34. Bath Iron Works Hired 690 People From Out of State. Almost None of Them Could Find Housing

In 2021, Bath Iron Works hired nearly 2,000 employees. 690 of them came from out of state. And almost every single one of them left. Not because they did not want the job. Not because BIW was not a great place to work. They left because they could not find anywhere to live.

That story is where this conversation starts, and it is one I have been wanting to have for a while.

I sat down with Julie Rabinowitz, Director of Communications at Bath Iron Works, and Dave Hench, BIW's communications and media relations veteran and former Portland Press Herald reporter of 25 years, to talk honestly about what Maine's housing crisis looks like from inside one of the state's most important employers.

Bath Iron Works is the largest manufacturer in Maine. They build Arleigh Burke class destroyers, among the most complex machines made anywhere in America. They have been on the Kennebec River since 1884. They employ people from all 16 counties in Maine. More than half of their workforce commutes at least 35 miles each way to get to the shipyard. And since COVID, the housing crisis has made all of that dramatically harder.

Wages in Maine have gone up about 38% since 2019. Home prices have gone up 79%. That gap is not just a statistic. For BIW, it showed up as tents. It showed up as employees living out of their cars. It showed up as a young woman in new hire orientation who had a job offer in hand and still could not pass a credit check to get an apartment because she had never had one before.

So BIW decided to do something about it.

They are now investing in an 84-unit attainable housing complex in downtown Bath, a 20-minute walk from the shipyard. The $22 million project is a partnership between General Dynamics, the Navy, Bath Housing, and Developers Collaborative. It will include studios, one-bedrooms, and a handful of two-bedrooms, prioritized for BIW employees and Navy personnel, with occupancy expected in summer 2027. There are already 87 people on the interest list.

We get into all of it in this episode. Why BIW uses the term "attainable housing" instead of "affordable housing" and what that distinction really means. How the Rumford mill town model from the 1800s still holds lessons for what employers can do today. What L.L. Bean is doing in Freeport with a similar workforce housing model. What other employers, developers, and housing authorities anywhere in the country can take away from what is happening in Bath right now. And why, if we want to talk seriously abou