Re: 115 Winthrop Square | Financial District
It could be since this state and surrounding states are lily white relatively speaking that there aren't enough people to fill the minority hiring goals.
This is substantially less true than it once was, and is becoming less true with each passing year.
MA is estimated at 75% white non-Hispanic in 2016, and that's falling.
Boston is about 55% white non-Hispanic in 2016, also falling.
Now some of the building trade unions? Now THERE you can find some lily white membership rolls. (I said some, not all)
ETA: So, my point being, there's an increasing number of minorities in Boston itself, and in some surrounding towns (Chelsea springs to mind), the percentages are even higher than Boston. It's not a shortage of non-white workers in the area generally that has projects perpetually below goals, it's a shortage of non-white workers in the construction and trade unions.
If one follows union politics, one can see a lot of tension around this. Plenty of unions outside of the construction trades have broadened their base a lot more, and there's growing impatience with the construction trades amongst those unions. This gets into the training issue: I've seen construction unions try to defend themselves with arguments along the lines of "none of those immigrants or other minorities have the necessary training", to which the answer comes back "the unions have substantial control over and/or influence on who gets into the training programs". I would say that the biggest rift I can identify within the union world generally is the split between the construction trades unions and everyone else (and yes, this is an oversimplification....).
And all that is just on the minority hiring front, as for the hiring of women in the construction trades, there's obviously not a shortage of women around.
Last, there's the goal of hiring Boston residents, which seems futile. Some plumber moves from Boston to wherever else, why should he get penalized on what jobs he can work on? There's no other city in MA that can even think of having such a high goal for intra-city hiring, since no one else has anywhere remotely enough construction workers in their city limits to meet any high goal. So for just Boston to set this goal, and fail to meet it again and again, seems like just throwing a "requirement" in front of developers, knowing that it won't be met.
