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Katrina
Katrina Thursday
30Mar
The Houston Problem
Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 12:23AM The people of Houston are starting to complain about the burden of Hurricane Katrina victims.
When I read about this, my first reaction was dismay that one of the richest cities in the South could complain about the burden of evacuees. After all, Houston got so many because it had the most to give. And I do not think Houston would consider for a moment trading its problems with those of New Orleans.
However, I know New Orleans well and realize that parts of it were very violent. Even in a good year it usually stood in the top 15 American cities in murder rate. After Katrina the murder rate dropped to zero for many months, primarily because the areas with the highest crime levels were also the most devastated. I sometimes shuddered as I wondered where those people went. Some of them went to Houston, apparently.
I hope though, that Houstonians remember that good is often unrecognized as people naturally focus on the worst. When New Orleans was hit by Katrina, hundreds of businesses relocated to Houston. Some of these will never return. Houston, and Texas in general, was very aggressive about plucking away Louisiana's best and brightest, both before and after the storm. There were job fairs in Houston to recruit educated evacuees, especially teachers and medical personnel. I remember a billboard that went up within a month of the storm in New Orleans, promising jobs in Texas to New Orleans teachers. Ads for dislocated nurses to move to Texas appeared in the newspaper almost daily.
I can relate my own experience. When I was in Baton Rouge after the hurricane, trying to decide what I was going to do, the very first phone call I received in my job search was from a Texas recruiter. When I finally decided on my present location in Mississippi, I turned down 4 qualified offers from Texas cities. Texas may have qualms about accepting our poor, but it silently benefits from the influx of our well-educated. If I had accepted one of those jobs and moved to Texas, no newspaper headline would have said, "Texas Reaps Benefits of Physicians Dislocated by Hurricane Katrina." Yet I know of several quality doctors who did resettle in the Lone Star State.
Though I sympathize with Houston and its problems with evacuees, it is simply unfair to blame New Orleans for this turn of events. New Orleans is in no condition to accept its poorest citizens back, and these citizens may not want to come back, considering that Texas is far richer than New Orleans, and its public services markedly better. It may be a burden for a sick woman to ask a relative to take care of her children, but one cannot try to give the children back while the mother is still in intensive care.
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Reader Comments (15)
Anyway, the Houstonians are looking for justice. The problem is that Katrina was not fair to anyone. There is no reason to think Houston should get "fair treatment" out of Katrina. The situation has losers on all sides, and people need to slip out of the habit of thinking people should get what they deserve. As Clint Eastwood said in the movie "The Unforgiven," "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
Justice: When you get what you deserve
Mercy: When you don't get what you deserve.
Grace: When you get what you don't deserve.
Texas, as well as the states hard-hit by Katrina, need all 3.
New Orleans is still struggling with major, major problems from this storm and can't take the refugees back, so unfortunately Houston will be contending with refugee problems for some time to come. It is way too soon for anyone to be grumbling!
My criticism is not so much directed at Texans in general as it is towards the people who contributed to the substance of this story. If you have read much of my website, you know that I do not make sweeping judgments like that.
I have not forgotten Rita. Actually I drove through Orange in early October. The sights were familiar, but I do have to say that having seen both storm areas Rita does not compare. I cannot explain that to you; if you don't take my word for it, then there is nothing else I can say.
Another thing. The President of the United States is a Texan. I cannot keep myself from saying that if the Bushes had been from New Orleans the whole outcome of this situation (especially the FEMA rescue) would have been much different. The Rita rescue was different from the Katrina one, for more reasons than one.
Finally: Your golden house comment goes to the core of the issue. Most Houstonians are middle class. I know that, I have been there. But, and this applies to me also, sometimes we forget how ridiculously rich we really are. As bad as Katrina was, it was a picnic compared to what happened in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Remember the tsunami that killed 125,000? Sometimes we forget. As bad as Katrina is, I shudder to think about what they are still going through in Sumatra.
If Katrina has taught me anything, it is that I have a long way to fall before I will ever be in serious need.
Thank you for writing. I appreciate what you have said and will think about it more.
It was not my intention to say that New Orleans would not take the refugees back. Only that they can't. The city is still too mangled and stretched for resources to take a large population back at this time. I suspect that as time goes on and housing is rebuilt, most of the Houston refugees will go back, and New Orleans will be glad to take them.
I am truly sorry that I ever wrote this post. I know better than to take one group's suffering (New Orleans) and compare it to another's (Houston). Somehow that always works out with hurt feelings all around.
Still, I invite you to look at the Katrina Gallery pictures on my website. That is MY HOUSE you are looking at. I had friends who died in that hurricane. Though you may feel Houston has borne more than its share of the evacuee burden, you have to understand that many people suffered very greatly from this storm. It is no fun thing to lose everything you own in one day.
And I do take exception to being blamed for the crimes committed by evacuees in Houston. Do you really think I had something to do with it?
To be honest, after the storm when all the poor people left NO and the crime rate dropped to nil, I was tempted to say the city was better off with all the poor gone. Then I read an excellent book called "Why New Orleans Matters" by Tom Piazza.
Piazza argued that the poor neighborhoods of NO were what made the city great. He pointed out that so many of the city's greatest artists came out of these poor areas, and that it is wrong, very wrong, for city planners to plan away the people who have done the most to give the city its character in the first place.
I do hope they come back.
I never felt Houston was treated as a second class city in the media, but I do admit that Houston gets less press than you would expect, given its size. A lot more ink is expended on cities that are smaller, even much smaller, such as San Francisco, Washington DC, Miami, and Seattle. Houston is overlooked compared to other towns its size.