I got a letter from someone who said Houston is turning into a crime pit.
Posted on 03/05/2006 8:12:55 AM PST by Ellesu
Crime is up. Schools are overcrowded. Hospitals are jammed. Houston welcomed a flood of hurricane evacuees with open arms. But now the city is suffering from a case of 'compassion fatigue.' In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Houston earned a loving moniker among many of the evacuees who sought refuge there: the Big Heart. This, after all, was the city that housed, fed and mended more than 150,000 survivors in a herculean effort that won national acclaim. Houston officials mounted what is believed to be the biggest shelter operation in the country's history, including MASH-like megaclinics that took on problems ranging from emergency care to eyeglass prescriptions. Then, just as quickly, officials disbanded those facilities to usher evacuees into more-permanent housing, offering them generous vouchers that covered rent and utilities for a year. "No other city really provided the resources and assistance Houston has," says Angelo Edwards, vice chair of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. "If not for Mayor [Bill] White and his administration, a lot of us would've been lost." But six months after the evacuees arrived, the city's heart seems to be hardening. The signs of a backlash are sometimes subtle. "You'll hear little snide remarks," says Edwards. "People will say, 'The reason you can't get a job is because you can't talk right'." Other times, the reaction is more venomous. Among the nasty examples Dorothy Stukes, an evacuee, cites: graffiti blaring F--- NEW ORLEANS in her apartment complex, schoolkids taunting her grandchildren to "swim in that Katrina water and die" and shopkeepers muttering about survivors' sucking the public coffers dry.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Enough of Chocolate City; what about the rest of the South? Is it only the Dem's stronghold that was hit by Katrina or is it only a socialist society that can't mend itself? The folks of Chocolate City already vote Blue.Who are they trying to impress? I can hardly wait until the Dims all go down for their spring meeting and the MSM starts harping on the failure of government to help these poor criminals. Even the rest of Louisiana will turn into a red state. Such arrogance.
Crime is up. Schools are overcrowded. Hospitals are jammed.
Sounds like my small "city" in California. Only difference is it is from illegal aliens here, not Katrina evacuees.
My husband just returned from 5 days in New Orleans with a high school missions group and he said many folks who are living there know their problems stem from unallied local gov't corruption. The officials want it to return just the way it used to be and THAT is never going to happen.
I'm waiting for the 2006 NOvember elections. I expect the Democrats to demand that NOLA adults be allowed to vote in both Texas and Louisana elections.
Imagine the nerve of a Houston city official telling the Katrina evacuees to get a job and get busy....are you kidding me? Those deadbeats are going to suck Houston and all the other cities that took them in, absolutely dry! That's the way New Orleans has always been, why do you think they called it "THE BIG EASY!" "Job? What job? We don't need no stinkin' jobs!" is the motto of the Nagin nuthouse gang living everywhere else but N.O. Damn shame too. Send them all packing, and be happy they are gone.
Imagine the nerve of a Houston city official telling the Katrina evacuees to get a job and get busy....are you kidding me? Those deadbeats are going to suck Houston and all the other cities that took them in, absolutely dry! That's the way New Orleans has always been, why do you think they called it "THE BIG EASY!" "Job? What job? We don't need no stinkin' jobs!" is the motto of the Nagin nuthouse gang living everywhere else but N.O. Damn shame too. Send them all packing, and be happy they are gone.
My hometown of Houston is as well equipped to handle these problems as any other city. Somebody has got to do it.
Change, evolution, problems-solving -- that's what life is all about. It is our National duty: bring it on!
Houston's heart is as big as Texas. They have done a ton for the Katrina refugees.
Huston folks aren't fools and now expect the Katrina people who stay to get a job and keep their hands in their own pockets, not their neighbors. A novel idea to N.O. people, but one that has merit for the whole country.
If it is a "National" duty, why does one city have to be that "somebody"?
There is an entire country out there, from sea to shining sea, where they can be spread out to and join the local economy. Swamping the economy of one single city only ensures a continuing welfare entitlement mentality.
You might be surprised to know that most of the state of Louisiana is already red. If it were not for the chocolate areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport, we would have had a Republican govenor in the last election.
Relative to the population of the central east coast of Florida there is a heavy influx of gulf coast evacuees who have remained. Most have integrated well into the area communities and become wage-earning, tax paying residents without any noticeable increase in per capita crime. Our small office building was painted last month by a painting firm that moved the owner, two employees and families, to this region and began to do business. A local bank did some smart lending to get the business restarted(as opposed to the national holding company banks who, in spite of their inflated rhetoric, wouldn't even talk to the owner about a loan to get his business going again).
Fact is when dope pushers , prostitutes, thieves, pick pockets,and just plain ne'er do wells. go from one place to another, they take their careers with them.
When a city absorbs these folks the Prostitutes, pimps drug Dealers and just plain ne'er do wells that city already has are in for competition and the crime rate has to go up.
Now some of these folks from NO are good decent , hard working people. They will make out wherever they go and they wont cause a problem. Some day when the insurance companies get around to it they will get their homes rebuilt and move back. Unfortunately the low income housing in New Orleans is for all practical purposes gone. No one is going to build a new house and charge the small rent those 100 year old shacks were bringing in. Unfortunately Houston forgot the old saying. "No good deed goes unpunished" The good people of New Orleans will move back and the dregs will probably stay in Houston.
Like your city we were already hard hit by the illegal problem, the evacuees just made it a worse.
I no longer travel in Houston without a loaded gun on the seat beside me. I work not too far from the Fondren area discussed in the article. It's frightening to park in the garage and walk down the enclosed stairs to find people urinating and deficating in the stairwells, doing drugs and having sex. It's no longer safe to be in the city after dark. Last night a woman was carjacked and kidnapped, beaten, raped and robbed in the Greenway Plaza area.
My home is on the market and as soon as it sells I'm headed out of the Houston area.
That is the way it needs to be done.
Putting 100,000 of them in one place where they expect the Government to take care of them in perpetuity is a recipe for disaster.
MSNBC must be running short on carriage returns.
I got a letter from someone who said Houston is turning into a crime pit.
This article is date 3/13/2006? Very prescient of them.
When city leaders in New Orleans made comments two weeks ago suggesting that they wanted only hardworking evacuees to return, some Houston city-council members erupted in protest—fearing that politicians in the Big Easy were trying to stick Houston with their undesirables. "We extended an open hand to all kinds of people," says Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. "If they want to return home, it's their right." And if they want to stay, she adds, they "need to stand up, get on their feet and get jobs."
There's a simple answer. Cut off the freebies.
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