Katrina evacuees a part of Houston
Ten years later, Louisiana culture pervades city
New Orleans did not deserve Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, but who believes life is fair?
Certainly not Renita Jackson, a pre-kindergarten teacher whose house in New Orleans’ Eighth Ward filled with neck-deep water when the levees broke 10 years ago this week.
Trapped for five days, Jackson, her daughter and 3-year-old grandson thought their lives were over. “All I saw was death,” Jackson said. “When I looked at my neighborhood, I thought it was the end of the world.”
Jackson, now 55, prayed as she had never prayed before. And, when her prayers finally were answered, she found herself in Houston — vaunted city of new beginnings.
Before and after Ka-
trina’s Aug. 29 landfall as a strong Category 3 storm, more than 1 million people fled Louisiana and coastal Mississippi. As many as 250,000 landed in Houston — more than 27,000 of the most traumatized arriving at the Astrodome and other Houston shelters in a 500-bus caravan from the drowned Big Easy. By October 2005, approximately 100,000 evacuees temporarily had made Houston their home.
Today, perhaps heeding the oft-tendered advice of Katrinaera Mayor Bill White to “look forward, not backward,” as many as 40,000, by some estimates, permanently have settled in the Houston metro area.
“We no longer think of them as evacuees,” said Mayor Annise Parker. “They are Houstonians in every sense of the word, and we are happy to have them.”
In the excruciating days after Katrina’s onslaught, Houston responded with open arms. As many 60,000 residents volunteered to help. From a downtown command center, White, assisted by then-Harris County Judge Robert Eckels and business, civic and faith leaders, oversaw a multi-million dollar campaign to house, feed, train and provide health care for the newcomers.
“Houston,” said White, “showed how to combine competence and compassion, and that was done at a time when public officials at the federal and other levels fumbled the ball.”
For his leadership, White later received the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s Profile in Courage Award.
But throughout the city there were largely unremarked instances of kindness.
“We no longer think of them as evacuees. They are Houstonians in every sense of the word and we are happy to have them.”
‘Blank stare’
Within weeks of arriving in Houston, the Rev. Gary Mack, a pastor at New Orleans’ Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, was contacted by Houston First Baptist Church with an offer of assistance. Mack was offered use of a chapel to preach to his displaced congregation and a salary. Food and furniture were collected for church members in need.
“Coming from New Orleans, we had pretty much been living in our own communities,” Mack said. “Seldom have AfricanAmerican churches and Caucasian churches gotten together in this way. Katrina tore down those walls. It was a totally new perspective of worship and God’s goodness.”
Still, for thousands of the dis- placed, overcoming Katrina’s hardship was daunting.
The storm flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, killed more than 1,800 people in five states and caused more than $135 billion in damage. Federal and private insurance companies paid more than $57 billion in claims, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency pumped more than $131 billion into stricken states for public works and other recovery efforts.
By July 2006, New Orleans’ 2000 population had dropped by more than half. And while the city’s population has rebounded to 80 percent of its pre-storm total, vast tracts of low-lying inner city neighborhoods remain derelict and virtually unpeopled.
For many evacuees, especially those from New Orleans, life consisted of tight-knit communities of friends and neighbors, walkable neighborhoods and deep cultural traditions.
Houston, sprawling over 627 square miles, geographically is 44 percent larger than New Orleans.
To Jackson, who does not drive, such vastness and the uncertainties of public transportation were alarming.
Her friend, Kendra Dorsey, 33, found the city dismayingly cold.
“People don’t seem as friendly,” she said. “If you greet someone in the store, you just get a blank stare.”
Stephen Klineberg, founding director of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said Houston’s initial warm reception to evacuees revealed “unexpected evidence of civic engagement in a city where measures of community connectedness are generally quite low.” In an early 2006 survey, 85 percent of poll participants said they had contributed either time or goods to benefit the evacuees.
But, he said, warm, fuzzy feelings soon were supplanted by ambivalence.
In a 2007 poll, 65 percent opined that evacuees’ overall impact on the city was “a bad thing.” That negativity increased to 70 percent in 2008, but the same poll found that 71 percent of those polled believed the city should respond at the same or greater level of beneficence in future crises. In a 2009 poll — the last time the question was asked — participants holding negative views toward evacuees dropped to 57 percent.
Two-thirds of participants in the 2006 poll said evacuees contributed to a significant increase in crime.
Early that year, then-Police Chief Harold Hurtt reported homicides had increased 23 percent in 2005, with 23 homicides in the year’s closing months involving Katrina evacuees as suspects or victims. White recently attributed the increase in violence to New Orleans gangs who arrived with law abiding newcomers. The city responded by intensifying policing in “hot spots,” a move that required mandatory police overtime.
