Affordable Housing Institute : US

When hurricane Katrina splashed New Orleanians all over America, how did their lives change?  So many stories accentuate the negative by focusing on the unreconstructed or abandoned areas,

 

 

but as Ed Glaeser observed in his Boston Globe op-ed, our civic obligation to places extends only so far as they serve people.  As a great feature from last Sunday’s New York Times observes:

 

Like pellets from a shotgun blast, New Orleanians spread everywhere, filing change-of-address cards from cities as distant as Anchorage and San Juan, PR. About 365,000 city residents fled; only about a quarter have returned.

 

How have the evacuees fared?  The question is important not only for these people, but also for what it may imply about housing and social welfare policy:

 

Can better neighborhoods rescue the poor? Or will bad luck and habits follow wherever they land?

 

Reporter Jason De Parle has done a commendably thorough job, chock full of insights, of examining not who stayed but who left:

 

Katrina families differ from the classic American migrant in at least one important way: they did not choose to move. Simply by deciding to strike out from home, the immigrant of lore has already shown much of the drive needed to succeed. Evacuees’ ambitions, unlike their neighborhoods, cannot be quantified.

 

As I have said repeatedly, Old New Orleans is gone forever, and thank goodness: for it was a city in decline, as Mr. De Parle remorselessly points out:

 

Once the economic leader of the South, New Orleans has been in decline for at least 100 years.

 

“N’awlins is the only city I know of that ignored the fact that

the future becomes the present, and the present becomes the past,

And the past turns into everlastin’ regret if you don’t plan for it.”

 

Over the last 25 years, the city had lost nearly one in five residents and one in seven jobs. Seven superintendents had passed through the school system in 10 years. By the mid-1990’s, no American city had a higher homicide rate.

 

To personify the evacuees, Mr. De Parle chronicles the story of Whitney and Jeralyn Marcell, starting in August, 2005, just before Katrina:

 

At 24, the driver, Whitney Marcell, weighed 300 pounds, and answered to the name Big Man. His wife, Jeralyn, who goes by Fu, had just turned 28. She brought along the hard-faced adolescents because her own hard life had presented her with a gloriously teachable moment: Big Man and Fu, up-from-nothing products of New Orleans’s roughest projects, were about to buy their first home.

 

Jeralyn and Whitney Marcell, with Rashad, 10, in their hurricane-ravaged home in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The Marcells, who have since resettled in suburban Atlanta, had just bought the house when Hurricane Katrina struck.

 

“Are you sure you can afford it?” friends had sniped, but Mr. Marcell’s only worry about the $86,500 loan was whether the terms would let him pay it off early. The couple signed a pile of legal papers and left the office owning a house in New Orleans‘ Lower Ninth Ward.

 

Two days later, Hurricane Katrina struck with biblical force, destroying the Marcells’ new home, and chasing them to the outskirts of Atlanta, where they became part of the largest American diaspora since Dust Bowl days.  But despite the loss of nearly everything they owned, the Marcells say they have moved up again.

 

Like many evacuees, they moved to Atlanta, and swiftly settled in a much better neighborhood:

 

The median household income in their new neighborhood is nearly twice that in the Lower Ninth Ward, and more than four times that in the projects where they had lived. Though they had recently worked their way out of poverty in New Orleans, the Marcells say this mostly black suburb offers much safer streets, better schools and a stronger economy.

 

The Marcells’ journey illustrates one surprising benefit from an otherwise terrible storm: the exodus took low-income families to areas richer in opportunity.

 

The New York Times analyzed relocation patterns in 17 counties in and around Atlanta and Houston, two leading destinations for Katrina evacuees. Like the Marcells, the average evacuee has landed in a neighborhood with nearly twice the income as the one left behind, less than half as much poverty, and significantly higher levels of education, employment and home ownership.

Still, it is unclear whether a better environment will bring success, for the Marcells or for others like them.

 

Rashad Ballard [Ms. Marcell's son -- Ed.], 10, a former resident of New Orleans, on his way to school in suburban Atlanta.

 

Some Katrina families may be too traumatized to benefit from the moves. Others may drift back to poor areas when government aid decreases. Even if they stay, the new neighborhoods may make little difference. Other forces — like family structure, cultural heritage and personal motivation — may do more to shape success.

 

Nonetheless, the relocation of tens of thousands of low-income families creates a grand experiment in class mixing. While the full effects will not be known for years, Ms. Marcell is among those who think it will succeed.

 

Neighborhoods of Hope

 

Given the physics of race and class, there was reason to worry about where they would land. Three-quarters of flood-zone residents were black, and nearly 6 in 10 were living on less than $30,000 a year. Nationally, such families tend to be crowded together in areas long on crime, short on jobs and plagued by inferior schools.

 

That is not the story of Katrina evacuees. In both Atlanta and Houston, their neighborhoods look much like the region as a whole. Measured against where they had lived in New Orleans, most find that a big step up.

 

To examine relocation patterns, The Times counted evacuees at elementary schools in metropolitan Atlanta and Houston: 13,000 students at 1,100 schools. Using the schools as proxies for neighborhoods, The Times then analyzed the surrounding Census Bureau tracts.

