[StBernard] St. Bernard lost 95% of residents

[Westley Annis]

Hurricanes forced 350,000 to leave Louisiana Census report says 140,000 went
to Houston area

12:22 AM CDT on Wednesday, June 7, 2006
By CLAIRE CUMMINGS / The Dallas Morning News

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drove nearly 350,000 people out of Louisiana
last year, with more than a third of them landing in Texas, according to new
census figures that provide the clearest picture yet of how the storms
scattered Gulf Coast residents.

The Census Bureau comparison of population estimates from July 1 and Jan.
1 show that Orleans Parish lost 64 percent of its residents and had only
about 150,000 - fewer than live in Irving - after the storms. St. Bernard
Parish, obliterated and inundated by Katrina, lost 95 percent of its
residents.

By contrast, the census found the Houston area growing by roughly 140,000
residents, a figure lower than the city of Houston's working estimate of
150,000 to 200,000.

The study, which included only the 117 coastal counties and parishes in four
states, also did not account for people dispersed elsewhere, such as the
70,000 estimated by the city of Dallas to have come to the area.

Also not accounted for is 19-year-old Ashley Williams, a former New Orleans
resident who has no plans to go back. She's happy with her new life in
Oklahoma City.

"The hurricane changed a lot of people's lives," Ms. Williams said. "With us
losing everything down there, there's nothing for us to go back to."

Ms. Williams now lives by herself and is looking to attend college soon.
Her family has gone back to New Orleans to await assistance in rebuilding.
Her mother works two jobs and her father is working on reconstructing the
family home.

Census officials cautioned that there weren't many people to count in some
areas four months after the storm, creating larger margins of error than in
most census studies. Also, the region has changed since January, with more
residents returning to some areas.

Among the weaknesses in the data: Only people living in households were
counted, meaning that hurricane refugees living in hotels and shelters were
excluded. That skewed some population counts.

Deborah Griffin, who participated in the census research, said the
population increases in counties that grew can be attributed mainly to the
hurricane. She said the studies should give cities and counties better
direction on how to steer resources toward evacuees.

"We would hope that local planners who need to have a little more
information about the characteristics of the population and the economic
impacts of those populations now have some tools available ... to maybe fill
in some blanks they might have," she said.

State demographer Steve Murdock said the full story of dispersion has not
yet been told.

"It's a mistake to think that these numbers provide a comprehensive look at
the effects of Katrina," said Dr. Murdock, who works at the University of
Texas at San Antonio. "They provide a certain snapshot, but they are clearly
only a partial picture."

Mike Grimes, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, also said it's too
early to see net effects from the storm.

"The safest thing to say probably is that the city [New Orleans] will
gradually increase in population to some level no doubt below the
pre-hurricane level," he said. "It's not getting larger in a hurry right now
because there's so much damage and people are having trouble with
insurance."

That assertion agrees with a poll of current evacuee residents in the
Houston housing assistance program, about 50 percent of whom said they plan
to stay, said city spokesman Frank Michel. A quarter of them said they would
return to New Orleans, and the rest said they don't yet know.

Absorbing a small city's worth of residents, many of whom are poor, has not
been easy - or cheap - for Houston. The biggest cost has been for public
safety, but state and federal reimbursements have paid for the bulk of other
services such as housing and education, Mr. Michel said.

The Houston Independent School District took in about 7,000 student evacuees
last year, and 5,000 remained when the school year ended, spokesman Terry
Abbott said.

The students cost the district an extra $20 million, $15 million of which
was reimbursed by state and federal agencies, Mr. Abbott said.

"We really count them as our own students," he said. "It really doesn't
matter where they are from now."

In New Orleans, demographer Greg Rigamer estimated the city has rebounded to
at least 221,000 people since January, or about half the size it was before
the storms.

"The analogy I like to use is that it's like a stock price in the middle of
the day. It's a very dynamic and fluid situation. People are continuing to
return, and the availability of housing and utilities has a bearing on
that," said Mr. Rigamer, head of GCR & Associates Inc., a New Orleans
consulting firm.

Still, census officials said, the data offers the best look yet at who was
driven from their homes, who was left behind, and who moved to the region in
the months after the storms. Across the region, the data showed large jumps
in the percentage of people using food stamps. In New Orleans, it showed
average incomes increasing by 16 percent, in part because many of the
poorest residents were forced to leave.

The black population in the New Orleans metropolitan area, which includes
several largely white suburbs, dropped from 37 percent to 22 percent, while
the white population grew from 60 percent to 73 percent of the total that
remained.

The Census Bureau was unable to provide race or socio-economic data limited
to the city of New Orleans because officials were unable to survey enough
people there to generate reliable data.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

E-mail ccummings at dallasnews.com

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