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- Steel is booming in Arkansas — so why are so many people still struggling to get by?</p>
<p>Bracey HarrisJuly 12, 2025 at 8:30 PM</p>
<p>For Mississippi County, Arkansas, the booming steel industry is an economic lifeline, but many can't reach it. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>OSCEOLA, Ark. — The church was initially told to prepare for 20 people. But in the end nearly 100 show up, mostly Black men, to hear about the Arkansas steel mill offering six-figure jobs. As newcomers trickle in, a deacon goes in search of more folding chairs.</p>
<p>"When you get paid this amount, we just can't give it to anybody," says Robert Potter, a supervisor at Hybar, the local steel company hosting the event. He warns that the jobs can be hot and dirty. "We're looking for the best people for the best job."</p>
<p>Hybar needs 154 employees for its new mill opening next month — engineers, security guards, cafeteria workers — but many of those jobs were already filled before the church event, which was billed as a career readiness workshop.</p>
<p>Sterling Winston, a man in his late 30s and wearing a baseball cap, speaks up during the Q&A. He has already interviewed twice at the plant without getting hired, he tells the room.</p>
<p>"But I'm still here," he says. "I ain't giving up.</p>
<p>Sterling Winston, center, joins a crowd eager to hear about Hybar's new steel mill. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>For Mississippi County, Arkansas, the booming steel industry is an economic lifeline. In the last decade, billions of dollars have flowed in to expand mills or open new ones, and it's often hailed as the top steel-producing county in the country. Last year, a $3 billion mill came online, employing hundreds, the largest private investment in Arkansas history. And as President Donald Trump seeks to reshape the United States into a "manufacturing powerhouse," some industry groups say steel is poised to keep growing. But for many residents in this county of roughly 38,000, the promise of the steel boom is still out of reach. In the shadow of the new steel plants, a quarter of residents here live in poverty, more than double the national average.</p>
<p>Osceola Mayor Joe Harris says part of the problem is that too many workers are here only temporarily — they're construction workers hired to build the mills or higher-paid steelworkers who live out of town and commute in for part of the week. They compete for scarce affordable housing and too often spend their earnings outside the county.</p>
<p>"If you come here and make your money and leave, that's not good for our city," he said.</p>
<p>For Harris, the boom has been a blessing but not a panacea. "I don't want to be a little town with billion-dollar industries around it and still suffering."</p>
<p>Mississippi County, Arkansas, has suffered from population decline in the wake of an Air Force base closure and factories leaving the area. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>Osceola's downtown betrays the town's struggles. It's dotted with aging brick buildings, some with doors boarded with plywood. On a late Saturday morning, apart from an errant building crew, it was practically deserted.</p>
<p>The downturn dates back to the 1990s, when the Eaker Air Force Base closed and took thousands of residents with it. Other factory closures followed. "We lost 9,000 jobs in the '90s. We're just beginning to make those up," said Clif Chitwood, president of the Great River Economic Development Foundation, who spent decades working to recruit new industries to Mississippi County.</p>
<p>Hybar sees itself as part of the solution. Wearing a white hard hat at the soon-to-open mill, CEO Dave Stickler gestures below to a worker on the basement floor attending to a maze of piping where hydraulic fluid will flow.</p>
<p>"This was nothing but soybean fields 22 months ago," he said. Now his investors are looking at opening two more mills, including one in Osceola.</p>
<p>Joe Wilkerson, 51, who oversees maintenance in Hybar's melt shop, remembers chopping cotton as a 12-year-old so he could buy clothes for school.</p>
<p>"All I wanted to do is work because we didn't have anything," he said. He can afford more for his own two children, and recently bought his daughter a new car.</p>
<p>Wilkerson lives in the county, but many other workers are just passing through.</p>
