WEST POINT, Ga. — Alfred Hall, a jack-of-all-trades handyman here, landed a job recently hauling pallets from the sprawling construction site on the northern side of town.
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Malcolm Malone, who runs M&M Car Washing Detail from a lean-to on the side of the road, has seen his business swell 70 percent in the last year.
And Debbie Williams, co-owner of Roger’s Bar-B-Que, a popular gathering spot, upgraded to a new hardwood floor, thanks to the steady train of new customers.
“It’s hard all over the place,” said Ms. Williams. “But in this little bitty town, we’re so fortunate.”
While much of the rest of the country remains mired in the depressing gray of recession, this rural town of fewer than 3,500 people on the Georgia-Alabama border, about 80 miles southwest of Atlanta, has somehow managed to draw the winning ticket in the nation’s economic lottery.
A new Kia Motors Corporation automobile manufacturing plant is opening here this year, an event that many residents of this former mill town, where life had slowly been ebbing away, can only describe as heaven-sent.
Foreign automakers have flocked to the South, drawn by huge incentives offered by state officials, cheaper labor costs and the nonunion environment. (In the case of Kia, which is based in South Korea, state and local officials doled out some $400 million in tax breaks and other incentives.) But this year, Kia’s is the only car factory scheduled to open in the country, drawing workers to one of the few regions now with concrete hopes of quickly escaping the economic downturn.
Kia has hired only 500 people at this point, but is working its way through more than 43,000 applications it accepted online last year. Supply companies that will feed the plant are increasing their hiring in the area, too.
“We’re the only place in the nation that is fixing to put between 7 and 10,000 manufacturing jobs online,” said Mayor Drew Ferguson IV, a 42-year-old dentist who is charged with managing the town’s growth. “We are the place that has the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The wave of jobs is arriving just in time for a community that had reached a nadir after the textile mills that once anchored it began shuttering in earnest in the 1990s. When the Kia deal was sealed three years ago, Darren Kelley, a City Council member, rushed over to the First United Methodist Church to ring its bell. Annie Davidson, 65, a lifelong resident, erected a sign on her front lawn, now visible to all driving down the community’s main drag: “Thank You Jesus For Bringing Kia to Our Town.”
Although the plant is not scheduled to open until the end of the year, the signs of revival are already unmistakable. There is the bustling new Irish Bred Pub in the previously moribund downtown; the earth now being leveled for the town’s first new subdivision in 25 years; the new Korean restaurants, with their smells so strange to Southern noses, crowded with Korean workers and the occasional enterprising resident, gingerly sampling the kimchi jigae.
“It feels like on the map we’re this little dot of hope,” said Dana Pope, the owner of the Twisted Daisy, a gift shop that is among several new businesses to open downtown.
When Tom Oswalt, the owner of West Point Shoe Outlet, first opened his store downtown more than a decade ago, the textile industry had already begun its slide.
“There were 18 vacant buildings downtown, 4 collapsing ones, including this one,” he said.
Mr. Oswalt has stocked 15 brands of work boots, seeking business from the construction workers flooding the area and recording his biggest sales figures ever last year.
Unemployment remains high — in Troup County, where the plant will be, it was 12.7 percent in February, and the rate is higher across the river in Alabama.
But 2,500 people will eventually work at the Kia factory. A potpourri of supplier companies will employ 7,500 more workers. Thousands of additional jobs are expected to be generated by the new restaurants, hotels and other businesses springing up.
Employment in the automobile and parts industry has fallen by half since 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but foreign expansion has helped to offset at least some of the deep layoffs by American manufacturers.
Kia’s plant, which will make the company’s Sorento sport utility vehicle, is its first in North America. The company’s market share has climbed in recent years and it is faring better than others in this recession as consumers look to economize, said Jesse Toprak, a senior analyst for Edmunds.com.
Hourly jobs, which are not unionized, in contrast with those at the Ford and General Motors plants that recently closed in the Atlanta area, are still expected to pay about $15 to $27 an hour.
Some laid-off workers in the area, however, are fretting about how they can compete for jobs with former employees of closed domestic auto plants who have been frequenting job fairs, along with others coming from out of state..
Randy Jackson, the director of human resources for the plant, said that some former auto workers had come from Michigan and elsewhere seeking work, but that 95 percent of applicants were from Georgia and Alabama, and most had no automotive background.
William DeLee, 50, a mechanic at the West Point Tire Company, recently got a call from Kia for an interview. Despite the odds, Mr. DeLee said while changing a flat tire, he was hopeful for a better life.
“I was just excited,” he said, “because I got my foot in the door.”