‘Mixed blessing’
A study by a panel of criminologists published in 2010 in the Journal of Criminal Justice, though, warned against attributing the crimes to former New Orleanians, noting that Houston experienced no significant increase in rapes, aggravated assaults, burglaries or auto thefts.
Media portrayals of New Orleans chaos in the storm’s wake likely also colored Houston opinion.
“I was watching CNN,” said Louis Cannon, 38, who had taught math at a New Orleans charter school, “and saw the looting and break-ins, the overall crime, that was being depicted to the nation. I know there’s some of that, but that wasn’t my city. It doesn’t reflect everyone, and it left me enraged. ... I watched that day in and day out. I was going up and down on an emotional roller coaster.”
Another former New Orlea- nian, Peter Washington, 45, recalled that, while Houstonians were “hospitable, willing to help with what they had,” finding work was difficult.
“Part of the problem was my 504 telephone area code,” he said, noting that prospective employers lost interest in hiring him when they learned of his New Orleans roots. “I’m not certain of their hearts or intentions, but once I was separated from New Orleans on paper, once I had a 281 area code, I didn’t have a problem.”
Omawale Luthuli Allen, a Louisiana-born Houston human rights activist who worked with evacuees, called Katrina a “mixed blessing” for evacuees.
“It certainly wasn’t Nirvana, heaven on earth,” he said, “but it did give them opportunities they never would have gotten in New Orleans.”
In a survey of major American cities, Forbes magazine this year called Houston the nation’s 12thbest spot, economically, for African-Americans.
Median household income for Harris County is $53,000, compared to only $37,000 in Orleans Parish. Late July unemployment in Harris County was 4.5 percent; in Orleans Parish, 7.4 percent. About half of black men in New Orleans are unemployed. Poverty rates tell a similar story — 19 percent live below poverty level in Harris County, 27 percent in Orleans Parish.
Once relocated in Texas, Jackson, after a stint as a fast-food worker, again gained employment at a pre-kindergarten school; Dorsey became an accountant; Cannon, an assistant principal at a Pasadena school; and Washington, a Harris County forensic investigator.
Not all erstwhile New Orleanians arrived with the first wave of evacuees.
John Dillman and his wife, Dee, owners of French Quarter book store, moved to Houston in stages, opening a Houston Heights branch shortly after the storm and formally relocating in December 2007.
The move meant giving up the charm of their home of three decades but was motivated by Louisiana’s post-hurricane economic slump. “That was the initial motivating factor, but not the main one,” said Dillman. “The main one was that I didn’t want to be the old guy sitting on the stoop saying, ‘Boy, you should have seen this place before the (jerks) showed up.’ ... You need to understand the move entailed literally moving 80 tons of books and 21/2 miles of shelving in 60 round trips. It was not something we did lightly.”
‘Cultural dynamics’
Mtangulizi Sanyika, a professor at New Orleans’ Dillard University, evacuated to Houston and stayed, largely, he said, because he was offered rent-free occupancy of a condo. His wife quickly found employment in the spiritual care department of a Texas Medical Center hospital, but for five years Sanyika made the long commute to New Orleans to teach at his old school. Before retirement, he became an adjunct professor at Texas Southern University.
Living in Houston, he said, has proved advantageous for former New Orleanians, even those in lower income brackets, in terms of health care and ample, affordable housing. Employment opportunities are more varied, and, said Sanyika, “the impression I get from people is that there is a better chance to make a better income than in New Orleans.”
Houston-area schools, he said, generally are better than those in New Orleans, where efforts to fix a “broken” school system, he said, have been less than successful. Within two years of Katrina, more than 5,000 former New Orleans students poured into Houston Independent School District classrooms, where, in many cases, they performed below grade level.
“In terms of the cultural dynamics,” Sanyika said, “access to food and music are virtually instantaneous in New Orleans. In Houston, you have to go and find it. New Orleanians are beginning to compensate themselves by creating a cultural infrastructure here, things that certainly were not present before the storm. But, if you want to find that deep culture, you have to go to New Orleans to get it.”
Transportation in Houston, he said, is a “bummer.”
On his frequent visits to New Orleans, Sanyika said, he still breathes a sigh of relief as he crosses the Sabine River bridge into Louisiana.
Former New Orleanians have a vital lesson to teach their new city, he said.
“We have something to teach about the spirit of life and living and how to be human,” he said. “The thing about New Orleanians, no matter what our circumstances, is that we never lose our soul to the vagaries of life.”
Mayor Annise Parker “We have something to teach about the spirit of life and living and how to be human. The thing about New Orleanians, no matter what our circumstances, is that we never lose our soul to the vagaries of life.” Mtangulizi Sanyika, a retired professor who taught at New Orleans’ Dillard University