Louisiana Touts 3rd Highest Percentage of Construction Job Growth
Adding well over 10,000 construction jobs, Louisiana ranked 3rd highest in the entire United States for the addition of construction jobs throughout the state. A total of 10,700 jobs were added increasing the amount of new construction employment to 8.3% from October, 2012 to October, 2013. It’s the largest year over year increase in the construction sector since the beginning of the Recession. Louisiana had a high number of increase throughout the entire state because of several new commercial and industrial project starts. Some of these projects were located in the Greater New Orleans and listed below:
- Transit Capital Project in New Orleans, Louisiana, the UPT/Loyola Avenue Corridor, a 1-mile streetcar from the Union Passenger Terminal to Canal Street
- 939 Iberville, redevelopment of a mostly vacant French Quarter building into an 87-unit residence. Plans call for unit sizes ranging from 765 to 2,164 square feet, as well as an 85-vehicle parking structure. Price of this project: $26,000,000
- New Orleans South Market District downtown, a mixed-use development off the Loyola Avenue streetcar line. The Paramount at South Market is one of the proposed commercial construction projects and is a five-story apartment, restaurant and retail building. Price of the entire project: $200,000,000
- Broad Community Connections, in partnership with L+M Development Partners (L+M), begins construction on the ReFresh Project, a 60,000 square-foot development on Broad Street includes a Whole Foods Market, Liberty’s Kitchen full service café and commercial kitchen, and The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University. Money utilized on the project is a $1.9 million loan.
- The nation’s first gasification plant, built by the Leucadia Corporation in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Investment of this industrial construction project $2.5 billion
- Incitec Pivot Limited’s Dyno Nobel and Cornerstone Chemical began construction on an ammonia plant and upgrades and infrastructure expansion at Cornerstone’s Fortier Manufacturing Complex. Cost of this project: $1.025 billion
Nationally, overall, 39 states out of 50 saw an increase in construction employment. The #1 state to see an increase was Florida at 19%, and Mississippi at 11% came in second.
“It is encouraging that three-quarters of the states are now adding construction jobs on a year-over-year basis,” said Ken Simonson, the association’s chief economist. “Employment increases are still intermittent in too many states, however, and nearly all states are far below their pre-recession highs.”
In St. Tammany Parish, the real estate market saw an upsurge of business in one of the typically slowest month of the year in November. Ron Lee Homes has several new custom home construction projects that started in the last few months, and we have several new homes that will be built at the beginning of 2014. The real estate industry, specifically the new home construction builders, have been a major factor in the increase of the GDP in the United States in 2013. For information on building a new home in the Greater New Orleans area, Contact Ron Lee Homes today at 985-626-7619 or E-mail [email protected].
