Ocean City Labor Shortage Caused By Lack of Seasonal Housing

OCEAN CITY, MD- The U.S. missed its target for job creation in August, with only 245,000 jobs reported, well shy of the 750,000 that were forecasted.

Problem areas in the economy include the restaurant that continues to face problems hiring workers.

For Ocean City, the worker shortage is being driven by a housing shortage for seasonal laborers.

“Property that was traditionally set aside for inventory used for j1 seasonal workforce housing, college student housing anyone coming to work seasonally we saw converted in large scale to Airbnb and VRBO,” said Ocean City Chamber of Commerce President Lachelle Scarlato.

She says that the month of August has been the hottest month on record for Ocean City’s housing market, driving up the price per square foot and creating an uneven playing field for those competing for space.

For businesses Owners like Shannon Tippett of the Mug and Mallet, the lack of housing means she is running her restaurant on less than half the staff she usually does, with longer hours and increased customer demand.

“A  typical year is 35-40 employees this year we have ten to fifteen and a lot of the problem is that people couldn’t find housing,” she said.

Tippett has had to close down large parts of the indoor dining section of her restaurant, because of her lack of servers.

Only two are currently employed by the restaurant.

She says she applied for 15 J1 permits to help her businesses, of them only 5 were approved, far less than she believes she needs to keep customers coming back.

Tippett told 47ABC that Ocean City relies on people coming in seasonally, as the county is not large enough to support the city, she says if the town wants small businesses it needs a solution.

“100,000 customers equals 10 thousand employees this town does not have 10,000 people working in it now with this housing problem,” she said.

To make up for that deficit, she had to call on a long-time employee Isaiah Johnson; who had moved on to a real estate job back into the kitchen to deal with the demand

Johnson says he understands both sides of the problem and points to issues with the previous housing for seasonal workers such as overcrowding and fire code violations that allowed other companies to come into the possession of the space.

“They would come in these workers, my friends, crying because the landlords had kicked them out before inspection, so [Tippett] always had this plan to get dorm-style apartments here in OC we had a property we were ready to go and everything but she kept on getting shut down in favor of Airbnb’s and now here we are,” he said.

Johnson says he’s had to put his career in real estate and his other businesses on pause to hold down the fort at the restaurant, but he says he’s happy to do it to help Mug and Mallet make it.

“When it comes to me being able to do something and someone who I consider like my mother almost being forced to shut down her business it’s not a hard choice to come back and help her out for a time until things get back to normal,” he said.

Scarlato told 47ABC the town is exploring options for next season’s seasonal workers, she says a town announcement for the program will come down this fall.