How Louisiana Is Slowly Turning Into America's Next Mega-State

By July 2025, Louisiana had about 39,700 fewer people than at the start of the decade. Fifty of its 64 parishes went backwards. The people who stayed are piling into a ring around Lake Pontchartrain, and measured edge to edge on the Census Bureau's map, the built-up land from Baton Rouge now sits about 7 miles from the built-up land reaching up the river from New Orleans. So this one is a scoreboard. Parish by parish, who moved in and who moved out since 2020, with the running total kept where you can see it. The board runs through New Orleans and Jefferson, East and West Baton Rouge, Livingston, Ascension, the river parishes between the two cities, Saint Tammany on the Northshore, Houma and the coast, and Lafayette out past the Atchafalaya Basin. Every stop gets the mega-state idea's best evidence and its worst. In Ascension, one place has nearly three times as many people as Gonzales, and it has never become a town. Somewhere in the middle, the federal government pulls one of the fastest-growing parishes out of the New Orleans metro. At the bottom of the board sit a parish that changed sides on the federal map and a forecast the state made for this corridor back in 2009, finally checked against the count. Did you move into one of these parishes, or out of one? Tell me where you came from and where you landed. WATCH NEXT ▶ Exploring Louisiana:    • Exploring Louisiana (Parishes, Places and ...   SUBSCRIBE ▶    / @louisianauncovered   Historical documentary. Names, dates, and cases are drawn from the public record and published reporting. Some footage is illustrative. Population figures are dated to their sources and can change. #Louisiana #LouisianaUncovered #MegaState