Many Houston Katrina evacuees unemployed: survey
Fri Sep 8, 2006 3:37pm ET144
HOUSTON (Reuters) - More than 80 percent of Hurricane Katrina evacuees surveyed in the Houston area are unemployed one year after the storm forced them to flee New Orleans, according to a study released by Rice University on Friday.
Sixty-six percent of the 362 evacuees surveyed had full- or part-time jobs before Hurricane Katrina battered the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, the study said.
The devastating hurricane caused massive damage along the coast, killed 1,500 people and drove hundreds of thousands from New Orleans.
Many of the unemployed told Rice professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein there were not enough jobs in Houston to support the thousands of temporary residents. Others said a lack of transportation made it difficult to find and keep a job in the sprawling city.
Of those surveyed, 68.5 percent said they were likely or very likely to stay in the Houston area because their neighborhoods were destroyed.
"This is a group that does not see their future in New Orleans," Professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein wrote in the study.
"Even though they indicate they are homesick and miss the neighborhoods from which they came, they do not see anything left in those neighborhoods."
This is the third survey of evacuees done by Wilson and Stein since September 2005. Most of the survey participants were black and did not own their own homes, the study said.
Estimates of the number of Katrina evacuees in Houston vary, but last month, the Texas Commission on Health and Human Services said 111,000 were living in the city. About 251,000 Katrina evacuees are scattered across the state, the commission said.