In both cities, the average evacuee lives in a place extraordinary only for its ordinariness. Neighborhoods where evacuees settled have virtually identical levels of education, employment and homeownership as the surrounding metropolis.

 

 

Those areas do have somewhat greater concentrations of minority residents and single mothers, and slightly lower incomes. But they are no more prone to outright poverty.

 

“It looks a lot better than I would have guessed,” said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who studies regional inequality. “I would have guessed that Katrina families would have been relocated in tracts much more disadvantaged and more segregated than the region as a whole.”

 

Jesse Rothstein, a Princeton economist, agreed. “These are better neighborhoods than I would have expected,” Mr. Rothstein said.

 

Many evacuees have not merely resettled, they have substantially moved up:

 

The real contrast for evacuees is with the neighborhoods they have left behind.

 

·         In the flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans, annual household income was $27,000. In the average evacuee’s tract in Atlanta, it is $52,000.

 

·         In New Orleans, 42% of the neighborhood children were poor. In evacuee tracts in Atlanta, the rate is 12%.

 

·         In New Orleans, about half the child-rearing families in the flood zones had fathers in their homes. In evacuee tracts in Atlanta, nearly three-quarters do.

 

Though all is not rosy (Mr. De Parle present Sheba Akmin, who leapt at the chance to move back to New Orleans), the Marcells are clearly better off than before.  Why?  Though his deductions are tactful, Mr. De Parle’s observations are pointed:

 

The Marcells say Atlanta has plenty of jobs, but seven months after the storm they are still jobless. They praise the school their 10-year-old attends but put much of their energy into his nascent rap career, as his reading scores lag.  […]

 

Though jobless, the Marcells are not destitute and have been able to replace much of what they lost to the flood. They have a new wide-screen television, a new computer and a new living-room suite. Last fall, Mr. Marcell’s 1992 Chevy Suburban was stolen. Though it was uninsured against theft, he bought a newer model, and added a DVD player.

 

“We are a hard-working family,” Mr. Marcell said. “We feel entitled to live comfortable.”

 

How are they living so comfortably, despite being jobless seven months after the hurricane?

 

The $400 a week they get in unemployment checks replaces only about half their former take-home pay. But insurance paid off their mortgage (giving them title to the land). And with their housing voucher they pay no rent.

 

These special Katrina vouchers are a substantially better deal than regular Section 8 (now called “Housing Choice Voucher“) recipients, who must pay 30% of their income, so these families got an immediate spending-power uplift:

 

 

In net terms, the rough numbers provided by the Marcells show that their income has fallen by about $175 a week — or by about $5,300 over seven months.

 

Against that, they have received more than $7,000 in lump-sum payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Red Cross and relatives.

 

As of this moment, the Marcells have had a net economic boon from Katrina.

 

Will their lives change for the better?  Statistically, no one knows:

 

As far back as Jacob Riis, the 19th-century crusader against slums, experts have argued that bad neighborhoods perpetuate poverty, steeping the poor in bad influences while walling them off from good schools and jobs.

 

Jacob Riis, Homeless Children, 1890

 

Count me firmly among those who believe environment is a powerful influence.  Similarly, the importance of diversified neighborhoods and the prevention of severe poverty concentration lie behind the current Administration’s strong emphasis on portable vouchers:

 

In making a parallel case, contemporary social scientists have been particularly influenced by the Gautreaux program in Chicago, which moved black families from public housing into white suburbs, where more adults found jobs and more children went on to college. Gautreaux began in 1976 and lasted two decades.

 

But a successor program, Moving to Opportunity, failed to replicate the results. Operating in five cities in the 1990’s, the program moved public-housing tenants of all races into neighborhoods with less poverty. An evaluation, published three years ago, showed that the transplanted adults neither worked more nor earned more than those who had stayed behind.

 

“The process of neighborhood influence appears to be more subtle and complex than most of us thought,” said Jeffrey Kling, a Brookings scholar who helped evaluate the program.

 

Similarly, you can take the family out of a bad neighborhood, but it takes long to take the bad neighborhood out of the family:

 

For all the promise of the new neighborhoods, other problems can get in the way. The troubled New Orleans schools, for one, may have left students too far behind their new peers.

 

Texas officials have estimated that Katrina students, on average, lag their new classmates by at least a full grade.  In Lithonia, standardized tests show Rashad [Marcell -- Ed.] reading two years below his grade level, even though he got A’s and B’s back home.

 

Rashad Ballard, a fourth grader at Stoneview Elementary, is in an educational setting better than the one he left behind.

 

The move up may also prove short-lived if evacuees are forced into worse areas or if their current neighborhoods decline. Reviewing the Times data, Professor Orfield, the Minnesota scholar, saw one warning sign: evacuee schools looked worse than evacuee neighborhoods. They have more low-income students than schools region-wide, more minorities and lower test scores. That is worrisome, he said, because “the schools re-segregate first and the neighborhoods tend to follow.”

 

Still, on balance the Marcell family has more than adjusted:

 

The Marcells, dancing at a February shower for their new baby, say they have been inspired by their move to Atlanta because the area offers greater safety and economic opportunity than New Orleans did.

 

“I love New Orleans, don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Marcell said. “But I thank God we are in Atlanta.”

 

Saint Katrina?

Keep your fingers crossed.

 

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