The Vulture of the West?

The below is a somewhat aimless exploration of the refugee situation in Houston and its possible implications for the futures of Houston and New Orleans. The first three headings come from what was to be its original title: "On Crime, Democrats, and Gulping".

Crime

Two stories in today's Houston Chronicle offer conflicting reports on whether Houston has, in offering shelter to New Orleans' poor, been the unsuspecting recipient of a future crime wave.

One article dismisses fears of an increase in crime due to the refugees as "nothing more than rumors":

However, Houston police officials, as well as evacuees at the Astrodome who spoke to the Chronicle Monday, were adamant that, despite the rumors, there is no crime epidemic at any of the relocation centers.

At a Reliant Park press conference this morning, authorities said that with the exception of a couple fights, there have been no arrests for violent crime at any of the facilities. There have been 37 arrests so far, from disorderly conduct to public intoxication [And there is an 11pm curfew at the 'dome. -- ed] . There have been two reports of sexual assaults, but one proved to be unfounded and one is still under investigation.

...

"There is an enormous change going on in the community," said Michael Lindell of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "But people don't really understand what's going on. And so they start talking to each other. It happens in all kinds of disasters. The rumors tend to revolve around people's fears of what could happen."

Lindell says, to a degree, racism also can factor into the community fear. [Is it racism to be on one's guard when it is a well-known fact that a disproportionate percentage of criminals are poor blacks? Racism and justifiable apprehension are not the same thing. --ed]

Most of the evacuees being housed at the Astrodome are black.

"Rumors get generated by people who are racially prejudiced, and then those rumors get passed on to other people who aren't necessarily racist," he said.

Lindell charged that the fear factor also can be indirectly linked to comments by state, local [link added] and federal officials.

But if this is true, why is a black Moslem saying the following in the same issue of the paper?

Minister Robert Muhammad, southwest regional minister for the Nation of Islam, said he had talked to the displaced and tended to agree that some toughs had arrived. Ninety-nine percent were good folks, he said, although many were traumatized and will have mental health issues.

But, Muhammad cautioned, "the ward wars that take place in New Orleans have now moved to Houston."

Great! If we do the math suggested by Muhammad and take it at face value, that means we've imported, from a population drawn in large part from the projects in New Orleans 249 "toughs" into a very small area. Only time will tell whether these toughs are too busy reorienting themselves to their new surroundings to pick up where they left off just yet, and whether the Minister's estimate is on the low side. [Since initially writing this, I've learned that officials expect to empty the Astrodome within the next few weeks. If the evacuees pose a crime problem, it will not be concentrated in one area. However, if there are organized gangs as Muhammad seems to imply, that may merely cause a problem that goes undetected longer. A few jitters remain.]

Democrats

One reason to fear that the paper and certain officials in Houston might want to downplay the crime issue also, incredibly, appears in the second article I cite: "Eventually, someone will point out discreetly that most of our potential new residents vote Democratic." Hmmm. I was tempted to make a crack about our mayor busing in fellow Democrats the other day, but decided it might sound mean-spirited.... But then, Democrats can be relied upon to think about who votes for which party no matter how crude it may be to bring it up -- as I believe Michael Moore once did when complaining that the choice to bomb New York was a stupid one on the part of the terrorists, because the victims were mostly Democrats!

Be that as it may, I suspect that many of our 150,000 total evacuees -- and not just the government-dependent poor -- will end up staying. These articles and other news reports note that many evacuees like Houston and say they want to stay. Our metro area, some 5.2 million strong, should be able to absorb them easily. Any crime problem (other than organized gangs that survive relocation) will be diluted into insignificance. In the long run, I think the criminal element will eventually wax nostalgic when they start to feel homesick for that widespread ineptitude and corruption in law enforcement for which New Orleans is famous. And since criminals go to jail in Texas, they will be have plenty of spare time to reminisce.

And speaking of absorbing refugees....

Gulping

In TIA Daily and elsewhere, I have seen comparisons between the hurricane that devastated Galveston, TX in 1900 and hurricane Katrina. The comparison brings up two things: (1) A city can indeed bounce back from near-total devastation. (2) Such cities end up smaller. Such comparisons also bring up the specter of one city swallowing another.

