69% of poor evacuees are here to stay (Houston)

Houston Comical ^ | 9/8/06 | ALLAN TURNER

[Verginius Rufus]

The Katrina refugees obviously need to learn Spanish so they can compete with the illegal aliens for those jobs.

[HostileTerritory]

Well, New Orleans does appear to have gridded streets, less traffic, and fewer highways than Houston does. It's a natural consequence of being laid out much earlier and stopping economic growth in the 1960s.

[HostileTerritory]

The New York Times had an interesting article about who went where. The refugees in Atlanta were largely middle-class people with family connections and cars who left before the storm, often under their own steam. The people who went to Houston were collectively much poorer, without connections or good transportation, and a large number were stuck in the city through the storm and the flood before leaving with just a few possessions. Both groups were predominantly black. Not surprisingly, the people who went to Atlanta had better resources and abilities to start new lives.

I don't know much about Baton Rouge.

[utahagen]

It is because there are good people among the Katrina refugees in Houston that Oprah at al should stop painting all of them as victims of American indifference. Calling a bum a bum -- be he black or white -- is the quickest way to distinguish them from non-bums. However, in the eyes of Oprah, if you're a black Katrina refugee living in Houston, NOTHING is your fault. Makes me sick.

[utahagen]

You ask, "Why haven't the Katrina evacuees taken the jobs formerly filled by the undocumented workers?" Because they are lazy and spoiled and their indolence is rewarded in the form of endless government handouts.

[stevio]

Yep, Who didn't see this coming? My condolences.

[wbill]

What bothers me the most about the displaced welfare parasites, is that when another disaster of this magnitude happens, communities will be reluctant to take any 'refugees' in - legitimate, or not.

I'm sure that many, if not most, of the people displaced by Katrina have moved on with their lives. But, as usual, a few bad apples spoil the entire basket.

[AD from SpringBay]

Poop floats and remains where it lands when the water recedes.

[weegee]

That's okay, the Dems needed new blood to guarantee elections in this town.

The black vote could be counted on giving 99.9% of vote in some pricincts to Democrats.

And they may approve things like zoning, rail, destruction of the Astrodome, that the locals would never have gone for.

[Tahoe3002]

"Houstonians, Muhammad said, must be "tolerant and generous" and work to instill a sense of independence and self-sufficiency in evacuees. "

Muhammad - STFU.
We were generous. And murder rates went up 15-20% since your criminal buddies arrived. I daily drive through the same areas as before, but now it looks like a ghetto. And it did not look lie that before Katrina evacuees. wasn't great there, but much worse now. Course, I have a .45 tucked under my leg if anyone tries a car-jacking.

[weegee]

Mayor Bob-White woke up at 8am and said "oh s***". There was NO plan in place before sunrise.

[weegee]

More homeless in other parts of town now because His Honor The Mayor is running them out of the rich cats' playground. There is no citywide ban on vagrancy.

[swain_forkbeard]

"And New Orleans was well-known for its cold temperatures and mathematically laid-out street grid."

Got me chuckling.

[ichabod1]

We spend too much on freeloaders here, but it's a far cry from what they were probably getting in NO. THAT is the biggest wake-up call. Texas, it's like a whole other country, compared to Ne-ew Orleens.

[daybreakcoming]

Houston is anything but unfriendly, in my experience.

I agree.......especially for it's size.

[daybreakcoming]

I don't know much about Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge and surrounding areas have been a mess. I won't even talk about traffic which was already a problem. But you can certainly pick out the RUDE New Orleans people from the locals.

[CobaltBlue]

My own guess is that Baton Rouge, and to a lesser extent, Atlanta, are far more similar, culturally, to New Orleans than Houston is.

Many of them grew up in neighborhoods with extended families all around them, where their families had lived for a long time, where everybody knew everybody, and you could always count on someone for help any hour of the day or night.

Most of the people in Houston, at least the Anglos, grew up in neighborhoods where the families were nuclear and people more or less kept to themselves, socializing with co-workers and people they know from leisure activities and church and formal organizations.

Thus, when you say, that the ones in Houston were "without connections or good transportation" -- where they came from they had all the connections and transportation they needed. But it's hard for them to become Texan overnight.

Different worlds.

[RS]

I understand what you are saying, but my comment was simply that there is no way they can return to that life, and no way that those same conditions they were living in can be rebuilt for them to return to NO.

Relief agencies in the past might have been able to rent older, run-down yet still adequate housing for the poorest, but those structures no longer exist and will not be rebuilt.

New Orleans would be foolish to use it's resources at this time to entice a non-productive portion of it's society to return.

The people of Houston are to be commended for their compassion, but if their decision-makers did not forsee this situation, they are very foolish indeed.

[ichabod1]

Because we took in a quarter of a million of them, thanks for being concerned. Nobody else did anything like that. We'd do it again too, because it was the right thing to do. We'll sort it out.

[HostileTerritory]

Thus, when you say, that the ones in Houston were "without connections or good transportation" -- where they came from they had all the connections and transportation they needed. But it's hard for them to become Texan overnight.

Yes. To be specific, many people who went to Atlanta had family already living in the area, because it's such a mecca for enterprising people from all over the South, particularly African-Americans. People who went to New Orleans were literally much less likely to have a brother or aunt living there to help out; their families didn't leave N.O. and if they did, it wasn't for Houston.