Regular pedestrians and bus passengers around town have probably seen the rambling, incoherent, and unnerving handwritten “signs” taped to bus shelters, seats, and signs telling the half a million refugees from Hurricane Katrina that there’s some new housing opened in New Orleans. So go home. Now.
The warm welcome that Texas extended to the Katrina refugees, it seems, is starting to wear thin in certain quarters. It’s not hard to find anti-Katrina refugee graffiti around Austin, especially around Sixth Street and Red River. Many Houstonians will talk freely about how former New Orleanians have brought a crime wave with them. Rick Perry (political barometer par excellence) went, in a year, from being the governor lauded for opening up his state to refugees to being the incumbent who scarcely squeaked a word about it during election season.
Meanwhile, reconstruction of New Orleans is failing. Walter Leger, of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, told the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee this week that state and federally funded building is being hamstrung by contradictory finance laws. The Rand Corporation estimates that the Big Easy will only be back to 51% of its pre-Katrina population by the end of 2008.
But here’s the real kicker. Today, the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest report, Climate Change 2007, and it’s depressing reading. It finds that global warming has an alarming momentum, with global temperatures likely to rise for centuries to come, due to what industrial crap is already in the air. Climate events like Katrina, and the resultant mass evacuations, will probably become inevitable, if not regular.
No city to go to. No city to welcome them. Are the Katrina refugees a reminder of a tragic past or a warning of things to come?
This article appears in February 2 • 2007.
