USA Today, October 8, 207: Katrina evacuees feel money pinch
Almost 40% of the people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina were below the poverty line last year, according to a government survey.
That survey, by the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that thousands of people who fled the hurricane two years ago landed in dismal economic straits, often facing meager paychecks or unemployment after the storm scattered them across the USA. It found nearly a third of those who fled the hurricane could not find jobs last year, and thousands more weren’t trying.
“People got here, but what hasn’t happened is that next step to economic stability,” says Don Baylor, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin. “Many of them are not economically stable.”
The survey does not track people from year to year, making it impossible to determine if the people Katrina displaced were better off before the storm. Many left some of the poorest sections of New Orleans; about a quarter of the adults had not finished high school. But Katrina upended social networks “and left them to start over from scratch, which makes it much more difficult,” Brookings Institution demographer William Frey says.
The nationwide Census survey, conducted throughout 2006 and released last month, offers the most thorough accounting yet of what happened to the more than 250,000 people displaced from the New Orleans area in the biggest mass migration since the Dust Bowl. The survey, which included only people who had not already returned to New Orleans, shows:
•Little work: The unemployment rate among those who left New Orleans was about 30%. Those who had jobs worked most often as cashiers, salesmen and janitors.
•Low incomes: A typical displaced family had an income of about $35,000 last year, far below the median income of $58,500 for families nationwide. Even among people who had jobs, the poverty rate was nearly 20%, and for children it was about 50%.
•Limited housing: Many evacuees still were living with friends or family. One-third of evacuees were living with people who did not evacuate.
Gilda Burbank fled with three grandchildren to Houston, where she has struggled to find work and sleeps on an air mattress in a government-subsidized apartment. “I was poor before Katrina, but I had food on the table, we went to Mass, we had clothes,” she says. “Now we’re poor poor. We’re worse off.”
One explanation, Baylor says, is that Texas employers were reluctant to hire people displaced by Katrina for fear they would soon go back to New Orleans.