In the case of Galveston, which had been poised to become a major Texas port city, the devastation resulted in Galveston's shipping traffic being handled by Houston instead. While Galveston rebuilt, Houston grew, and eventually, left it in the dust to become the largest city in Texas and fourth-largest in the country. In 1900, the populations of Galveston and Houston were 38,000 and 45,000 respectively. In 2000, they were 57,247 and nearly 2 million. (The Houston metro population cited earlier includes Galveston, I believe.)

My initial impression of this storm was that it might, like the example for Texas above, result in Baton Rouge overtaking New Orleans as the largest city in the Pelican State, and that may well happen. One estimate has the population of Baton Rouge swelling from its 2000 figure of 227,818 to over 400,000 now. How much of this will be permanent? The two cities already are home to many of the same industries, and fear of future hurricanes may well cause some businesses (and private citizens) to be averse to returning to their old home in the Big Easy.

But upon some further reflection, the question might not be whether New Orleans loses out to another city, but which city that will be.

Two economic factors militate against New Orleans ever being as large again as it is now. (1) Its industrial base has been shrinking for some time already and (2) what is left is mainly industries that are no longer very labor-intensive.

The Chronicle reports on the former.

Houston has been the land of opportunity for Louisiana residents for decades, [Houston Mayor Bill] White said, from Mississippi River floods and from energy companies that moved from there to here.

Houston has been benefiting from a New Orleans brain drain for some time already.

And on the latter , RealClear Politics points out that:

[The "new" New Orleans] could just be an industrial terminal. George Friedman, of stratfor.com, argues that "the ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic." As in Jefferson's time, this "is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and" -- we get beyond 1803 here -- "the bulk commodities of industrialism come in." Those bulk commodities include oil and natural gas, about one-quarter of the national production of which come through New Orleans and South Louisiana.

Friedman's argument seems hard to counter. And it is surely within the nation's physical and financial capacity to rebuild New Orleans' port and oil infrastructure -- re-engineering it to withstand a Category 4 or 5 hurricane this time, not just a Category 3 -- and make it once again what it was until last weekend. But ports and petrochemicals are no longer labor-intensive industries: It doesn't take that many employees to man a refinery or a container port. Port Fourchon, the site of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, is a tiny community in southern Lafourche Parish. Restoring the port will not restore the fabric of the city.

Aside from tourism, it would appear that there isn't much left.

The Vulture of the West

The next quote, about a city that has already swallowed another, should sound ominous to boosters of New Orleans.

White cautioned against any appearance of profiting from another city's misery. And Jim Kollaer, president of the Greater Houston Partnership for 15 years and now an executive vice president with the Staubach Co., said nobody needed to be seen as a vulture.

Finding office space for New Orleans firms helps them stay in business, he said. The motivation is to assist them, and if they stay because they like it here, that's fine [bold added].

Nobody knows how soon New Orleans might return to a new normal, so nobody knows what businesses and workers will really do in the long term, Kollaer said.

At shelters, many had employment on their minds.

Andrew Dawson, who worked as a bartender in New Orleans, was browsing the classified ads Monday. He plans to board a Metro bus today and start applying for bartending jobs around the city.

"If I like it, I may stay here," said Dawson, who had found refuge at a Red Cross shelter with his wife and six other family members.

If the news reports I keep hearing are any indication, lots of New Orleanians already like Houston, which seems poised to earn the nickname, "the Vulture of the West." (Kollaer's own quote above suggests the moniker.)

If my own experience is any indication, the refugees will like it more and more as time goes on. (The nine-month shuttering of New Orleans I recently heard reported is bad news in that regard, if it materializes.) On top of that, New Orleanians will feel quite at home here in the city I regard as the most culturally similar to New Orleans. (There are important differences, though.) Houston is very cosmopolitan and has heavy Cajun and Creole influences already. I can and do buy roux, andouille, and boudain in ordinary supermarkets here. Crawfish, fresh seafood, and good, cheap restaurants (of all varieties, including Cajun) abound. So do Louisianians, for that matter. Back in grad school, for example, when I was between marriages, a friend and I took up salsa dancing. In the racial continuum of Latin society evident at the dance clubs, we met Louisianians of all shades. I developed a really good gumbo recipe back then, too, thanks to all the feedback I got from Louisiana natives I knew socially at school. Houston may not have a French Quarter, but it has many other charms. And, as for the Quarter, it is but an hour's plane flight and short cab ride away. There is something for everyone here, even for those who, like myself, were overwhelmingly unimpressed with H-Town at first.

