‘New Orleans West’: Why Houston’s Hurricane Katrina evacuees never went home

In what has been described as the biggest climate-driven migration since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, more than a million people fled from Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans 10 years ago. Many never moved back home. They escaped to Baton Rouge, Birmingham, San Antonio, Dallas and Atlanta. The biggest number headed to Houston, a 560km drive along the Gulf coast and itself no stranger to hurricanes. Read more: Obama lauds 'inspirational’ New Orleans, a decade after Katrina As New Orleans marks the anniversary of Katrina this week, many who called the city home in August 2005 will be absent. Tens of thousands swapped one of the nation’s most distinctive and historic cities for the car-centric urban sprawl and homogenous modern suburbs of a metro area of six million people that is today about five times larger than greater New Orleans. Estimates vary, but of the 250,000-odd evacuees who arrived in Houston after the storm, up to 100,000 likely stayed permanently. “We call Houston ‘New Orleans West’,” said Mtangulizi Sanyika, an academic who left New Orleans after his house flooded and ended up staying in Texas when his wife found a job at a hospital. Sanyika is chairman of the New Orleans Association of Houston, which is planning a series of commemorative events . Watch: Ten years after Katrina, the beat is back on in New Orleans The New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, visited Atlanta and Houston last week to meet with the displaced, thank the cities for their hospitality and tout the Big Easy’s recovery. “Y’all can come home whenever y’all want,” he told former residents at a church service, according to NPR . There is plenty of room. Between 2000 and 2006, New Orleans’ population fell by more than half. The city’s current population is about 384,000, 79 per cent of the number who lived there in the years before Katrina. The size of the black community has declined by about 30 per cent, some 97,000 people. While the city has rebounded impressively in some respects, there is little economic incentive for many former residents to return. According to the Texas Organizing Project, a non-profit community group, the unemployment rate for black Texans is 9.5 per cent, while a 2011 Loyola University study found that 52 per cent of working-age black men in New Orleans did not have jobs. And rising housing prices are making city centre living unaffordable for many people on low incomes. Carl Lindahl, a University of Houston professor, said that two sections of the displaced population in particular tended not to return: parents of young children, who felt Houston was safer and had better schools, and the elderly, who believed New Orleans lacked social services. IN PICTURES: Hurricane Katrina 10 years on In the days after the storm, buses took evacuees from the Superdome to the Astrodome, Houston’s famed indoor sports arena, which acted as a shelter. Many residents donated time, money or goods to help them. “The initial arrival brought out the best in the city,” Lindahl said. “It extended for about two months afterwards. Within a year there was a response linking the New Orleanians to crime and claiming there was a spike in murders.” Lindahl said that some found themselves overlooked for jobs because they had a New Orleans 504 cellphone area code. Twelve months after the disaster, at a meeting in a church in an affluent part of Houston, hundreds of white residents demanded the mayor send the “Katrina illegal immigrants” back to Louisiana, Texas Monthly reported . Fuelled by police statements and reports of looting and violent crime in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane, it took years for the fearmongering to be discredited by accurate data. In 2005, Lindahl co-founded a project in which survivors documented each others’ stories. Spread out across Houston’s vastness, the exiles remained linked by their common culture, said one of the evacuees, Dallas McNamara, a photographer. “Things like music allowed people to get together,” she said. Bands formed. Branches of New Orleans-based churches set up in Houston. Restaurants opened. “I think people are kind of surprised by how much they like Houston. They have a nicer home, they like the schools. They’re blown away by the amount of driving that they do but they tend to become pleasantly surprised,” McNamara said. Still, she added, “I do miss the politeness that was just ingrained … and there are more rules here. You can’t walk out of the bar with your cocktail or beer.” For Sanyika, “The most negative aspect of Houston for most New Orleanians is the transportation. The other is the food. It’s a very different kind of taste,” he said. “A Texas gumbo doesn’t taste quite the same.” The 73-year-old still visits New Orleans regularly. “When I leave there is always a sadness,” he said. “New Orleans is in your soul, your heart, your roots, it anchors who you are and you take it with you wherever you go.”