City proponents are careful to maintain visible ties to Pella’s Dutch heritage. One local
McDonald’s has fake shutters on its windows and gables decorating its roof, features that meet local design guidelines. The visitor’s center is housed inside a windmill, one of several in town. This spring, Pella planted 130,000 tulip bulbs for its annual Tulip Time festival.
The city’s main square—dominated by a “Tulip Tower” where each year a highschooler is crowned Tulip Queen—is surrounded by Dutch store fronts, housing businesses from restaurants and bike shops to a full-service quilt shop.
Pella Corp.’s tastes, in some instances, are more modern. Some new construction funded by the family shareholders’ group, including townhomes and a grocery store, feature few traditional Dutch design features, raising the ire of some residents.
“If we’re going to put up a building that’s built from scratch, there’s no harm in building it in a traditional Dutch aesthetic, right?” asks Shawn Thomas, a member of a group that works to preserve the city’s historic buildings. Still, he appreciates the support the company has given over the years. “Pella puts a lot of money into this town, and it’s put a lot of money in the right places.”
The company says its designs reflect its brand while staying true to the city’s heritage. Its headquarters campus, which anchors the south end of Main Street, features a three-story, red-brick office building, a product showroom and factory that churns out made-to-order doors and windows.
Labor pool
Pella says it will take time to increase its local workforce. Currently, about 2,550 people work for the company in the town, but only about 640 live there. The others live and commute in from neighboring Iowa communities.
“We can make an investment now knowing that the payback may not be next quarter and maybe in a few years,” says Mr. Yaggi, whose company employs roughly 10,000 workers across 14 states.
Pella executives say the company tried more traditional solutions to boost its ranks. It raised pay, automated some tasks in factory work to widen the appeal, and doubled down on recruiting from the local high school and college—but with limited success. Tapping a larger labor pool isn’t easy. Some candidates relocating may fret about adjusting to life in an overwhelmingly white town with more than two dozen churches and two bars, they say.
“We can bring in all the amazing talent from across the country, but if they get here, and they don’t see themselves reflected in the community, they don’t feel at home,” says Nicolle Picray, a company spokeswoman.
Absent interventions from Pella, Andrew Kreifels says he wouldn’t have joined the company. Mr. Kreifels moved here with his wife and two children from suburban Detroit earlier this year to run Pella’s strategy and business development team.
After rounds of interviews, problems kept surfacing. He couldn’t secure spots in local child-care centers, ending up on wait lists instead. Options for local housing were limited, he says, and the idea of at least a 45-minute commute to the office from Des Moines wasn’t appealing.
“If you’ve got a dual-career household, of your top 10 priorities, the first five are child care,” says Mr. Kreifels. “I vividly remember saying to my now-manager, ‘It’s just too much, I don’t think we can do it.’”
Pella had a plan. The company offered him corporate housing, a spacious colonial in the city, for a year. It also reserved two slots for the Kreifels’ children in a local daycare center that the shareholder family paid to renovate and expand.
Mr. Kreifels plans to stay in the housing until next spring when construction is scheduled to be completed on a home he and his wife purchased in the city.
Housing shortage
Executives and city leaders agree that a shortage of housing is a big barrier to growth. On a typical weekday, 5,000 to 6,000 people pour into the city for work at large employers such as Pella and farming-equipment maker Vermeer Corp., Mayor Don DeWaard says.
Employers nationwide, including meat-processor JBS USA Holdings Inc. and
Walt Disney Co., are focusing
on housing in an attempt to address labor-market issues.
The shareholder family’s investment arm bought 160 acres of farmland here for Prairie Ridge, a development aimed at creating more affordable homes. The median home price in Pella is $339,750 as of July, according to real-estate brokerage
Redfin Corp.
“If a house comes on the market, it’s usually gone almost instantly,” says Mr. DeWaard, who worked as a local real-estate developer before being elected in 2019. He says he recently sold his own house through word-of-mouth before it was officially on the market. People relocating might spend tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price to snag a home here, he says.
“The odds of someone staying in the job are much higher if they live in the community where they work,” says Mr. DeWaard.
Pella, the company, is also remaking the city to be more attractive for out-of-state recruits by covering construction and startup costs for some businesses.
Poke bowls
One of those is Liberty Street Kitchen, a contemporary restaurant opened in 2019 that serves dishes such as poutine, tuna poke bowls and steak ramen stir-fry. Pella recruited a Des Moines-based hospitality organization to take care of hiring and running the new establishment, which sits inside a hotel along a short, artificial canal.
Liberty Street Kitchen has been a hit with Pella residents, packed for lunch and dinner most days. Like many businesses in town, the restaurant is hiring. The hourly rate for dishwashers starts at $14, nearly twice the federal minimum wage and $4 more than the starting pay at Jaarsma Bakery, just around the corner.
Jaarsma bakes Dutch letter pastries, almond butter cake and white walnut bars six days a week, but owner Lisa Larson says the pressure in the local labor market is intense. Several businesses along the town square feature “Help Wanted” signs. Ms. Larson, whose family has owned the bakery for five generations, says she has lost four new hires to Pella in the past year.
“We get a lot of people who move to town and they work for us for a month or not at all, before they’re like, ‘Oh, I got the interview for the job that I really wanted’ and ends up being at Pella Corp.,” she says.
Jason Bandstra, owner of #DutchFix, a restaurant, says he employs dozens of teens, offering flexible hours and short shifts to secure staffing. “When we started this business, my wife and I understood that Vermeer and Pella Corp. have exhausted the labor force in this community, and we were going to have to run this place with high-school kids,” he says.
Pella executives say there is little overlap between its workforce and the labor pool local businesses are hiring from. The company is offering $3,000 sign-on bonuses for some roles on its warehouse and manufacturing operations team, according to its website. It is also seeking machinists, commercial truck drivers as well as a senior internal auditor.
Residents in Pella recognize the benefits of having the company deeply tied to the city, says Ross Davidson, pastor of Heartland Reformed Church. “Companies coming from somewhere else, you put a factory in because you got incentives, and when those incentives dry up, you find the next best place,” says Mr. Davidson, who moved here from Michigan 20 years ago.
Heartland is one of Pella’s smaller churches, but its congregation of about 125 spans generations and socioeconomic backgrounds, Mr. Davidson says. There is division among his members over whether or how much Pella should grow, and how growth may change the town.
“When we moved here 20 years ago, you would never see anyone cut their grass on Sunday,” he says, as one example of how Pella is changing. “Now if I sit in the yard, on a Sunday afternoon, I can just see mowers running all over.”
Pella, the company, is steadfast with its development plans. It recently committed $6 million to help the city build a 90,000-square-foot recreation center, with three gyms, multiple pools and a rock-climbing wall. These efforts, executives say, will help woo talent.
Mr. Kreifels is originally from Iowa and never planned to move back when he left 16 years ago. Before Detroit, he lived in Philadelphia and Portland. “I would never have imagined us moving to a town of this size,” he says.
Pella has its advantages, Mr. Kreifels says. He used to spend as many as three hours in his car every weekday between commuting to work and ferrying his toddler to daycare. It has been easier to make friends than in the big cities he’s previously lived in.
The scale of Pella Corp.’s investments were confusing as an outsider, Mr. Kreifels says, but now that he’s a resident, he understands why the company has been so proactive about filling in gaps in the town’s amenities.
“The conversation with friends and family is like, ‘these people that you work for, why would they do all that?’ ” he says. “And then once you get here, you realize, well, if they didn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t be living here.”
Write to Charity L. Scott at
Charity.Scott@wsj.com