Lakewood’s supercharged business boom hits a worker shortage bump

Photos: AVI Grass Photography

When Mark Chopp first started to market the idea of constructing an office building in Lakewood ten years ago,

people thought he was trying to sell them the Brooklyn bridge.

The investors he approached for funding turned him down. Working in Lakewood meant low-key jobs or commuting to Manhattan. No one believed that an office building could be filled with local businesses.

The area that Chopp had in mind was equally unpromising: best known for hosting a minor league baseball stadium and otherwise home to acres of pine trees.

A decade on, that woodland has mushroomed — like a plant on steroids — into a full-blown corporate office park. Lining Boulevard of the Americas today is one glass-and-steel building after the next, complete with trendy lobbies, lounge chairs, and soft music.

It’s a stretch to compare these buildings to Manhattan’s corporate headquarters, but only because the space here is that much more contemporary and expansive.

Mark Chopp’s building boom — he’s completed 500,000 square feet of office space in recent years — is, at one level, a story of a business vision come true.

But take a look at Tower Two’s lobby screen, and the rise of the corporate park points to a much bigger story.

The nursing home conglomerates, health care billing offices, real estate investment firms, Amazon businesses, and IT companies are evidence of the unlikely emergence of America’s once-quiet yeshivah town as an economic powerhouse.

The vast number of ancillary businesses in these prestige quarters speaks of the financial success coursing through the town, which has become a Klondike on the Jersey Shore.

“Lakewood went from a non-market to a micro-market to a small market in just a few years,” says Chopp.

But that sizzling development and the seemingly endless business opportunities have now collided with the reality of a growing worker shortage. Lakewood has become an employee’s market, and wages have climbed steeply in recent years.

“Four years ago, for a man leaving yeshivah and looking for his first job, starting salaries were around $35,000 to $40,000,” says Yoel Tolwinski, director of job placement at PCS, a division of Agudath Israel of America. “Today, a man straight out of kollel is making $50,000 — and some are getting closer to $60,000, depending on the industry.”

In a town overflowing with avreichim and business professionals, there are as yet no economists. Data on jobs added, market activity, and consumer confidence aren’t reported.

Instead, the post-Minchah conversations in the corporate conference rooms and impromptu business networking events over Bagel Nosh coffee in the lobbies of some of the newest office towers are the places to take the economic pulse.

There’s a sense that even as the next quarter-million square feet of class A office space goes up in Lakewood, and after a decade of sustained expansion, there are questions about how the city will navigate the hiring crunch.

Avi Klugmann is one of those Lakewood natives whose career trajectory explains what’s happened in his hometown.