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The Workforce is Coming, the Workforce is Coming
By Teasha Cable
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode into Lexington, Massachusetts with a warning. The Minutemen heard it, weighed it, and chose to stand. That decision, made in the dark with incomplete information and everything on the line, is what we now call the beginning of America.
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode into Lexington, Massachusetts with a warning. The Minutemen heard it, weighed it, and chose to stand. That decision, made in the dark with incomplete information and everything on the line, is what we now call the beginning of America.
Two hundred and fifty years later, as the country marks the anniversary of that decision, Lexington is in the middle of another pivot. Not a revolution in the dramatic sense, but the kind of quiet, hard, consequential shift that actually determines whether a community thrives for the next fifty years, and beyond.
Sandhya Iyer, Tourism and Economic Development Director for the Town of Lexington, joined me on the Dynamic Decisions Podcast to talk about what that shift looks like from the inside.
Your Workforce Needs Housing
Lexington has a problem that a lot of communities would envy, and then quickly realize, maybe not. Lexington is home to nearly 2.9 million square feet of life sciences space, built on the back of a boom that has since corrected.
Vacancy is rising. The sector is decentralizing. The strategy that worked for the last decade, e.g. land the big tenant, fill the lab, collect the commercial tax revenue, isn't producing the same results.
However, Sandhya's response is not what most people expect from a town sitting on that much premium commercial square footage.
She's converting it to housing. You read that right.
Her core argument is straightforward: you can't attract or retain businesses if the people who work for them can't afford to live nearby. Workforce housing isn't a concession to a soft real estate market. It's infrastructure.
If we don't have enough workforce housing to help retain our businesses, we have to shift focus.
A building that has sat vacant for decades is not generating the tax revenue people assume it is. New residential development, even at a lower commercial rate, still represents net new growth.
The development cycle signals that the market believes in the location. That matters, especially in a town where the tagline is "We Make History Here" and the intention is to mean it literally.
The Negotiation Hiding Inside Every Development Deal
Sandhya also talked about something that doesn't get enough public attention: what communities actually negotiate when a developer comes to the table.
New development creates enormous leverage to address neighborhood needs that would otherwise sit in a deferred capital queue for years.
Sidewalk improvements. Water and sewer capacity. Street infrastructure. Residents experience these systems every day, and development deals can be structured to deliver them as a condition of approval.
Those are the things we negotiate. That's where our board walks in and says to a developer,'We need these things for this neighborhood'.
The 50-year lens matters here.
Once housing is built, it anchors a neighborhood for decades. The negotiation at approval is often the best leverage a town will have to shape what that neighborhood looks like long-term. For a place that takes its long-range identity as seriously as Lexington does, that's not a small thing.
Regional Thinking Over Boundary Thinking
One of the most useful frameworks Sandhya introduced is the distinction between boundary thinking and regional thinking. It comes up in her work designing the Massachusetts Economic Development Academy, a curriculum built on the premise that practitioners need to think across disciplines and across municipal lines.
Her advice to communities competing inside a large regional ecosystem: stop trying to replicate what your neighbors have.
If the next town has a commuter rail station, the question isn't how do we get one too. It's how do we connect to it.
"Every community has its own character. When you don't recognize your own ecosystem, your own people, and what the community wants, it's going to be hard to chase your dreams."
This is, in its way, the same lesson Lexington's founders understood. They didn't try to be Boston. They knew what they had, they knew what they stood for, and they built from that.
The town isn't trying to become Cambridge either. It's trying to be a place where people want to live, where historical identity is an asset rather than a constraint, and where the decisions being made in 2026 create a foundation for the next ten years, not just the next budget cycle.
The Takeaway for Practitioners
Economic development at the local level is increasingly a solo or near-solo job. One person wearing the hats of planner, housing director, small business advocate, tourism strategist, and corporate recruiter simultaneously.
Sandhya's work at the Massachusetts Economic Development Academy is partly about giving those practitioners a peer network and a common language so that decisions don't get made in isolation.
Her final piece of advice to EDO practioners?
Go back to your community first. Survey them. Ask what matters. The answers might surprise you, and they're almost certainly more specific than the growth narrative suggests.
The best economic development strategy isn't the one that attracts the most attention. It's the one that matches what the community actually needs to sustain itself over time.
250 years after Lexington's Minutemen decided to act on what they knew, the town is still doing exactly that. Different stakes, same instinct: read the signals, understand what your community needs, and make the call.
That's not just good economic development. That's leadership.
Listen to my conversation with Sandhya Iyer on the Dynamic Decisions Podcast.