In Hammond, Louisiana, a government building sits a little too quietly for its purpose along a section of North Oak Street. The Tangipahoa Parish Workforce Development office doesn’t make a big deal out of promoting itself. But when you walk through those doors on a weekday morning, the waiting area reveals a more complete picture: some people are using tablets to fill out forms, others are holding printed resumes, and some are speaking softly to caseworkers. When a workforce ecosystem is functioning, or at least attempting to, it looks like this.
Louisiana’s most ostentatious city has never been Hammond. On I-12, it is located about halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It is big enough to be noticeable but small enough to go unnoticed. However, over the past few years, it has quietly evolved into a sort of testing ground for what mid-size Southern cities can achieve in terms of workforce development.
Here, the local branch of Louisiana’s workforce system is known as Geaux Jobs, a name that combines optimism and pragmatism. It provides free online training via platforms like Alison, links job seekers with employment resources, and offers programming for young adults between the ages of 14 and 24, a group that workforce experts frequently refer to as the most difficult to reach and crucial to get right. Additionally, veterans receive specialized assistance. The programs here seem to have been designed to cover topics that regular job boards just don’t.
In fact, the young adult part is worth pausing on. When those individuals become challenging to re-engage as adults, workforce pipelines that disregard teenagers and early twenties often pay a price years later. Hammond appears to comprehend this. It’s difficult to determine whether the programs are adequately staffed and fully funded from the outside, but at least the intention seems sincere.
Even though it isn’t connected frequently enough, the housing component is also a part of this tale. In May 2023, the Louisiana Housing Corporation opened The Burrow in Hammond, a 64-unit multifamily development built with CDBG-DR funds, housing bonds, and low-income housing tax credits. The development is close to a supermarket and retail establishments, which may seem insignificant until you consider how much a person’s ability to regularly attend work is impacted by their proximity to grocery stores. These specifics are important. Because thousands of rental properties throughout the state were destroyed by the 2016 floods, the developers and LHC discussed resilience—FORTIFIED Gold construction, backup generators, Enterprise Green ratings. Employees who lose their homes also lose their jobs. There is ample evidence of the brutality of that cycle.
Seldom is the relationship between stable housing and a productive local workforce discussed in the same sentence, but Hammond is subtly arguing that point through what it is actually constructing. Affordable housing developments and workforce development offices don’t always work well together. Whether the agencies involved are doing this on purpose or if the timing is largely coincidental is still unknown. But something is taking shape regardless.
The Geaux Jobs network extends beyond Hammond into Livingston, Ascension, Washington, and Iberville parishes, suggesting a regional strategy rather than a city-specific one. That’s probably the smarter approach. Workforce problems in southeast Louisiana don’t stop at parish lines, and neither do the workers.
What happens next in Hammond’s workforce story is genuinely hard to predict. Federal workforce funding is notoriously vulnerable to political shifts. Programs that work well in one administration cycle can be quietly gutted in the next. But for now, on North Oak Street, the doors open at 8 a.m. on weekdays, and people keep coming in. That, at least, means something.
