Michigan’s economic challenges are often discussed as though they were separate problems. Our schools are struggling. Manufacturers need skilled workers. Young families cannot afford homes. Communities of all sizes from the Upper Peninsula to Detroit are losing the very people they need to grow.
But these aren’t separate crises. They are different symptoms of the same problem.
Michigan has allowed the basic economic ladder that once defined our state to weaken: Learn a skill. Find a good job. Buy a home. Raise a family. Build a life.
Restoring Michigan’s prosperity requires rebuilding that ladder from the bottom up. I understand that connection personally.
I grew up on a beef and dairy farm in Beal City. I spent 24 years working for a Michigan manufacturer and later became a small-business owner. I have watched generations of Michiganders build good lives through family-sustaining jobs without necessarily following the traditional four-year-college path.
Michigan succeeded because we respected the dignity and economic value of making things. That is why education reform must be part of any serious economic-development strategy. Michigan students need strong foundations in reading and mathematics, but our definition of educational success also needs to extend beyond preparing every student for a university degree.
A student who wants to become an engineer should have that opportunity. So should a student who wants to become an electrician, machinist, welder, or carpenter.
That means restoring greater emphasis on career and technical education, expanding apprenticeships and giving students earlier exposure to skilled trades.
It is difficult to talk seriously about reviving Michigan manufacturing while ignoring the workforce required to do it. Our state has an extraordinary opportunity as companies reconsider supply chains and America works to restore domestic manufacturing capacity. We already have much of what manufacturers need: infrastructure, industrial expertise, a culture of innovation and generations of knowledge about how to build things at scale.
But factories don’t run themselves.
Manufacturing investment follows talent. If Michigan can produce the best skilled workforce in America, we can compete aggressively for the next generation of automotive, aerospace, defense and advanced-manufacturing jobs.
And that brings us to housing. Suppose Michigan succeeds in attracting new employers and creating thousands of well-paying jobs. Where will those workers live? Without question, housing has become an economic-development issue.
Employers cannot expand indefinitely in communities where their workers cannot afford to live. Young people are less likely to remain in Michigan if the first rung of homeownership remains beyond their reach. And communities cannot grow their tax bases if they cannot add residents and housing.
The workforce shortage and housing shortage are also directly connected. Michigan needs more homes. To build them, Michigan needs more people who know how to build.
The same young person who discovers carpentry, electrical work or plumbing through career and technical education can help address Michigan’s skilled-worker shortage, earn a family-supporting wage and become part of the workforce needed to increase Michigan’s housing supply.
That worker can then become a homeowner. That is the virtuous cycle Michigan should be trying to create.
Education produces skilled workers. Skilled workers attract investment. Investment creates good-paying jobs. Good-paying jobs allow families to buy homes. New construction makes those homes more plentiful. Growing communities create customers for local businesses and a stronger tax base for schools and public services.
Each piece reinforces the others.
The opposite is also true.
Poor educational outcomes shrink the skilled workforce. A smaller workforce makes Michigan less competitive for investment. Weak job growth pushes young people elsewhere. Housing shortages make staying even less attractive. Population stagnation then makes it harder to sustain communities and public institutions.
Economic decline can become self-reinforcing just as easily as economic growth. Michigan therefore needs to stop treating education policy, manufacturing policy and housing policy as separate conversations conducted by separate groups of experts.
They are one, interconnected economic strategy.
Fortunately for Michiganders, Mike Rogers has put forward proposals addressing each part of that equation, with plans focused on strengthening education and skilled-trades pathways, expanding Michigan manufacturing, and increasing the supply and affordability of housing. Taken together, those proposals reflect an important reality: Michigan cannot solve its workforce, economic-development and housing challenges in isolation because progress in each depends on progress in the others.
That strategy begins in the classroom, but it ultimately ends with something much larger: whether a young Michigander with big, ambitious dreams believes there is a future worth building here.
For most of our history, Michigan offered a compelling answer.
You could learn useful skills here. You could find meaningful work here. You could earn enough to buy a house here. And you could reasonably expect your children to have opportunities greater than your own.
That promise helped turn Michigan into an industrial powerhouse.
Restoring it will require measuring economic policy by something more meaningful than the number of programs government creates or taxpayer dollars it spends.
The better question is whether Michigan is producing opportunity.
Can a child master the fundamentals and graduate prepared for adulthood? Can a young worker acquire a valuable skill without taking on enormous debt? Can a manufacturer find the workers necessary to expand here? Can a carpenter afford to buy one of the homes he helps build? Can a young couple look at Michigan and conclude that this is where they want to raise their children?
Those questions are connected. Our policies should be, too.
Michigan was made by generations who learned, labored, built, and brought ideas to life right here in the Great Lakes State. There is no reason we cannot do it again.
Senator Roger Hauck represents the 34th District in the Michigan State Senate.
