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12. The Katrina Diaspora: Dislocation and the Reproduction of Segregation and Employment Inequality
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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The natural disaster spawned by the 2005 hurricanes illuminated the poverty, unemployment, and low earnings of many black residents of the Gulf Coast. The people who fled their homes to other locales faced the life-altering question of whether to return to their former cities or make a new life in the places to which they evacuated. Was it better for black residents, particularly those who were not faring well in New Orleans before the hurricanes, to move on, or would similar dynamics of poverty and race reemerge and disadvantage Katrina evacuees in their new settings?1 To answer this question, I focus on economic and employment opportunities for evacuees. My analysis relies on the body of research connecting space and work as well as research on poverty and place (specifically the notion that economic and employment opportunities are linked to place).2 My interest in the postdislocation employment and residential outcomes of displaced black Gulf Coast evacuees yields two central questions: (1) How did the dislocation and resettlement of Katrina and Rita evacuees improve, maintain, or worsen their employment and earnings outcomes? and (2) What mechanisms contributed to these outcomes? Evidence for the arguments I make here come from employment data collected by the Current Population Survey (jointly produced by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics), summary segregation and employment data on New Orleans, a large-scale survey of the shelter population in Houston (the metropolitan area receiving the largest displaced population) conducted by Rice University, interviews with volunteer organizations that assisted evacuees in other cities, and newspaper accounts. I find that race and class shape the opportunities of evacuees in new settings and contribute to the difficultly non-returnees have in obtaining employment and housing. 169 12 VVVVVVVVVVV The Katrina Diaspora Dislocation and the Reproduction of Segregation and Employment Inequality NIKI T. DICKERSON NIKI T. DICKERSON 170 What Happened? Relocation and Employment Outcomes Approximately 2.2 million residents were displaced as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.3 Of evacuees relocated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 61.6 percent went to Texas and 27.0 percent went to Louisiana.4 The metropolitan area of Houston, Texas, received the largest share of evacuees, estimated at between 100,000 and 160,000. A Rice University research team surveyed 1,081 of these displaced people and found that 69 percent intended to stay in Houston. In Houston, and other metropolitan areas, evacuees are less likely to be employed and, if employed, earn less on average than those who have returned.5 Figure 12.1 shows the dislocation status and employment outcomes for the Katrina evacuees. A year after the hurricane, the unemployment rate of displaced residents who had returned to their homes was 5.9 percent, whereas for those who had not yet returned, the unemployment rate was 25.6 percent.6 Figure 12.2 reveals that black evacuees were five times more likely to be unemployed than white evacuees. Because the federal government does not consider a person who is unemployed for over a year to be “actively looking for work,” and therefore does not count these workers as part of the labor force, 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 returned Percent Unemployed not returned FIGURE 12.1. Percentage of Evacuees Unemployed, September 2006, by Dislocation Status. Source: “The Labor Market Impact of Hurricane Katrina: An Overview,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review Online 129, no. 8 (August 2006): http://www.bls.gov/opub/ mlr/2006/08/art1full/pdf. [34.204.52.16] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:59 GMT) THE KATRINA DIASPORA 171 these figures may undercount the unemployed. Furthermore, because only residential homes are surveyed, these data do not capture the experiences of evacuees living in hotels or shelters. These two factors very likely led to a significant undercount of black evacuees, who were more likely than white evacuees to reside in shelters and experience long-term unemployment. Figure 12.3 shows the unemployment rate for each group of evacuees (those who had returned home versus those who had not) on a monthly basis. The rate of unemployment seems to drop fairly rapidly for non-returnees in this sample. Non-returnees were presumably being slowly absorbed into the host metropolitan labor markets, but they might also have been dropping out of the formal labor market altogether, as figure 12.4 suggests. Figure 12.4 shows the percentage of evacuees employed, by dislocation status. While...