The Latest Employee Perk? An Affordable Home.

Source: ADP, S. Mitra Kalita
Photo: Affordable Housing

Why won’t they come back?

Bosses are in regular consternation over why it’s so hard to get staff back into the office. Many are focused on luring employees through promises of staff bonding, enhanced creativity, and “midweek mixers,” but a more effective strategy may be to pivot to two less sexy but arguably more powerful bargaining chips: commute times and affordable housing.

One survey shows saving money and time spent commuting are the most important factors for those who want to work remotely, sharing the top spot with childcare. What’s an employer to do to attract talented workers who can’t afford to live nearby?

Help them afford it—or, in some cases, build it for them.

That’s the increasing realization of companies across industries, regions, and sizes. This current moment seems the right time for a grander experiment around affordable employer-sponsored housing. The pandemic only underscored desires for flexibility and deeper ties with one’s family, colleagues, and neighborhood. At the same time, most of the market is inaccessible to the typical buyer; a Redfin report found only one in five homes was affordable last year to a median-income US household, compared to two in five in 2021.

That has stark implications for an employer’s ability to recruit talent. “The limited availability of quality affordable housing is an impediment to team members and their families,” says Juriana Sperandio, human resources head at JBS USA, a food-processing company. “We saw many examples of team members having to look in communities an hour or more away from our facilities for housing, due to the lack of affordable options close by.”

JBS is one example of a company now offering housing programs—with units for workers to rent or own—as an employee benefit. And some startups, such as Landed, are working with employers in industries such as education, healthcare, and the public sector to make housing affordability less of an impediment to hiring and retaining workers.

Those organizations join several others, such as Meta and Elon Musk’s Tesla, Boring, and SpaceX, in linking the hunt for talent with the hunt for housing—some to greater extremes than others. Musk plans a community along the Colorado River, outside Austin, Texas, for his workers to live. Overseas, company-sponsored housing is more common; India, for example, boasts worker “colonies” in diverse sectors as oil and mining, banking and dairy. To be sure, the downside of company towns and labor being concentrated in one area also has been well-documented, leading to suppressed wages and less job mobility. In other forms, though, employer-sponsored housing can also be a retention driver and a pathway to otherwise-elusive homeownership.