Evacuees landed in high-crime ZIP codes: Many of them did not know about Houston’s notorious areas
Driven by housing patterns, economics and sometimes the desperate desire to find a safe new home, roughly one-fourth of the 83,300 Hurricane Katrina evacuees occupying government-financed apartments have gravitated to high-crime neighborhoods on the city’s southwest side.
There, as they struggle to reassemble lives shattered by August’s storm, they live amid gunfire, prostitution, violence and - in some cases - sour regret that they didn’t exercise better judgment in selecting a Houston home.
I suppose there are a number of good reasons why Katrina refugees would end up in some not-so-great neighborhoods- a supply of available (affordable) housing, their lack of knowledge of the Houston area, and the general rush to get people into more stable living situations. It’s unfortunate in some cases that these folks ended up in parts of southwest Houston that are not famed for their safety and stability, but in September and October the need was for speed and getting people into available housing. Besides, you didn’t really think that people in Sugar Land, River Oaks, or Memorial were about to allow their million-dollar neighborhoods to become cluttered with refugees, did you?
