Top employers are helping with city housing

A dream job in the big city can come with complications. For many ambitious young graduates, the biggest headache attached to landing a role in London, Sydney or New York is finding somewhere affordable to live. If the lack of cheap housing in major cities has become a worry for the millennial workforce, it’s also a significant recruitment problem for companies around the world. 

Housing pressures have forced the corporate world to rethink the perks used to entice top talent. With bicycle racks, free gym membership and paid volunteering leave now commonplace sweeteners, some leading employers have realised the most lucrative benefit they can offer is help meeting housing costs, whether it be loans, subsidies or mortgage deals.

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Facebook and Google have even drawn up plans to construct housing for tech workers struggling with prices in the San Francisco Bay Area, a return to the days when philanthropic industrialists created company towns and model villages with the aim of improving the lives of labourers. 

London prices becoming a barrier to entry-level recruitment 

So what exactly can businesses do to ease the housing problems experienced by urban workers worldwide? Could the scale of the crisis push large employers into buying or building homes for staff? 

In London the shortage of affordable homes is making business leaders anxious. Some 66 per cent of companies in the city said housing costs and availability were having a negative impact on entry-level recruitment.