St. James Parish, Louisiana

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Cost of living stretches income further: Local prices run 7.4% below the national average, so the nominal median of $65,531 is worth $70,768 at national average prices. BEA publishes price parity at metro level, not county level.
• Talent gap: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment trails the national average by 16.2 pts, relevant for advanced-services attraction strategy.

• Largest private-sector industry: Manufacturing employs 2,313 workers (42.7% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $130,049. Every industry figure on this page is private sector; government employs a further 1,581 and is counted separately.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $3.3B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Manufacturing averages $130,049 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $17,321, a 7.5x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Pipeline Transportation concentrates at 27.11x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 7 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, but 60.6% of the employment across them depends on one source of demand: goods manufacturing. Read the count as depth within that single demand base rather than as spread across separate ones.

• In line with national: Home value to income ratio of 3.2x sits near the ~4.1x national average; affordability is neither a clear advantage nor a recruitment friction.
• High home ownership: 84.4% owner-occupied; rental supply may be tight for incoming workers.
• Vacancy level: 13.1% of housing units are vacant, below the Louisiana rate of 14.4%, and down from 13.5% in 2019.
• Vacancy composition: the largest vacancy category is other vacant at 73.5% of vacant units, with seasonal and recreational use at 4.2%.
• Genuinely available supply: units listed for rent or for sale are 18% of the vacant stock, or 2.4% of all housing units against the 13.1% headline vacancy rate. Absorbable supply for an incoming employer is thin, and the gap between the two is the redevelopment and conversion opportunity.
• Affordable rent tiers: 2 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom sizes sit below what a household on the median renter income of $28,621 can pay without cost burden (~$716/mo), and 41.8% of renter households are measured as cost-burdened.

• Succession risk is real: 26% of working-age residents are 55-64. Plan for retirements over the next decade and pair attraction strategy with talent retention.
• Low participation: 57.1% labor force participation. The labor force itself fell 6.7% between 2019 and 2024, from 9,637 to 8,988.
• Talent pipeline: no college, university, or technical school is located in St. James Parish per the IPEDS institutional directory, so any training pipeline serving it runs through institutions outside the county.

St. James Parish shows strong potential for pipeline transportation attraction, with a 27.11x concentration and 71 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally. Near-term succession risk is elevated, with 26% of the working-age population within 10 years of retirement age.

Most of the employment across the concentrated sub-sectors traces back to a single source of demand. Goods manufacturing accounts for 60.6% of it, with chemical manufacturing the largest single sub-sector at 44.2%. Recruitment that widens the demand base changes that exposure; recruitment inside the same base deepens it.