Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | May 16, 2022 | Worcester Business Journal 21 e Bravehearts' winning battle L E T T E R T O T H E E D I T O R E D I T O R I A L D ear WBJ Editor Brad Kane, Your piece entitled "Fighting a losing battle" in April was unhelpful to my small business. Your headline flies in the face of an under- dog story and cuts against the grain of our small staff of gritty, happy warriors led by the indomitable Dave Peterson. e premise of your piece – that the Brave- hearts compete with Worcester's new Triple A base- ball team – is accurate though, and a fact skillful city leaders have never publicly acknowledged, to avoid being seen as harming a family-owned business. To be clear, our situation is not a losing battle. e Worcester Bravehearts organization is built on a culture of excellence. e team has won four championships. Off the field, the Bravehearts achieved the sixth best in the country for summer collegiate baseball attendance in 2019 aer building our fanbase each year since 2014, bucking the trend of most sports franchises. e Bravehearts grew our attendance until the world collapsed in March 2020. Show me a spectator baseball team anywhere in America in 2020 or in 2021, and I'll show you a business that suffered in attendance. In 2020, the Bravehearts indeed operated with zero fans thanks to government restrictions. erefore, our attendance was actually up by 1,229% in 2021 rather than down by 52%, as your headline purports. e Bravehearts' battle in 2021 was not so much against the most expensive minor league baseball stadium in America, but rather against COVID. We were not certain the Bravehearts would play games back at Fitton Field, due to the College of the Holy Cross' restrictions. Our sales staff 's cubicles remained vacant because our outreach targets such as schools were still operating remotely and most businesses were struggling mightily such that the last thing on their minds was organizing their people to go to the ballpark. Despite that, the Bravehearts' attendance grew over the 2021 season culminating with a sellout crowd for our final home game, even while our Triple A friends minutes down the road were hosting a home game the same evening. Competition is good, but the landscape for baseball in Worcester is not level. is is not Coke v. Pepsi. While our situation is not a losing battle, this is David v. Goliath. We are competing with a govern- ment-subsidized competitor owned by a collection of billionaires and millionaires. e Bravehearts' ad- vantage is our model is still viable with as few as 750 fans per game. By contrast, the Triple A club needs to attract many more fans than it did in 2021 and do that for decades if they are to avoid sticking the city's hardworking taxpayers with the team's bills. e Bravehearts provide our guests with has- sle-free, pleasant summer evenings, complete with free parking, fabulous local baseball stars, enhanced by whimsical entertainment, delicious food, cold beer, and capped with fireworks shows, all for less than the cost of taking the family out to dinner. Respectfully, that is the underdog story you should have reported. Don't forget: David beat Goliath. Sincerely, John W.S. Creedon, Jr. President & owner, Worcester Bravehearts The above Editorial is the opinion of the WBJ Editorial Board. The Viewpoint column, the A Thousand Words cartoon, and the Word from the Web commentary represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of WBJ or its staff. WBJ welcomes letters to the editor and commentary submissions. Send them to bkane@wbjournal.com. A T H O U SA N D WO R D S B Y R A M Ó N L . S A N D O V A L is problem impacts everybody John W.S. Creedon, Jr. A cross the U.S., the overall cost of goods and services has risen at the fastest rate since 1981. Of course, inflation impacts everything differently; it's not as if the price of everything rose by 8.3% in the past year. e cost of certain goods, like gasoline, have risen at a much higher rate, while the prices of other commodities have stayed relatively steady. Inflation has had uneven impacts across the country and in different sectors of the economy. In Central Massachusetts, the one rising cost that should concern us the most is housing, which is a sec - tor where prices were already on the rise pre-COVID, and they have only accelerated during the pandemic. In Worcester County, the median price of a single-family home was $380,000 in April, a jump of 10.1% over the course of 12 months, according to e Warren Group. e previous two years, the figure had jumped 9.2% and 6.6%. In Worcester, the average rent for a one-bed- room apartment was $1,525 per month, an increase of 14%, according to data from the website Zumper. As recent as 2016, the average monthly rent for that same unit was under $1,000. e rapid increases in the cost of owning or renting in our region should worry business owners, as having suitable housing your employees can afford is key to providing stability in their personal and professional lives. Few businesses can afford to hand out 10% raises each year to cover those increases, which means the housing market becomes slightly more out of reach for every employee each time prices go up, and that is not even taking into account the rapid rise in mortgage rates. If your workers are dedicating a greater portion of their earnings to housing and transportation, that leaves less money for everything else, which diminishes their overall security and quality of life. For years, tech firms in other high-cost regions like the San Francisco Bay – one of the few housing markets more constrained than Greater Boston – have been struggling with housing affordability for employees. While their approach is multi-faceted, one of the main solutions they have focused on is the need to invest in more housing. at translates to more affordable hous - ing for lower-income workers, and more housing op- tions for those people displaced by higher-earning tech employees driving the seemingly unending demand. Building more housing in Central Massachusetts is one obvious solution to the problem here as well, but the pace of building has fallen well behind demand; and developers, naturally, want to maximize the profit on each project, as their costs have increased expo- nentially, too. One option is for Central Massachusetts businesses to look to outlying communities still within a somewhat short commute to their offices. Places like Southbridge, Charlton, Spencer, and the Brookfields that despite significant increases, still have relatively reasonable housing costs. row in some improve- ments to the public transit system and a progressive work-from-home policy from your company to cut down on commuting costs, and some of the steep hous- ing cost increases can be mitigated. e city of Worces- ter, and the county as a whole, have been booming. It's in everyone's interest that inflation and the spike in housing costs does not kill the golden goose. W W

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