Posted on 09/08/2006 9:10:11 AM PDT by Diddle E. Squat
Life in Houston hasn't been easy, with many lacking health insurance, jobs, survey finds
Houston may be hot, unfriendly and frustratingly difficult to navigate, but more than two-thirds of the poorest New Orleans evacuees who fled to the city after Hurricane Katrina plan to stay, a Rice University survey released today shows.
Almost 69 percent of the 1,081 people queried in the National Science Foundation-funded study conducted in July by political science professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein said they likely will remain in Houston. That figure is up from about 57 percent in October and 51 percent in September 2005.
Wilson and Stein say their findings reflect the view of 35,000 to 40,000 evacuees, about one-fourth of the displaced New Orleanians thought to be living in the city.
The study found life for poor evacuees in Houston has been difficult.
Almost half have no health insurance. Nearly a third lack a high school diploma. Three-fifths reported they held jobs in New Orleans, but almost half earned less than $15,000 a year. At present, less than 20 percent are employed and about 74 percent earn less than $15,000.
"This means a couple of things," Wilson said. "One: They have little to go back to. Most of the group were renters, and the rental situation in New Orleans is pretty bleak. Second: Many of them had been working in the service industry, and that is still a little rocky there. ... Houston is looking at continuing to shelter a population that didn't want to be here in the first place. The chances of finding something to go back to are pretty slim. That raises questions of how they are going to be integrated into the city."
One of the few bright spots noted by the evacuees was the state of education. Fifty-seven percent of respondents found Houston schools superior to what they left behind. Only 13 percent considered Houston schools worse.
Tensions about crime
The survey results are released today as tension about evacuee-related crime has led to calls for evacuees to be sent packing. In late August, more than 1,700 westside residents attended a session with Mayor Bill White and Police Chief Harold Hurtt, who announced formation of a 140-officer unit to combat crime in evacuee-filled neighborhoods there.
Police report that 59 of the 262 Houston murders between Jan. 1 and Aug. 26 involved Katrina evacuees as victims or suspects.
White spokesman Frank Michel warned Thursday that it is "unfair to judge the many by the conduct of the few" but reiterated the mayor's assertion that housing for criminals would be provided in jail.
"We've got to point out that we got between 200,000 and 300,000 evacuees," Michel said, "and apparently 130,000 to 150,000 remain. We got a cross-section — everybody from the boardroom to the guy who cleans the boardroom. People with work histories found jobs, transferred jobs and moved businesses. Yes, there are some people who may not match the market here and a number who are retired. ... Our challenge is to lift those in the lower circumstances."
Employment help
To that end, two job fairs — the latest in August — have been conducted by The WorkSource. Sue Cruver, spokeswoman for the agency, said 69 jobs were filled in August, with 725 likely to be filled by the end of October. Cruver noted her agency has offered training in job skills and some trades.
White, Michel said, has emphasized that housing benefits are finite and able-bodied evacuees should seek work.
WorkSource labor market analyst Joel Wagher said Houston's unemployment rate stands at 5.5 percent. He added that a variety of jobs can be obtained with only a high school diploma. In 2002, for instance, there were 76,000 sales clerk jobs, and that number is expected to increase by 12,000 in just six years.
The problem, he said, is that such positions bring small paychecks. "What's declining," he said, "are high-paying manufacturing jobs."
"The problem is more structural," said Nation of Islam Minister Robert Muhammad. "Houston is not primarily a tourist city and New Orleans was." Much of the city's economy, he said, emphasizes health care, space and other high-tech callings.
"Plus," he said, "when you factor in transportation and the cost of living, it makes it extremely difficult to survive on that economic level."
Sense of hopelessness
Wagher noted that some applicants have difficulty reaching job interviews. Evacuees participating in the survey peppered their responses with such observations as, "I've never lived in any place this large," "Things too far off," and "Always getting lost on the highway."
They complained, too, that they felt alienated in the big city, with 76 percent reporting loneliness and 61 confessing a sense of hopelessness about the future. Almost 30 percent said their health has declined since Katrina.
Houstonians, Muhammad said, must be "tolerant and generous" and work to instill a sense of independence and self-sufficiency in evacuees.
"Texas is going to have to urge the rest of the country to recognize the systemic problem with poverty and racism in the country," he said. "We in Texas will have to show the rest of the country how it's done. How to help a person. Instead of giving them a fish, teaching them to fish."
Reasons to return Meanwhile, he said, New Orleans needs to immediately reopen minimally damaged public housing units. The Housing Authority of New Orleans could not be reached for comment Thursday, but its Web site contended 1,000 families have been allowed to return to public housing.
"Based on an extremely slow rebuilding process in New Orleans and the shortage of affordable housing, it's clear that people don't have the alternative to return," said Ginny Goldman, spokeswoman for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. "People do want to go home ... but they're starting to lose hope."
Jacqueline Jones, an organizer for the Jeremiah Project, a New Orleans advocacy organization, said rents in the city have tripled.
"Before Katrina," she said, "a house might rent for $700 or $800. Now you couldn't get into it for less than $1,500. It's not just lower income people who are affected. Their problem is there just isn't any housing stock."
The Katrina refugees obviously need to learn Spanish so they can compete with the illegal aliens for those jobs.
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.
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.
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.
Poop floats and remains where it lands when the water recedes.
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.
Mayor Bob-White woke up at 8am and said "oh s***". There was NO plan in place before sunrise.
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.
"And New Orleans was well-known for its cold temperatures and mathematically laid-out street grid."
Got me chuckling.
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.
I agree.......especially for it's size.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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