At first glance, ideas like this make sense. However, a big problem is that those locations often don't have the infrastructure necessary to support what you're talking about. While Boston doesn't build housing nearly as quickly as it needs to, places outside the Boston/128 loop often build at half the rate Boston does and often have residents that don't want to build housing faster. Most areas don't have a public transit network outside of Boston and it's really hard to add more cars.

For example, Google employs 2,100 people in Cambridge. An interstate highway can carry about 2,200 cars per hour per lane. So to support just Google's relatively small presence in Cambridge via cars would basically require adding two lanes to an interstate (one out and one in). Given that the cars would need to slow down and park, it would require a lot more infrastructure.

It's also hard to incentivize good jobs to move somewhere. For a company like Google, they want to locate their offices where they're confident they'll get workers and can continue to grow and expand. In Cambridge, Google has expanded from 441 employees in 2008 to 2,100 in 2022. If the state offered Google some incentive to open an office in Springfield or Worcester, how would Google incentivize workers to move out there? When Google opened an office in Cambridge, it was already a place where lots of software engineers lived and wanted to live. Maybe Google could pay workers more, but then there's really no state incentive for Google since they likely have to spend more than that incentive getting workers to move.

In fact, how much of an incentive could the state offer? $10,000 per worker per year? At that point, the worker would need to earn over $200,000 for the state to break even (since the state taxes on a $200,000 salary would be less than $10,000). Even then, the state is losing tons of money. If that worker were in Cambridge without a state subsidy, the state would make nearly $10,000 in tax revenue rather than losing money. Would Google take $10,000 per worker per year? Probably not. "Hey, we'd like to give you $5M per year to open a small 500 worker office in a location that puts your company at a big competitive disadvantage compared to your peers who will be able to more easily hire top talent in desirable locations." $5M is tiny to a company whose revenue is $282B - oh, $282B plus $836M; the $836M was just such an uninterestingly low amount of money compared to the $282B.

That's not to say that the state can't do things to make places like New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, and Springfield more attractive for business. However, it takes time (like a decade or more) and there are going to be moves that many residents might dislike. Creating business districts that are nice for transit, walking, and biking will mean trading off parking and road throughput. Residents often hate new housing because they worry about traffic and parking. What happens when you say that you're going to be bringing in a truck-full of new housing because you're looking to incentivize businesses to move there? How do they react when you tell them that the parking lot they like using is going to become a building with minimal parking - and there will be a lot more people trying to get to that area too?

If you want employers to move to areas, they need to feel confident that it's a good investment. Money won't sway them - at least not any amount of money it would be sane to spend on an incentive. When Amazon was looking for HQ2, they weren't swayed by incentives. They were simply looking to milk money out of the locations they already wanted to go to - NYC and DC, places where the workers they want already wanted to live. Massachusetts can't offer Google $50M a year to hire 500 people outside of Boston. That would be $100,000 per worker. We can't give Google 20 people's taxes for every worker they hire outside Boston/128.

If we want places like Worcester and Lowell to be places where companies want to go, we need to focus on creating the environment that will make that happen. For example, if we had a higher speed express rail link between Lowell and Boston, that could make Lowell a place more easily commutable to for existing workers. A tech worker could move to Lowell and commute to Boston which incentivizes a tech company to move to Lowell. A tech company moving to Lowell could retain more workers living in Boston if it were a reasonable commute. If we started converting a lot of the parking around the Lowell rail stop to businesses and housing and allowed any building to be 5-stories tall within half a mile of the station without parking requirements, that could make sure that there would be housing and new office space available as companies and workers need it. If we put more money into public transit in Lowell and started converting car lanes into bus lanes, we could ensure people could get around (a bus lane moves more people per hour than a car lane).

But I can already hear the complaints. People don't often think about how their community has to change in order to accommodate the kinds of things you want. They want the jobs, but they don't want to have the traffic or parking difficulties - difficulties that will be compounded by the fact that you'll have to give up some of that parking while also having more people in the area. There's a lot of 1 and 2-family homes a couple blocks from the Lowell rail station. Will they be receptive to people building larger apartment buildings? People often want the jobs/money without any changes. Often times people will literally say, "can't they build it somewhere else?" That's what's already happening while they're complaining people aren't bringing all the money and building to their town!

What's a concrete example of this? Somerville. The city isn't perfect, but it has leveraged its way to the kind of thing you're talking about. I know, it's in the Boston area, but it's building itself up as a biotech hub along the Green Line Extension (and Assembly on the Orange Line). What are some of the keys? They got a rail link that ensures workers can get to jobs, they're minimizing parking, and they're making it an increasingly nice place to bike, walk, and hang out. Somerville wasn't always what it's like today.

If other cities outside Boston/128 want that kind of development, they're going to need to do similar things. What stands in the way? A bunch of things. Money is always hard to come by and infrastructure isn't cheap. The fact that suburbs like North Billerica would likely dislike being bypassed on a job-connector rail line might make an express line difficult. Boston/Cambridge/Somerville outweigh their suburbs more than Lowell or Worcester do. Ultimately, I think the biggest thing that stands in the way is that a lot of people aren't looking for their city to change. Sure, they'll complain that Boston gets all the good jobs, but most would also hate my proposal to increase housing and move people away from cars.

Creating social change like that isn't easy. Cities across the country have tried to lure workers with offers of cheap housing and tens of thousands of dollars and they've had almost no takers. Cities sometimes likewise try to draw companies with incentives and usually get burned in the process. The company milks the town for all it's worth and doesn't actually generate economic benefits for the area. What creates sustainable economic benefits are when you create a good environment for economic prosperity. However, that also means giving up some things that many residents might prize: parking minimums so that you never have to pay for or hunt for parking at the stores you go to, apartments that bring new neighbors, and more traffic and a bit of a modal shift toward public transit.

There is the potential to do it in other ways. Maybe you don't want a lot of new housing. Somerville is doing that with one of the lowest levels of new homes in Boston. At the same time, people dislike the rising rents and displacement. We could create a business-only focused Lowell or Worcester revitalization plan, but what's the point if most of the current residents won't get to benefit from it?

Ultimately, if we want businesses to move to those cities, we need to make them places people want to be and that can accommodate population growth (though more housing and public transportation) so that businesses know they can grow and thrive there. Otherwise, we're just going to get garbage businesses who will take money and deliver no benefits.

I am curious if there were specific incentives you'd like to see done. If you were governor and legislature of Mass, what would you do - keeping in mind that there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay a company to incentivize them to move to Worcester?