Posted on 12/15/2006 12:54:29 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW ORLEANS - It wasn't the flooding that drove Dr. David Jones out of New Orleans for good. His house in the Lakeview neighborhood stayed dry. Instead, it was the way Hurricane Katrina eroded the orthopedic surgeon's practice.
With fewer patients to treat and no patience for the sluggish pace of the city's recovery, he moved his family and practice to Raleigh, N.C., in July.
"I love New Orleans and always will," said Jones, 39, who now works at a hospital affiliated with Duke University. "I could have made a go of it there, but it would have been slow and arduous."
New Orleans is losing an alarming number of young professionals in Katrina's aftermath. Many doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers and other highly educated people are gone. Some left during the storm and never came back. Others came back, but soon gave up and moved out altogether.
Whether a full-blown brain drain is under way is unclear. But some suspect so, and fear the exodus will only get worse.
"They don't see the career opportunities here that they see elsewhere," said University of New Orleans political science professor Susan Howell.
For many professionals trying to make a living here, the number of patients and clients has dropped off drastically. Less than half New Orleans' pre-Katrina population of 455,000 has returned.
A recent survey by the University of New Orleans suggests the loss of the region's best educated, most talented and highly trained workers could worsen. One-third of residents surveyed in October said they are likely to leave within two years, and those with postgraduate degrees were even more likely to consider leaving.
Health care has been especially hard-hit. Thousands of doctors, nurses and medical technicians were evacuated after Katrina in August 2005. Sixteen months later, only five of 11 hospitals are open, just one at full capacity.
According to another UNO survey, the city has regained less than 60 percent of its non-hospital physicians and its private education jobs. A similar percentage of professional, scientific and technical workers, including lawyers, engineers and architects, had yet to return more than a year after the storm, the survey found.
One who came back but plans to leave again is Jennifer Lange. Lange, 33, was president of the Young Leadership Council, an organization of young professionals, when Katrina hit. A marketing manager for Isidore Newman School — whose graduates include the NFL's Manning brothers — she evacuated to Houston, then came back a few months later.
But her job was one of about 90 eliminated by the private school, and she found herself working at a lower salary for an insurance and benefits company.
Now, she plans to move back to Houston, where she and her fiance, financial planner Thomas Brandino.
"I never wanted to leave," she said, "but he looked around and couldn't find a job here." Still, Lange is optimistic: "We'll be back one day. He's promised me."
William Frey, a University of Michigan demographer who has studied post-Katrina population trends, said young people with professional opportunities are the most likely to leave.
"The long-run trend has been a substantial brain drain from the metropolitan area," said Frey, who added that he expects more young professionals to leave.
Louisiana State University economics professor James Richardson said he has yet to see "irrefutable evidence of a brain drain."
But Katrina has made recruiting a challenge for Entergy Corp., the utility company whose New Orleans division declared bankruptcy after Katrina destroyed much of its electric and natural gas systems. Robert Spencer, an Entergy human resources director, said the company has 400 openings, mostly for accountants and engineers.
"We're not getting enough people knocking on our door as we were pre-Katrina," Spencer said. "The moment they find out we are headquartered in New Orleans, they think back to some of the scenes of what they saw on TV and they don't give us any kind of consideration."
Tulane University has a similar problem. About 40 of 400 tenure-track faculty members left after Katrina. Provost Paul Barron said he probably will not know until spring how many faculty members will return for the 2007-08 academic year.
"There is probably a large number of people who are thinking about leaving," he said. "It's still not the easiest city in the world to live in."
Jones, the doctor who moved to Raleigh, said a lack of recovery planning by government officials may be causing white-collar workers to move on.
"It seems they were more interested in getting tourists back than helping residents return," he said. "They had a real chance to change things, but they blew it."
I think ‘brain drain’ in New Orleans is when the Tulane basketball team goes to an away game.
Tulane University has been actively trying to recruit me to their school over the past year... I keep telling them 'no.' They don't seem to get it.
LOL
"If I only had a brain"
It actually went downhill before that, but it was good at one time. I believe you are correct about the NEA.
Note: National Guard requested to remain in NO until June 2007.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Leaving New Orleans
As many as a third of the people now living in the New Orleans area say they may leave within the next two years due to poor quality of life in the storm-stricken city.
That's the finding of a telephone poll of 400 residents of Orleans and Jefferson parishes conducted last month by the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans. Susan Howell, the center's director, released the poll's findings yesterday.
