Lessons from Houston’s Katrina response – Grist

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the state of emergency. I’m Jake Bittle, and today we’re going to talk about the lasting political impact of one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

When we talk about the impacts of climate change in the United States, and especially the racial dimension of those impacts, there is no escaping Hurricane Katrina. The storm of 2005 that burst the riverbanks in New Orleans remains the costliest hurricane to ever hit the US, as well as perhaps the worst humanitarian crisis of the last century that took place on American soil.

In the nearly 20 years since Katrina, academics and demographers have done reams of research on the storm’s political and social impact, both on New Orleans itself and on the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who never made it back. Studies have examined how the storm affected trust in government, how it affected turnout rates in later mayoral elections, and who the storm victims were likely to blame for the failed emergency response, to name just a few.

But Katrina also had a major impact on the cities to which evacuees fled. In Houston, 300 miles to the west, more than 200,000 victims arrived after the storm, many coming in on evacuation buses and camping on the floor of the Astrodome. Knowing it would take months or years for New Orleans to rebuild, the Houston government undertook a massive resettlement effort to find those evacuees long-term housing in Texas rather than putting them up in trailers or hotel rooms. Many of them later chose to settle permanently in Houston.

This relocation effort earned Houston Mayor Bill White national praise, but it also caused significant local backlash. Longtime Houstonians soon began to complain that evacuees were importing old gang conflicts from New Orleans, which caused the city’s homicide rate to rise in 2005 and 2006. There was little data to support this fear, but a moral panic exploded in the city regardless, with dozens of newspaper reports fueling concerns about eviction crime. The White administration, facing a looming re-election campaign, responded by stepping up enforcement of low-level traffic and drug offenses, arresting some evacuees and pushing others back to New Orleans. This fear of a crime wave had a clear racial dimension—New Orleans had a much larger black population than Houston at the time—and it created a prejudice against New Orleans who sought work or tried to acclimate at local schools.

Anti-evacuation sentiment has softened in later years, but the political backlash for the Katrina relocation holds lessons for the future of climate displacement. As climate disasters worsen and force thousands of people from their homes each year, it creates major political upheavals for the communities that receive those displaced. Even in a city the size of Houston, which had the space and resources to accommodate an influx of evacuees, the Katrina diaspora created a social panic. For other communities — such as Duluth, Minnesota, which some have speculated could be a “climate haven,” or Boise, Idaho, which absorbed many victims of the 2018 wildfire that destroyed Paradise, California — the backlash could be even greater. be significant.

To navigate future climate disruptions, politicians will need to be prepared to deal with concerns about housing, jobs and crime—concerns that may spill over into outright racism or xenophobia. This is another way climate disasters have scrambled political attitudes and changed the beliefs people bring to the polls.

You can read more about how Katrina changed Houston’s politics in our full story here.

PS Have you just joined us in this newsletter? Back issues of State of Emergency are available hereand you can read too all the reporting in this series.

A flood of disasters

The city of Houston and surrounding Harris County helped resettle thousands of New Orleans evacuees after Hurricane Katrina, but since then Houston has seen a string of costly disasters, from Hurricane Harvey’s epic rainfall to a deadly ice storm in 2021.

Above: A person looks out at the flooded interstate after Hurricane Beryl swept through the area on July 8, 2024 in Houston, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

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