<p>Billions have flowed toward steel mill projects in Mississippi County over the last decade. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>John Romine, 39, lives near the Louisiana line but comes to the county seasonally with his brother to find work. "They got the money and we got the tools," he said. To get to the Hybar mill, he drives to a parking lot near the plant and boards a school bus that transports him to his pipe-fitting shift. Then he returns to his home, a camper in an RV park in Blytheville, another part of the county, about 17 miles away. Almost every lot in the RV park was occupied when NBC News visited him there, with license plates from Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, Texas and Mississippi.</p>
<p>Lisa Willard, who runs the Mississippi County Union Mission, a homeless shelter, said the arrival of temporary and shift workers has made it harder for longtime residents to find affordable housing.</p>
<p>Though the steel mills have been charitable, Willard said, the county's dichotomy of affluence and poverty reminds her of visiting another country on vacation.</p>
<p>"On one side you see the beautiful resort; the other side you see the villages," she said. "We have the wonderful steel mills. We have this other side as well."</p>
<p>Outside an Osceola soup kitchen, the lunch line moves briskly. Visitors take their food — in this case a lunch of Ro-Tel tomatoes and chiles mixed with spaghetti — to go. Lee Mosley, 48, an electrician, is one of them.</p>
<p>"By the time you pay your rent, it's hard because you ain't got no money to pay the light bill or any other bill or go grocery shopping because you're broke from the bills," he said, standing outside, plate in hand.</p>
<p>Left: Evangeline Johnson serves guests free lunch at the back door of the SHIFT Family Outreach Center in Osceola, one of several soup kitchens in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Right: John Romine, with dogs Banshee and Major at Willow RV Park in Blytheville. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>Between 2015 and 2023, the most recent data available, median rents here rose by nearly 30%, according to the U.S. census. The number of short-term rentals in the county has nearly tripled from May 2024 to May 2025, according to data from AirDNA, which tracks listings from Airbnb and similar services, as landlords increasingly cater to steel industry workers.</p>
<p>"Housing is a huge need," said Blytheville Mayor Melisa Logan.</p>
<p>"I used to say a 'housing desert,' but now I'm in a housing crisis."</p>
<p>Logan said she's tried to find solutions to these housing woes. She said she spends time networking with developers and builders, hoping they might bring projects to Blytheville.</p>
<p>She's also encouraged by steelmakers' efforts to incentivize full-time employees to stay local. "If you trust us to come and earn your living," Logan said, "you should trust us enough to raise your family."</p>
<p>Roughly half of the county's steelworkers live outside of Mississippi County, according to Chitwood, of the Great River Economic Development Foundation.</p>
<p>A new program called "Work Here, Live Here," sponsored by Big River Steel Works, Hybar and other companies, will give steel industry workers who stay in their jobs for at least four years up to $50,000 to build or purchase new homes in the area. One hundred and sixty three have already signed up.</p>
<p>"You get these families in. They make the school districts better. They bring in restaurants, hotels," said Dan Brown, vice president and chief operating officer of Big River Steel Works. "The community starts building up."</p>
<p>Hybar CEO David Stickler, left, says he's already considering building a second mill in Osceola, Ark. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
<p>That's not the only effort to help Mississippi County reap the benefits of the boom. The companies say they are eager to recruit local workers.</p>
<p>Stickler talks openly about trying to diversify Hybar's ranks. He said he wants the mill to "look very similar to Osceola" when he walks through it.</p>
<p>At the local community college, Arkansas Northeastern, students can earn a "steel degree" or study other trades with help from scholarships.</p>
<p>On a recent Friday, workers from a Little Rock-based steel fabricator, Lexicon, were in a community college classroom, practicing how to properly align steel mill machinery. The college's president, Christopher Heigle, looked on. He's fond of telling high school students that they can start making $80,000-$100,000 within years of graduation.</p>
<p>Stickler knows he can't hire everyone, but he thinks anyone who wants to should at least have the opportunity to interview at Hybar. That's what the church workshop was about.</p>
<p>As Pastor Cleveland Cain stood up to close Saturday's event, dozens of heads bowed. He thanked God for the opportunity.</p>
<p>He prayed that it would come to pass.</p>
<p>Residents say affordable housing is hard to come by in Mississippi County — and rents are on the rise. (Brandon Dill for NBC News)</p>
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