upfront costs. The business would then repay the city. Today, business owners need upfront money to finance improvements. 

Help new and small businesses access the capital they need to expand. Whether it’s a Main Streets business that needs a microloan to purchase equipment or inventory or a start-up that needs funding to move to its next growth phase, access to capital is a critically important issue for new and small businesses. I will work with community banks and financial institutions to develop a Made-in-Boston venture capital firm, similar to what the Boston Community Venture Fund does throughout the Northeast. I will work with state partners like the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation; nonprofits like Accion; our city’s cutting edge community development corporations; our Main Streets programs; NextStreet; and our lending institutions to make sure that we have a full, robust spectrum of financing options available to entrepreneurs who are ready to start a business or to business owners who ready to take their businesses to the next level.

Help new and small businesses to become suppliers to larger companies and institutions in Boston. I will launch a “Buy Boston” program aimed at helping Boston’s new and small businesses find new markets for their products and services among the Boston area’s many large companies and institutions. Seventy percent of small businesses dramatically increase their employment and revenues after becoming suppliers to large firms. 

Help all businesses compete on a level playing field. In 2012, I held a hearing with Councilor Ayanna Pressley to reform the payment and bidding process for city contracts so that businesses owned by women and people of color can compete on a level playing field.  As mayor, I will also develop a program to connect general contractors with diverse subcontractors and to create a database of such businesses.   

#2. Support good jobs for all Bostonians

Promote workforce development targeted at middle-skill jobs. Middle-skill jobs -- which require more than a high school education but less than a four-year college degree -- account for roughly two out of every five jobs in Massachusetts, and will continue to form a key part of our jobs market. These jobs often offer good pay and benefits in fields like healthcare, skilled trades, and the green economy. By partnering with employers, colleges, unions, and critical nonprofits like the Boston Private Industry council, we can develop career pipelines that prepare Bostonians for middle-skill jobs. Ultimately, every Bostonian should have access to at least two years of education after completing high school.

Make our high schools Hubs of Opportunity. Earlier this year I unveiled my Hubs of Opportunity proposal, which calls for each Boston high school to have at least three major partnerships: at least one with a college or university; at least one with a private sector employer (including medical institutions and non-profits); and at least one with a trade union or community-based organization. Each high school would work with its partners to develop a college pathway and a vocational pathway focused on a specific industry or academic field. The partners would help develop curriculum, provide internships to students, offer resources and people to assist teachers in implementing the curriculum, and allow the use of their facilities for learning. Read more about Hubs of Opportunity here.

Enforce the Boston Residents Jobs Policy. The BRJP aims to improve job opportunities for Boston residents, workers of color, and women on construction projects receiving funding from the city. I will strengthen and enforce the BRJP.

Advocate for an increase in the state minimum wage. The minimum wage in Massachusetts, now $8 per hour, has lost much of its purchasing power over the last several decades, and it has not been raised in five years. I will work with the Boston delegation to the State House to push for a much-needed minimum wage increase.

Create green jobs by seizing the economic opportunity in responding to climate change. For generations, we have been reliant on fuels like petroleum, coal, and natural gas that are not found nearby. In the clean energy economy, the work of insulating homes, putting solar panels on homes and schools, and recycling creates jobs that can’t be outsourced to another state, region or country. I have outlined a series of environmental goals that will help create good-paying green jobs for Bostonians. Read more about those goals here. 

#3. Establish a hospitable environment for business

Lead a culture of customer service at City Hall. Boston’s permitting and licensing processes are needlessly complex, opaque, and time-consuming. We need a user-friendly City Hall that makes permits, licenses and city services available online and treats residents and business owners like customers walking into an Apple Store. We should have a completely transparent city government focused on an inclusive approach to problem solving. I will lead a culture of customer service at City Hall that removes bureaucratic red tape and prioritizes user-friendly services for residents and businesses. 

Advocate for repeal of the recently-enacted software sales tax. Given the critical importance of the innovation economy to the future of our city and state, the software sales tax is not the right way to fund much-needed improvements to our public transportation system. It threatens to undermine growth in our innovation economy. I will work with the Boston delegation to the State House to push for repeal of the tax.

Attract and retain talented workers. Our region’s talented workforce is the primary factor behind the success of our innovation economy. Keeping talented young people here -- when it’s time for them to start a job, start a business, or start a family -- will be one of my top priorities. We need to bring down the cost of housing with a real middle-market housing strategy driven from a thoughtful plan. We need to extend the MBTA’s service hours for young people who work late or want to enjoy a night on the town. It needs to be up to us -- not the state -- to control liquor licenses in Boston, because it harms our economic potential and makes our city less lively when restaurateurs can’t open new restaurants because they can’t get a license. Young people want to live in a fun, vibrant city that is rich in arts, cultural, and recreational opportunities. If we don’t open our city up more, we will lose out to other places.

#4. Collaborate with regional partners on trade, tourism, and economic development

Maintain open lines of communication with leaders throughout Greater Boston. Fairfax County, Virginia, recently opened an office in Boston to attract companies to the county. This is both a sign of Boston’s economic success and a reminder that we face tough competition for talented workers, innovative companies, and investment dollars from other regions of the U.S. and other cities around the world. With the Boston area’s world-class universities and hospitals, with its leading financial services firms and cutting-edge biotech and high-tech companies, and with its creative people, we can compete with any place in the world, but through enhanced regional communication and collaboration, we can focus our efforts on the strategies that are most likely to strengthen our regional economy for the long term.

Create a Trade and Tourism office, and task it to work closely with other cities and towns in the Boston area. Right now, Boston combines tourism and arts functions into one office -- the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events. I will separate this office into independent functions. A stand-alone arts office would be able to focus its efforts entirely on cultivating a thriving arts community in Boston, while the marketing office could focus on trade, tourism, and economic development and work with partners in our region to attract businesses, investment, students, and visitors.