Betsy's Page

Betsy's Page: "Houston, We Have a Solution


Nicole Gelinas has an in-depth look at the problems facing Houston as it tries to integrate Katrina evacuees from New Orleans into their city. First, she covers the admirable and effective job Houston did in the first days as the evacuees reached Houston.

Houston solved the first long-term crisis Katrina caused—what to do with thousands of desperate citizens washed out of their homes—because elected local and county officials carried out Shea’s style of determined competence on a mass scale with military precision. The city augmented its own resources with volunteers from churches, temples, corporations, and charities to take in what amounted to a new population equal to 10 percent of its own citizenry over seven days, and to place two-thirds of these evacuees into housing within weeks.

They have worked hard to get the evacuees into housing rather than keeping them holed up in hotels waiting in some sort of housing limbo. However, this has caused new problems because many of the evacuees are concentrated in apartment complexes in one area of town. And there they have brought with them all their gang violence and criminality from New Orleans.

Moreover, some evacuees gravitated toward the apartment complexes simply because they aren’t different from what New Orleans’s underclass is used to: low-rise housing proje"