Business View Civil and Municipal | September 2022

77 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 9 BAYTOWN, TEXAS Current distributors include Home Depot, IKEA, and Red Bull. It’s an impressive list that keeps growing as the area’s general business prospers. “NRG Energy is another corporate partner out our way,” Davis continues. “They’re a very large consumer services company. We also have Katoen Natie (KTN), they’re a Belgian firm. They operate in excess of five million square feet of logistics here in Baytown. So, not only do we produce a lot in Baytown, but a lot of inventory produced elsewhere eventually finds its way here in preparation for being shipped out to the world. From here, they’re loaded on trucks, on barges (if they’re being transferred to the Houston port, where they get on a much larger ship), rail, air, every means of transportation imaginable seems to have their meeting here in Baytown.” By way of context, he mentions that the Houston area accounts for about 6% of the U.S. GDP– an astounding figure. “To say that the Houston area is important is an understatement. Baytown is more or less the post office in all of this, the distribution point for much of the domestic product.” On the residential side, between 3,000 and 5,000 homes have consistently been at some stage in the development process since 2015. There are currently about 10 major subdivisions in development in the Baytown area alone. “We’ve also seen a consistent improvement in the quality of housing that developers are willing to build here,” Davis insists. “Once upon a time, these companies might have assumed that this was mostly a blue collar job haven, that only affordable housing could ever be marketed in our city. There has been a paradigm shift, with local builders realizing that the average petrochemical job exceeds $125K per year in salary and benefits. So, we do not have blue collar jobs in Baytown, we have gold collar jobs. There is plenty of disposable income in Baytown and a willingness and desire to buy housing that