The survey found that 17 percent of the residents in both parishes said they are "very likely" to leave, while 15 percent in both parishes said they are "somewhat likely" to leave. At the same time, 67 percent of Orleans residents and 65 percent of Jefferson residents said they were "not very likely" to leave, while the rest said they didn't know.
The poll may actually underestimate the number of area residents who are contemplating moving because it only included people with land-based phone lines. Consequently, it most likely excluded those people still living in trailers.
Residents who are considering leaving cited four things that need to happen in order to make them stay: controlling crime; streamlining the government bureaucracy and making government more proactive; fixing levees and taking other flood-prevention steps; and repairing damaged infrastructure, particularly streets.
Crime and public safety were the most commonly mentioned motivation for leaving, the study found. Thirty-one percent of Orleans Parish residents and 45 percent of Jefferson Parish residents said they do not feel safe in their communities. Earlier this week, even before the poll's findings were released, New Orleans Police Superintendent Warren Riley said he would ask Gov. Kathleen Blanco to extend the National Guard's stay in the city through next June, the Associated Press reports.
Other major problems continue to be availability of housing, which 71 percent of Orleans Parish residents and 35 percent of Jefferson Parish residents ranked as "poor" or "very poor." Besides housing, three other conditions are perceived much more negatively in Orleans than Jefferson Parish: the conditions of streets, control of abandoned houses, and control of trash.
The poll found some improvement in the outlook of New Orleans area residents. The percentage of people in the two parishes who say they are somewhat or very worried about what will happen to them in the next five years declined slightly since the last poll conducted in April, from about two-thirds to about one-half. But that's still high compared to Americans overall, who as the pollsters note tend to be fairly optimistic about the future.
The survey also found improvements in everyday life since April, with respondents now better able to shop for groceries, get around town and make home repairs.
But there was one notable exception to the general upward trajectory: Slightly more Orleans Parish residents -- 50 percent now compared to 45 percent in April -- say they have difficulty getting medical care. Jefferson Parish residents also reported little improvement in this area, underscoring the region's severe shortage of medical personnel.
I thought Narlin's problem was not ENOUGH drains...
"New Orleans threatened by `brain drain'"
There actually was brains there at one time?
A fine example of why the drain will continue.... LOL!
Good luck with West Point! ;)
you are so right ... I loved NOLA as a frequent visitor and consider myself a Near-NewOrleanian. What most people miss is the incredible contrasts of NOLA. It was a city of extremes in so many ways, and truly stratified. The contrast between Bourbon Street and Uptown St. Charles, the 'anything goes' v. the intense family ties of many of the old families, the relaxed attitude v. ultimate formality not seen in NY or SF. Just a world of contrasts.
From what I witnessed at the Astrodome (I volunteered after the storm) and what I have seen on television from the people and leaders of NO after the storm, if this brain-drain continues they should have a skull full in 1-2 more years.
Why are they making a big deal about the fact that about the same percentage of professionals did not return as did the rest of the population.
The article's own numbers confirm that there isn't a greater percentage of professionals that did not return as compared to other people.
Why do they act surprised that only 5 of 11 hospitals are now open when less than half the people returned.
They are trying really hard to make a point that their own facts don't support.
The AP should fire this idiot.
There's an assumption in this...
All of South Louisiana has been experiencing a brain drain for a generation. I was an honors graduate from the magnet high school in Baton Rouge in the late 1970s, I went out of state to obtain a far better engineering education than was available anywhere in Louisiana, and I have never lived there since. Same story for my sister (except for the engineering part) and my brother (also a well-educated professional) gave up on Louisiana himself several years ago. Some years ago I attended the twentieth reunion of my magnet school class and only a handful of the ~80 or so folks present still lived in Louisiana.
Bobby Jindal campaigned for Governor on this very fact before Katrina and Rita hit. He said "If we don't change the way we do things here we are going to continue to have to call long distance to talk to our children and get on an airplane to see our grandchildren." Bobby was and is right, of course, but Louisianians chose Meemaw because, well, they're Louisianians.
And meanwhile our elected congressmorons and the Bush administration are pouring billions of taxpayers' dollars into the drain.
This is a joke right?!! Any town that would reelect Ray Nagin after his complete failure in Katrina obviously has NO brains to drain!
My son graduated from Tulane last year. Great school.
Senior year really sucked. First three were incredible.
The city is a wasteland. Don't go. Cohen is a great school president in a horible city.
In a decade I expect that we'll be seeing some fellow who figured out how to be the man who rebuilt New Orleans and consequently became a billionaire. Opportunities like this dont come along often, and are not for the faint of heart. But for the bold, the risk takers, well, this is a once in a lifetime chance.
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