Houston Growing Impatient With Katrina Refugees

Katrina's Latest Damage
Crime is up. Schools are overcrowded. Hospitals are jammed. Houston welcomed a flood of hurricane evacuees with open arms. But now the city is suffering from a case of 'compassion fatigue.'
By Arian Campo-Flores; With Richard Wolffe, Mark Hosenball and Sarah Childress
13 March 2006
Newsweek

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Houston earned a loving moniker among many of the evacuees who sought refuge there: the Big Heart. This, after all, was the city that housed, fed and mended more than 150,000 survivors in a herculean effort that won national acclaim. Houston officials mounted what is believed to be the biggest shelter operation in the country's history, including MASH-like megaclinics that took on problems ranging from emergency care to eyeglass prescriptions. Then, just as quickly, officials disbanded those facilities to usher evacuees into more-permanent housing, offering them generous vouchers that covered rent and utilities for a year. "No other city really provided the resources and assistance Houston has," says Angelo Edwards, vice chair of the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association. "If not for Mayor [Bill] White and his administration, a lot of us would've been lost."

But six months after the evacuees arrived, the city's heart seems to be hardening. The signs of a backlash are sometimes subtle. "You'll hear little snide remarks," says Edwards. "People will say, 'The reason you can't get a job is because you can't talk right'." Other times, the reaction is more venomous. Among the nasty examples Dorothy Stukes, an evacuee, cites: graffiti blaring f--- new orleans in her apartment complex, schoolkids taunting her grandchildren to "swim in that Katrina water and die" and shopkeepers muttering about survivors' sucking the public coffers dry. Stukes, chair of the ACORN KSA, has become so concerned that when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin came to town recently, she begged him to hire a public-relations firm to repair the evacuees' image. But given all that Nagin has to contend with amid his own run for re-election, that is not likely to land high on his list.

Katrina continues to be a destructive force. The Bush administration found itself engulfed once again last week, after the release of some footage of the president at an August video briefing on the hurricane. The tape revived discussion of some of Bush's darkest days, when he seemed either uninformed or unable to respond to a national disaster unfolding on TV. But the tape wasn't the only thing fueling Katrina's return to the news. Stoked by congressional investigators, new details have emerged about the government failures that left so many people in mortal danger. Late last week retired Marine Corps Brigadier Gen. Matthew Broderick resigned his post as Homeland Security's operations chief amid accumulating evidence that the command post he directed as Katrina hit misjudged the early damage to New Orleans. (Homeland Security said Broderick left to "spend more time with his family.")

Yet as devastating as Katrina has been for the administration, its impact has been far more visceral in those communities that received tens of thousands of evacuees --overnight. In cities stretching from Atlanta to San Antonio, good will has often given way to the crude reality of absorbing a traumatized and sometimes destitute population. In Baton Rouge, which added 100,000 people to a pre-Katrina population of 225,000, residents bemoan the loss of the city's small-town feel and worry that trailer-park settlements will become permanent fixtures of blight. In Dallas, the city housing authority began offering rent vouchers to some of its 20,000 evacuees, only to become quickly overwhelmed and fail to pay landlords, prompting a number of eviction notices.

But perhaps no city has been as convulsed as Houston, which took in the greatest number of survivors. As some see it, the city is suffering from "compassion fatigue." Public services are overwhelmed, city finances are strained and violent crime is on the rise. When city leaders in New Orleans made comments two weeks ago suggesting that they wanted only hardworking evacuees to return, some Houston city-council members erupted in protest--fearing that politicians in the Big Easy were trying to stick Houston with their undesirables. "We extended an open hand to all kinds of people," says Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. "If they want to return home, it's their right." And if they want to stay, she adds, they "need to stand up, get on their feet and get jobs."

It doesn't help that a small segment of criminals threatens to give all New Orleanians a bad name. Though Houston's murder rate was already climbing before Katrina, the newcomers have added to it. Of 189 murders in the six months after the hurricane, 33 involved Katrina evacuees as either suspects or victims, according to Police Chief Harold Hurtt. Initially, the killings resulted from clashes among rival New Orleans gangs, says Hurtt. More recently, they've stemmed from robberies or narcotics, he says. Many cops are struck by the brazenness of the evacuees. "It seems like the face of crime has changed in Houston," said Officer Brandon Brown one night last week as he patrolled the sketchy Fondren area of the city, where many of the arrivals have settled. "It's more tense, more violent." Soon after saying that, he was called to respond to an alleged assault. A New Orleans woman was accused of attacking her boyfriend, whose head she had previously slashed with a shard of glass.

There are other signs of strain. The Houston Independent School District has been flooded with 5,800 additional kids, out of 20,000 overall in area schools. That influx has forced it to spend an additional $180,000 per day of its own $1.3 billion annual budget--only a fraction of which may be reimbursed by the federal government--to educate the new students. With their arrival have come new social tensions: one near-riot between Houston and New Orleans kids at a high school in December resulted in the arrests of 27 students. Part of the problem, according to Edwards of ACORN's Katrina survivors' group: a hip-hop culture clash between kids who feel a need to "represent" their musical style. "Now you've got two sticks of dynamite rubbing against each other," he says.

The newcomers are also taxing the area's health-care system. Already burdened by a high proportion of uninsured people before Katrina, Houston has had to contend with thousands more. The problem will likely only get worse: on Jan. 31, more-generous Medicaid rules for Katrina victims expired. As a result, countless patients who had been receiving treatment in doctors' offices may now turn to overwhelmed emergency rooms. "Our hospitals are struggling financially to get by, and this doesn't help," says David Persse, Houston's EMS medical director. "Hospital CEOs are about to have coronaries." Worse still, infection rates for sexually transmitted diseases are increasing--possibly an outgrowth of high rates in New Orleans, city health officials say.

--All of which leaves Houston Mayor Bill White scrambling to keep the city's finances afloat. He's taken heat from political opponents who carp that he should have sought greater assurances of federal support before welcoming evacuees so magnanimously. "This is going to create turmoil for many years to come," says Steve Radack of the Harris County Commission. But White responds that the city couldn't exactly shut its doors to desperate, dislocated people. Last month he announced that FEMA had agreed to reimburse the city for its housing-voucher program--expected to cost $300 million to $400 million--and to pay $6.5 million in police overtime costs to boost patrolling. And he continues to campaign for additional education and public-safety funds. Six months after Katrina, he says, "there is still an emergency." The city that so generously opened its heart could now use a little generosity itself.

Hard Time: In Houston, which police say has become more tense and violent since Katrina, officers arrest an evacuee after a domestic fracas | A Place to Call Home: Six months after Katrina, Alfred Avery (left), 75, is still staying in a Houston hotel room provided by FEMA. Back in September the city opened its arms to evacuees and Laura Bush.>