In the headlines and on social media, corporate behavior on so-called social issues is markedly more muted than it was a decade ago. Under changing political, legal, and public relations (PR) pressures, many employers have scaled back public engagement on issues including race, sexual orientation, and gender. But less-public corporate discussions on social issues continue to consider factors like sustainability and workforce diversity as risk-management considerations in making decisions in our firm’s field of site selection.

Some commentators and analysts interpret the shift away from highly visible corporate engagement in “social” issues as evidence that sustainability and diverse talent are no longer mission-critical for corporations. That conclusion misses an important nuance in the realities of today’s corporate decision-making.

The importance of these factors varies considerably by project type. They tend to matter most for corporate headquarters, R&D centers, and other talent-intensive operations, as well as for capital-intensive projects such as semiconductor fabs, data centers, and advanced manufacturing facilities that depend heavily on reliable power, water, and infrastructure. They may carry less weight in certain production or logistics projects where transportation, real estate, labor costs, and proximity to customers dominate the location equation. For executives evaluating talent- or infrastructure-sensitive projects, the practical lesson is to incorporate workforce availability, climate resiliency, water and power reliability, and related operating risks into the site-screening process early rather than treating them as secondary considerations.

For corporate head offices and research projects, ready access to highly educated and specialized workers can be critical. For water- and energy-intensive industrial projects, such as semiconductor fabs, data centers, and certain advanced manufacturing facilities, plentiful and reliable utility service can be a decisive site-selection determinant. For operations requiring 24/7, 365-day continuity, insulation from natural disasters, severe weather, and other climate-related risks can also carry substantial weight.

The public posture of many companies has clearly changed. But workforce attraction, retention, and scalability, together with operational risks involving climate, power, and water, remain hard-and-fast considerations for corporate location planners.

It remains true today that companies are only as good as their people. One way for companies to improve workforce competitiveness is by operating in markets that offer them maximum access to the talent they need to recruit and retain. Factors such as health care access, proximity to knowledge hubs, quality of life, and workforce amenities can and do influence where highly educated and specialized workers choose to live. Those factors tend to cluster near universities and major metropolitan areas.

That helps explain a pattern we are seeing in our site selection work. The strong economic and population growth associated with many Sun Belt states is not evenly distributed across those states. Census data show that much of the growth is concentrated in major metropolitan economies such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Orlando, and Nashville — the principal centers of job creation, corporate investment, and population growth. These large metros in states with conservative policy environments all have deep labor pools based on welcoming and diverse cultures, access to universities, and strong health care systems.

Based on our national insights, similar dynamics are occurring in other major metropolitan markets. Philadelphia is attracting new corporate headquarters, highlighted by Burlington Stores’ recently announced $370 million headquarters relocation to the city; Boston-Cambridge continues to attract major life sciences investment, including AstraZeneca’s new $1 billion Kendall Square R&D center; San Francisco is adding to its extraordinary concentration of AI companies, with major expansions by Anthropic and OpenAI, while the broader Bay Area is also building a significant quantum-computing cluster; and Chicago remains a major food and beverage industry center, reinforced by Mars Snacking’s 600-job headquarters expansion and the presence of companies such as Mondelez International and Conagra Brands.

Some workforce considerations, including access to reproductive health care, have become politically contentious while also creating business and talent-management considerations. For some companies, the availability of reproductive health care can factor into site selection, alongside a broader set of workforce, operating, cost, and risk considerations. For startups and midsize employers, differences in state reproductive-health access can create additional recruitment, retention, health care benefit, and employee-relations considerations, particularly when the company has a limited multistate footprint or when travel reimbursements are not financially sustainable.

While reproductive care is not a single deciding factor for most companies, survey research suggests that access to abortion is an employment consideration for a meaningful share of young, upwardly mobile workers. A 2022 national survey by LeanIn.Org remains a useful benchmark for understanding these workforce attitudes: 76 percent of working women under age 40 said they were more likely to want to work for a company that supports abortion access, and 74 percent of working men under 40 agreed.

Other research points in the same direction. A 2024 CNBC/Generation Lab survey of 1,033 Americans ages 18 to 34 found that 45 percent said they would probably or definitely reject a job offer in a state where abortion was illegal, while 62 percent said they probably or definitely would not live in such a state.

Corporate location strategy is also being shaped by increasingly complex operational resiliency risks. Site selection consultants and corporate decision-makers must evaluate weather-related exposure with the same rigor applied to labor costs, taxes, infrastructure, and logistics. Extreme events can disrupt workforces, damage infrastructure, interrupt supply chains, and drive higher insurance, utility, mitigation, and business-continuity costs.

Energy and water availability is also becoming an important site-selection variable, particularly for semiconductor, data center, and advanced-manufacturing projects, where consumption can be both an operating constraint and a community-relations issue. These sustainability risks tie into workforce strategy as well. Prospective employees are weighing quality-of-life implications associated with a location’s water quality, wildfire smoke, flooding, drought, and other environmental pressures. For companies making long-term location decisions, resilience is no longer a secondary consideration; it is becoming a core measure of a market’s competitiveness.

This evolving risk-management equation can create new opportunities in markets that have sat outside the first tier of relocation consideration. In our site selection work, we have seen a long-running migration of corporate investment away from higher-cost states such as New York, New Jersey, and California. But in our work with clients considering Florida and Texas, we are seeing employers and employees weigh rising housing and insurance costs, infrastructure pressures, climate exposure, and health care access alongside traditional advantages such as taxes, incentives, and labor availability. That changing calculus could elevate midsize urban markets that offer a compelling combination of operating resilience, workforce quality, affordability, health care access, and welcoming communities for a diverse labor force.

Upstate New York is a useful case study. The Upstate Revitalization Initiative, combined with semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing investments, has helped reposition the region as a serious contender for next-generation industry. Micron broke ground in January 2026 on a semiconductor megafab complex of up to four fabs near Syracuse, a planned investment of up to $100 billion. GlobalFoundries announced in February 2024 that it would invest more than $11.6 billion to expand its operations in New York’s Capital Region, and in October 2026 it said it would operate two new fabs in Malta under a U.S.-Japan initiative of up to $21 billion. Edwards Vacuum has built a $319 million semiconductor-supply-chain facility at Genesee County’s Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park. The facility is scheduled to open in fall 2026 and is expected to create hundreds of jobs.

In today’s environment of heightened not-in-my-backyard opposition to major development — most visibly around data centers — community acceptance is also a critical variable. Companies expect site selection consultants to understand the local landscape and cultivate relationships with business leaders, elected officials, and neighborhood organizers.

In the bigger picture, site selectors and economic development professionals should recognize that evaluating sustainability and workforce considerations is not a bygone exercise in corporate PR. These factors will continue to influence corporate location decisions, even in a so-called post-woke business climate, as decision-makers approach these questions not as matters of ideological positioning but as questions of business risk, competitiveness, and long-term performance.

At the same time, the fundamentals of site selection remain: labor availability, reliable and affordable power and water, competitive operating costs and taxes, market access, a business-friendly tort system, incentives, and speed to market. The strongest location strategies account for both sets of factors rather than treating them as competing priorities.