The Housing Crisis Hits Home

It gets even harder to build a business when your employees can’t afford a place to live, says a business owner who decided to try to solve the problem himself.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:            

• Ami Kassar writes about the right way to use a line of credit.

• The IRS has been rejecting legitimate ERC claims.

• Will artificial intelligence determine whether bosses are sharp enough to lead?

• Gene Marks explains the pluses and minuses of managed services.

HOUSING

Business owners have a stake in the housing crisis: “A decade ago, I opened a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and found out quickly how perilous our local economy can be. One afternoon in July, a few of my line cooks—all Jamaican culinary students who had traveled to the United States on student work-study visas—rolled into work late for the third time that week. The other cooks were annoyed. So was I. I’d been spending my days stumbling through what seemed like impossible situations, and here was one more crisis.

• “But the students had a good excuse: They had landed in Provincetown with two promises from a nearby restaurant: a summer job and a place to live. The job had materialized (as had a second one, filling in at my restaurant). The housing hadn’t.”

• “These teenagers had been living out of the back of a borrowed car parked illegally in a faraway beach parking lot. Away from home for the first time, working seven 16-hour days a week, these cooks had nowhere to live in an ultra-progressive town that desperately needed their labor. Hearing this, I realized: If I want to keep my restaurant open, the local housing crisis is my problem too.”

• “My job was to sell lobster rolls. But to do that well, I also had to become a landlord; over the next several years, my business spent more than a million dollars buying, renting, and operating housing for our workers. I helped employees work through the tangle of affordable-housing applications and joined community boards discussing housing issues.” READ MORE