Many Katrina evacuees staying in Houston

Rasha Madkour

HOUSTON — About 70 percent of Katrina evacuees who fled to Houston last year — many of whom are poor, black and have little education — plan to make the city their permanent home, according to a survey released last week.

The survey of 1,081 refugees suggests a longer burden on social services that are already stretched thin by the estimated 120,000 evacuees still living in Houston, said Rice University professor Rick Wilson, the survey’s lead author.

He also warned that other cities are monitoring how Houston has coped with the influx of new residents. Since more disasters are inevitable, Wilson said state and federal agencies need to figure out how to better handle evacuee populations.

“Will any city in the country be willing to absorb a large evacuee population if everybody is looking at Houston and watching what’s happening with New Orleans?” Wilson said.

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, surveyed different Katrina evacuees three times over the past year. Over time, more people indicated they would likely stay in Houston — from 51 percent in September to 69 percent in July.

“What’s there to go back to? At least here you have some certainty,” said Wilson. “So while the future doesn’t look great, at least it’s better than taking a chance and going back.”

There was no margin of error reported in the survey since the results were not meant to predict for a general population, according to the authors.

Only 20 percent of those surveyed had jobs in Houston. Sixty percent said they had jobs in New Orleans before Katrina.

The evacuees who do not work cited difficulty with transportation and navigating Houston, Wilson said. Others in the survey said they felt discriminated by employers reluctant to hire evacuees for fear they might return home.

Evacuees were also accustomed to jobs in the service industry, of which there aren’t many in their new home. The City of Houston has been offering job training to evacuees to try and address this problem.

While a third of respondents had no health coverage before the hurricane, that proportion has swelled to almost half. Almost three-quarters reported an annual income of less than $15,000.

Ceeon Quiett, a spokeswoman for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, said the city just opened its first center in Houston to provide displaced evacuees with information on jobs, housing, schools and requirements for cleaning property. Demand has been high enough that the city plans to open two more.

Nagin “understands how some people may not be able to come back this year or next year, and there may be some that will say: ‘We’re settled, and we’re not coming back,”‘ she said. “This is a unique situation that no one has had to deal with before.”

She said families with children in school may be especially reluctant to move again considering all the upheaval of the last year.

“That’s a life changing event and it sticks with you. They want to get on with their lives,” Quiett said.

Only about 230,000 of the 455,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned to New Orleans so far, with many neighborhoods still left in flooded ruins. Nagin has said that substantial recovery will take three to five years

Associated Press writer Michelle Roberts in New Orleans contributed to this report.

(Associated Press)