The people of Houston are starting to complain about the burden of Hurricane Katrina victims.
When I read about this, my first reaction was dismay that one of the richest cities in the South could complain about the burden of evacuees. After all, Houston got so many because it had the most to give. And I do not think Houston would consider for a moment trading its problems with those of New Orleans.
However, I know New Orleans well and realize that parts of it were very violent. Even in a good year it usually stood in the top 15 American cities in murder rate. After Katrina the murder rate dropped to zero for many months, primarily because the areas with the highest crime levels were also the most devastated. I sometimes shuddered as I wondered where those people went. Some of them went to Houston, apparently.
I hope though, that Houstonians remember that good is often unrecognized as people naturally focus on the worst. When New Orleans was hit by Katrina, hundreds of businesses relocated to Houston. Some of these will never return. Houston, and Texas in general, was very aggressive about plucking away Louisiana's best and brightest, both before and after the storm. There were job fairs in Houston to recruit educated evacuees, especially teachers and medical personnel. I remember a billboard that went up within a month of the storm in New Orleans, promising jobs in Texas to New Orleans teachers. Ads for dislocated nurses to move to Texas appeared in the newspaper almost daily.
I can relate my own experience. When I was in Baton Rouge after the hurricane, trying to decide what I was going to do, the very first phone call I received in my job search was from a Texas recruiter. When I finally decided on my present location in Mississippi, I turned down 4 qualified offers from Texas cities. Texas may have qualms about accepting our poor, but it silently benefits from the influx of our well-educated. If I had accepted one of those jobs and moved to Texas, no newspaper headline would have said, "Texas Reaps Benefits of Physicians Dislocated by Hurricane Katrina." Yet I know of several quality doctors who did resettle in the Lone Star State.
Though I sympathize with Houston and its problems with evacuees, it is simply unfair to blame New Orleans for this turn of events. New Orleans is in no condition to accept its poorest citizens back, and these citizens may not want to come back, considering that Texas is far richer than New Orleans, and its public services markedly better. It may be a burden for a sick woman to ask a relative to take care of her children, but one cannot try to give the children back while the mother is still in intensive care.