Manufacturing Growth Requires Addressing Community Needs
Randy Wolken, President & CEO

This week, I joined many others from the Syracuse area in attending a series of events in New York City aimed at addressing the need for community investment in preparation for the planned historic investments in manufacturing. These investments extend well beyond Micron alone, which has committed to spending billions on constructing its first chip fab in Central New York over the next three years. By some estimates, the investments by other companies and industries exceed $6 billion, with an additional projected $20 billion related to Micron’s investment. These planned investments are unprecedented; however, we must prepare our communities to ensure the successful implementation of these initiatives. To do so, we must work to close other gaps in capital investment. These gaps are often described as ‘missing markets’ in capital investment.

The existence of missing markets helps explain why some of the most pressing needs in our society go unmet, even when everyone agrees they’re essential. A missing market exists when an investment would create tremendous value for families, communities, and the economy, but private capital is insufficient to support the investment on its own. This happens not because the investment is unproductive, but because the financial returns are too slow, too indirect, or too uncertain for traditional investors to accept. As a result, critical areas such as workforce development, affordable housing, and childcare receive significantly less investment than communities need. When we recognize why these markets fail to form and how public or philanthropic partners can help fill the gap, we unlock enormous opportunities for growth, stability, and shared prosperity.

At the core of the problem is the mismatch between where value is created and where it’s captured. For example, workforce training programs equip individuals with the skills they need to earn more and contribute to industry growth, but no single investor directly profits from those benefits. In each case, society gains far more than the individual investor who pays the upfront costs. Affordable housing, for example, generates stability for families, strengthens local labor markets, and supports small businesses—but the financial return to a developer is far lower than the social return to a community. Childcare enables parents to work, children to learn, and employers to depend on a reliable workforce—yet most childcare providers operate on razor-thin margins, and they can’t raise prices without pushing families out. That gap between broad public value and narrow private return is at the heart of why missing markets emerge.

Workforce development initiatives highlight this pattern. Training people for higher-wage jobs, technical careers, and advanced manufacturing roles, delivers remarkable returns over a lifetime. Our own talent initiatives at MACNY have proven to be highly valuable and successful. When done well, workers earn more, employers gain skilled talent, and communities become more competitive, but no single individual or entity captures enough of those benefits to justify paying the full cost upfront. When an employer trains a worker, that worker is of value to their firm and the greater community. However, the cost is often too high for a worker to pay for their own training, and while training providers can build these programs, they usually can’t sustain them without consistent support. Even though everyone agrees that a skilled workforce is essential for economic growth, these chasms can create a market failure.

Affordable housing may be the clearest example. It produces extraordinary benefits: families become more stable, children perform better in school, and communities gain the workforce they need to grow. Employers are more likely to expand in regions where workers can afford to live. These ripple effects are real, measurable, and powerful—but they don’t show up on a single developer’s balance sheet because building affordable units is more expensive than the rents that families can reasonably pay, especially with rising construction costs, limited land availability, and tight zoning rules. Developers simply can’t make these margins work without support, and without creative financing tools, tax incentives, and public-private partnerships, the private market can never form at the scale needed.

Childcare is an equally striking case. It’s essential to family life, economic mobility, and local productivity; yet the business model is fundamentally flawed. High-quality childcare requires trained staff, low teacher-to-child ratios, safe facilities, and predictable operations—all of which are expensive to maintain. Meanwhile, parents, especially those early in their careers, simply can’t afford the full cost of quality care. This leaves providers squeezed from both ends: too costly to operate, yet too expensive for families to pay. Many centers close, workers leave the field, and parents end up withdrawing from the labor force. The economic impact is enormous: communities lose workers, employers face shortages, households lose income, yet again, the benefits of childcare flow to society, not to individual providers. Without public support or employer partnerships, this market can never reach the scale that families and employers urgently need.

What ties these examples together is a simple truth: many of the most critical investments for families, workers, and communities only pay off entirely when viewed from society’s perspective. The value is real—higher productivity, stronger regional economies, more stable families, and a more resilient future workforce—but its payout is spread out across time, across institutions, and across generations. This spread makes it difficult for traditional capital markets to support these investments independently. Yet when public, private, philanthropic, and community partners step in to bridge the gap, the transformation is extraordinary. Affordable homes are built. Childcare centers become stable and high-quality. Workforce programs create pathways to opportunity.

Recognizing missing markets isn’t about blaming investors or expecting the government to do everything. It’s about understanding how the structure of incentives shapes what gets built—and what doesn’t. It’s about recognizing the tremendous opportunity that exists when we choose to invest in the foundations of a strong society. The moment we fill these missing markets, communities grow, families thrive, and the economy becomes more dynamic. These aren’t just worthy social investments—they’re engines of long-term prosperity waiting to be unlocked.

MACNY and many of our members are committed to highlighting the existence of missing market capital needs and collaborating with others to close these gaps. In doing so, we can see the entire community prosper. If you share our interest, please reach out to me, via email, at [email protected].

Together, we can better position ourselves for future success.