It used to be that folks in Alexandria boasted of its location in the center of Louisiana as being a positive thing when it came to attracting business, industry or even athletic events.
But, the negative side of that location, according to Alexandria realtor Matt Ritchie, is that we are like an island, too isolated from where the action is.
The action is along the I-10 or I-20 corridors.
Rouses Grocery, for example, is a popular grocery supermarket chain with stores in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and its headquarters is in Thibodaux. But all their markets, which run from Lake Charles to Gulf Shores, Ala., are on or near the I-10 corridor.
Waffle House, on the other hand, has several stores in Louisiana, but most are on or near the I-20 corridor in north Louisiana. The closest to Alexandria is in Opelousas.
Another reason Rouses doesn’t fit this market, Ritchie said, is there are not enough people making enough money to support one. Rouses tends to offer higher-quality or specialty items and a more upscale shopping experience, which leads to higher price tags.
“Traffic drives retail,” said Ritchie. “The retailers have it down to a science, practically, figuring how much business they’re likely to get based on how much traffic they get by their business.”
Ritchie is a 51-year-old native of Pineville, a husband and father who was voted by his peers as Louisiana Realtor of the Year in 2017. He is most familiar with and invested in Cenla. He is the developer and sole owner of Pinewood Pointe Shopping Center in Pineville and he owns quite a bit of land around Rapides Station.
The median household income in Rapides Parish (as of 2023) is less than $60,000, according to various census and data trackers, and the parish population (as of 2023) is 126,260 — down from 130,000 in 2020.
On a recent Saturday night, my wife and I went with another couple to dinner at one of the more popular restaurants in Alexandria.
“It’s a Saturday night, and the weather is nice, and this place ought to be hopping,” my friend said. It wasn’t hopping. It was cruising, at best.
Yet, there are signs of life around “The Real Easy,” as Alexandria has branded itself, countering “The Big Easy” nickname for New Orleans with a moniker that fits the convenience of a place that is within a 15–20-minute drive from anywhere else.
In and around the Garden District, some once-dilapidated houses have received facelifts in recent years. Olive Garden, a long sought-after restaurant, is scheduled to replace Johnny Carino’s on South MacArthur Drive before the year is out.
Thanks to Ritchie, the old Baker Manufacturing facility in Pineville has undergone a facelift on the outside and has been gutted on the inside and is available for another user as a distribution and storage facility. Plastipak, a sub-contractor for Procter and Gamble that had been operating there and using it as an overflow warehouse, is moving from there this weekend, said Ritchie.
Ritchie also renovated the old K-Mart building in Pineville and is working on luring a national retailer to go in on half of that location. He said he almost had Harbor Freight for the other half of that Pineville location, but that hardware business, which gets its products from China, cut off that deal (and others) after the presidential election in anticipation of the tariff war with China.
Economist Dr. Loren Scott said last fall he anticipated economic growth in central Louisiana, with most of it happening in 2026. He based that on the construction of the Beaver Lake facility – a multi-billion-dollar state-of-the-art renewable energy facility to be constructed at the former International Paper site in Rapides Parish. It will produce green methanol. To do so, it will use wood fiber from routine forest thinning activity.
Scott also based some of that optimism on Cleco’s new carbon capture facility at its Brame Energy Center in Lena. He said both are expected to bring billions of dollars in construction activity.
There’s also hope for the future, said Ritchie, in the success stories at Rapides Station in recent years of the Amazon and Lowes distribution centers.
“If we can attract industry and jobs (like that) that pay an above-average wage, we can start attracting some of those stores and restaurants we talked about,” he said.