And if there is something for everyone here, there is also room for everyone.

[Harris County Judge Robert] Eckles and other Houston officials said the city can handle the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 residents from Louisiana who evacuated from Katrina.

"We're a big city - about 5 million - and that's about the size of the entire state of Louisiana," he said. "We'll deal with it if they stay."

All this talk of refugees wishing to stay in Houston may, in many or most cases, just be the initial reaction of those who have been displaced by a storm and have not yet had the time to grow homesick. One does not very easily reconnect with a lifetime's worth of friends and family, for example, by not returning home. Nevertheless, if, as William Faulkner famously put it New Orleans is "a courtesan whose hold is strong upon the mature, and to whose charm the young must respond," she has formidable rival in Houston, and time is not on her side. To put it another way: New Orleans might be fun, but who would you want to marry? Some will find this question sacrilegious, but it will make loads of sense to all but the most fanatically devoted to New Orleans. And for those, they may return to find their courtesan no longer quite the same. (I already know of one lifelong resident thinking of not returning for this very reason.)

Also not on New Orleans' side are the many negatives -- again, something for everyone --that the hurricane has made blatantly obvious. Among them: How will the poor rebuild? (See also Note below.) And will those who can afford to rebuild want to risk going through another Katrina? If the feds help the poor rebuild, the crime problem will return. How many of the looted want to face that prospect again? (A taste: A friend of a relative hired a guard to protect her home from looters. The guard was murdered and the house looted anyway.) And if the poor don't return, it will change the character of the city. How will the city attract new residents? (Speaking for myself: I find the city charming and my wife had a desire to live there. We've relatives and connections in New Orleans, but I didn't want to face the prospect of what is happening now on a yearly basis even before I saw how bad it really could be....) Will the city's government continue to be inept? Would the reward for those who returned after rearranging their lives for nine months be another hurricane strike?

While New Orleans is very charming and will survive in some form, I think that it will survive as a diminished city. Its industrial base is all but gone. Something not even the equal of the doomsday scenario whispered about for years has proved worse than imaginable. All but those with the strongest ties will stay away, except to visit.

I love New Orleans, but don't want to live there. I'd like to see it come back, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around how that will occur when I consider what would have to factor in to the decision for a resident to return, even if it is his home. I'm not quite ready to count her out, but I'm worried.

-- CAV

Note: An article appears in the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger concerning the likelihood that many of the city's blacks may never return.

Lallande escaped to a Baton Rouge shelter, and for now, he has no plans of going back. "What for? I don't have nothing back there."

And where some saw grim images and shattered futures, the city's most destitute saw rare opportunity.

"Actually, some people were a little better off after the storm," said a 26-year-old man who spoke on condition of anonymity as he took groceries out of a looted store last week. "I had gotten to the end of my rope. Now, I got a little something."

But even middle-class blacks are reconsidering their futures. Herman and Christy Taitt, devotees of the city's music and culture, said they already have calls out to several different cities.

Herman, 44, is the head maintenance manager at Dillard University and Christy, 37, is an accounting supervisor at a pharmaceutical firm. They had a house and cars but always thought they might have done better out of New Orleans.

"Family kept us here," said Herman Taitt. "And I love the history of this place. The culture. It's the birthplace of jazz. The food. The parties. You can have a good time here. So we stayed. We allowed ourselves to have a second-class status to Southern white folks."

But now, Herman Taitt said, his elderly father is missing -- and a crucial bond to the city is broken. "We're looking at Houston," he said. "We're looking at L.A."

There is more about this in the next post.

Updates

9-7-05: (1) Added Note with link to Clarion-Ledger article on blacks leaving New Orleans. (2) Added links to the next post.