Op-Ed: When Bay area shipyards close, we all lose

Jeffrey M. Voth

Mare Island shows why the Bay Area can’t rebuild middle-class ladders once skilled work disappears.

Just before the new year, Mare Island Dry Dock informed the city of Vallejo that it would permanently shut down and lay off its entire workforce. Closures like this rarely break through in the Bay Area, but they should. For generations, shipyard work had been one of the region’s most durable paths into the middle class, built through skilled trades learned over years of steady work. In a place where middle-class life is increasingly fragile, the loss of steady, skilled work is not easily replaced.

What happened at Mare Island is not just a business failure. It reflects how industrial capacity actually works. When work stops, the workforce that sustains it begins to scatter, and skills that took years to build erode faster than they can be replaced. Layoffs happen in days, while rebuilding that capacity takes years and, in shipbuilding, often decades. Those conditions cannot be recreated on demand.

Maritime logistics, surge sealift, and ship repair capacity shape resilience in a crisis. When commercial shipyards close, the loss is strategic as well as economic, and it cannot be rebuilt on relevant timelines.

The Bay Area once supported shipbuilding and repair as a continuous regional system, not a collection of isolated facilities, a pattern that once held across California’s maritime economy. Mare Island was an anchor, but it relied on steady work flowing through private yards, suppliers, and skilled trades across the region. That continuity let skills compound across generations and made investment rational. When continuity weakened, the system did not pause. It thinned quietly long before closures became visible.

Today, there is renewed effort to expand shipbuilding and maritime training across the Bay Area and beyond. Those efforts are necessary and welcome. But they also reveal a timing problem. New facilities, workforce pipelines, and modernization programs take years to stand up, even when funding and political support are aligned. When existing yards close in the meantime, the workforce and supplier capacity those future investments rely on continues to thin.

A clear example is Cal Poly Maritime Academy in Vallejo, the only maritime academy on the West Coast. The academy is expanding training capacity and preparing for a new training ship. Training ships, upgraded waterfront facilities, and new programs take years to translate into licensed mariners and experienced professionals, and they depend on an existing ship repair and industrial base in the North Bay to absorb that workforce once it is trained. Until recently, even that pipeline was fragile. State leaders acknowledged last fall that without integration into Cal Poly, the academy itself faced closure.

What makes losses like Mare Island’s so hard to reverse is how decisions are structured. Systems tend to favor the lowest near-term cost over long-term continuity, and future capacity over existing work. Preserving the workforce and supplier base already in place is harder because the benefits are diffuse and the costs are immediate. No single decision appears decisive, so the cumulative effect goes unowned. Capacity erodes quietly, even when plans look strong on paper.

In the Bay Area, the stakes are especially high, particularly outside the core tech economy. When industrial capacity disappears here, it is not easily replaced by something else. The loss falls hardest on places like the North Bay, where shipbuilding and repair once anchored local economies and provided durable work across generations.

Mare Island’s closure is not a singular failure or an argument against future investment. It is a reminder that industrial capacity is cumulative and fragile. Once steady work has disappeared, the skills and relationships that sustained it do not sit idle waiting to be recalled. They move on. The choice is not between past and future. It is between sustaining and prioritizing what still exists; or accepting that some forms of work, and the stability they provide, will be far harder to rebuild once they are gone.

Jeffrey M. Voth is an industry executive working at the intersection of engineering, technology, and the U.S. maritime industrial base.