Around 4:30 every afternoon, says human resources director Kurt Spasic, the parking lot at LeTourneau Inc. is &#8220a racetrack.” Most of the company’s 718 employees are getting off for the day and heading home. For the majority of those employees, though – just over 400, in fact – &#8220home” is not just up U.S. 61 in Vicksburg but up to an hour away, or more, in Clinton, Brandon, Monroe, Tallulah and Port Gibson.

&#8220They ride together. You’ll see cars with three or four people coming in together,” Spasic said. &#8220And with the price of gas they’re fixing to start doing it more.”

Spasic himself drives the 60 or so miles daily, one way, from Brandon to LeTourneau, just south of Vicksburg’s city limits. His wife works in Brandon, he said, but her job had little to do with their decision to buy there. She could have easily found work in Vicksburg. Rather, the family of six couldn’t find an affordable house large enough to accommodate them in a decent area.

&#8220We moved from Dallas-Fort Worth,” said Spasic, who sold his five-bedroom house in Roanoke, Texas, for $156,000 before moving. &#8220And regardless of what all the reports say, real estate is more expensive (in Vicksburg) than where we moved from, which is a major metro area. That’s a major problem.”

Estimates vary on the number of people who live outside of Warren County and drive here to work. BrokerSouth GMAC Real Estate agent Pam Beard said she thinks about 1,500 people commute; Mayor Laurence Leyens said he’s seen numbers as high as 5,000 and others say around 3,300. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 statistics outpace those conjectures, reporting more than 5,200 of the nearly 25,000 employed in Warren County come from 34 other Mississippi counties and 19 Louisiana parishes.

&#8220It’s a huge deal because that means the people are coming in to get work, but they’re not really contributing to the economy directly by paying taxes,” Leyens said. &#8220I’m not criticizing them, but people who live here tend to consume here, buy their gas here, pay taxes here, send their kids to school here.”

At the core of the problem is housing, Leyens said, calling the kind of problems faced by the Spasics &#8220the most important thing that city government ought to focus on.” The jobs are coming, in the form of casino and hotel expansions, health care and new retail outlets, he said, but he wonders: where will those workers come from?.

&#8220If we’re sitting at 7 percent unemployment and we’ve got 3,300 people coming in to work here, that means there’s not enough people to fill jobs,” Leyens said. &#8220We need more housing so that these people don’t have to commute.”

In that case, said Beard, the demand – for medium-priced housing, especially – has outpaced the supply in Vicksburg. For higher-priced houses, too, the market in and around the city is booming faster than builders can keep up; there were more homes valued at more than $100,000 in Warren County than there were homes under $50,000 in 2000 for the first time. It’s a trend Beard said she expects to continue as long as the city is growing economically.

&#8220We’ve got clients every day who are having trouble finding a house,” Beard said. &#8220If you’re in the $80,000 income range and you were looking for a home in the $150,000 to $200,000 price range, your choices are limited. I’m not saying they’re non-existent, but they’re limited.”

Yet housing is hardly the only issue keeping people who work in Vicksburg from setting down roots in the city. Truett Sanchez lived in Vicksburg for about a year after he landed a job with the Corps of Engineers’ construction division, but moved to Monroe last year to accommodate his schooling and his wife’s. Now he drives 160 miles a day, more than one hour each way, while finishing his MBA at the Universiy of Louisiana-Monroe at night while his wife attends Louisiana Tech in Ruston. And neither expects to call Vicksburg or Monroe home for long.

&#8220I haven’t even attempted to look for a house here (in Vicksburg). When I lived here, I lived in an apartment,” said Sanchez, 26. &#8220I’m staying here until I finish my degree. Then, hopefully, I’ll find somewhere else to work.”

&#8220Schools” is an answer many commuters give for living elsewhere, though they’re usually referring to their kids’ education rather than their own. One of Sanchez’s Corps colleagues, Ken Mosley, for example, drives from Clinton, where he said he prefers the schools to those in Vicksburg; another, Paul Morgan, drives 72 miles each way from Brookhaven in large part so his kids can go to school there. In addition to the trouble finding housing, Spasic said he and his wife chose Brandon because they didn’t want to send their four children to Vicksburg schools.

&#8220When the schools don’t meet the expectations and the housing is expensive, as well, that’s a major problem for Vicksburg,” he said.

For exactly that reason, Leyens said improving the school system is one of the most important elements of his broader economic development agenda.

&#8220That comes from a perception,” he said of area schools’ sometimes bad reputation.

Vicksburg Warren School District Superintendent James Price said the perception is already beginning to change, as evidenced by a districtwide enrollment increase of 250 students this year, not counting Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Housing is the larger issue, Price said, but he is bothered that what he consides old perceptions continue to spread via word of mouth.

&#8220It hurts when you see the quality of people in our community and the jobs that they’re doing to have people accept blindly as fact that (Clinton’s) school system is better than our school system when that’s not the case,” said Price, who added that he often meets with Realtors to show the district to prospective buyers. &#8220Five or six years ago, I think you had people who would say they didn’t want to send their kids to Vicksburg, but today I just don’t believe that’s a true statement any longer. Schools are a secondary reason. They’re going where they can get the most house for the dollar.”

All Vicksburg Warren schools are rated by the state as level 3, or &#8220successful,” Price said, except for Warren Central Junior High and Bowmar Elementary, which rank higher at 4 and 5, respectively. All seven schools in the Clinton School District are rated 5, records show.

For Vicksburg native Krissa Rowland, 27, and her husband, Clinton offers &#8220a good halfway point” between her job at the Corps’ Waterways Experiment Station in her hometown and her husband’s work in Jackson – as well as a chance to be closer to the bigger city.

&#8220I don’t have kids, and that definitely was a factor because we’re young and there’s a lot more opportunity for entertainment in the Jackson area,” said Rowland, who also works three days a week teaching gymnastics in Vicksburg. &#8220I think we’ll stay in Clinton. We like the school district there, and we like being that close to Jackson.”