Vermilion Parish Current scale
Population (2025 est.) 57,671Â
2024 nominal GDP $1.950 B
2024 real GDP $1.533 B (2017 dollars)Â
Employer establishments 969
Employer jobs (2023) 9,362
Employer payroll (2023) $449 M/yearÂ
Proposed Starbase investment $100 B
Announced permanent Starbase jobs ≥3,000
The first bit of money to be spent is 100 million on shore line stabilization. 100 million dollars is 1/1000 of what is being spent in total.
I just saw a post where a welder in Pennsylvania started at 62.50 an hour. Wages in South East Texas are a lot lower, 35 to 40 an hour. I would expect that to change.
Between the 100 billion project between far northwest Houston and College Station in Texas and the Starbase in south central Louisiana, there will not be a heavy equipment operator to be hired in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama. And, they will be hard to come by in Arizona, Missouri Tennessee and Georgia. I say this because the construction crews are already limited.
If I was young, and had a lick of sense, I would move to College Station and buy a house in Southeast College Station or move to Louisiana and buy a house in Southwest Lafayette Louisiana. Even a Redwing boot salesman would do well in the next 20 years.
Sure, but a large percentage of that is flowing to the 1% and the massive corruption endemic to the State. If you weren’t working in the chemical or oil & gas industry, you weren’t getting much personal benefit from the high GDP.
A lot of Parishes (equivalent of state counties) even have high sales taxes on basic groceries in Louisiana.
And the rest of $100 billion is still quite a lot. Remember what Qaz wrote in the OP: “If I was young, and had a lick of sense, I would move to College Station and buy a house in Southeast College Station or move to Louisiana and buy a house in Southwest Lafayette Louisiana. Even a Redwing boot salesman would do well in the next 20 years.”
Ironic that SpaceX wants to move to that part of Louisiana, because it is literally a different world down there. You have to see it and live it to believe it.
In a lot of ways it is a good place. You want to be far enough south that you get a boost from the rotation of the Earth and you need to be far enough away from people and infrastructure that the occasional launch mishap doesn’t bother anyone too much.
Dad was there working on guidance systems from the Redstone Rocket on, and Mom me and sibs often visited. It was a weird mix of the sparse population, culture, and economy abiding from pre-WWII and a rapidly growing far more educated and wealthy bunch. I had a bunch of 6-8 year old resident friends I hung with when visiting there, and the mother of my best friend from that buch was widely known as “the alligator lady”, because if an alligator choose to hang out in or near your home you called her. She was a dead shot with her .45 revolver, and also excellent with larger armaments…. Ah, the good old days!