The Long Term Recovery of New Orleans’ Population after Hurricane Katrina

TLDR: This article identifies social, spatial, and temporal explanatory frameworks for housing and population recovery and uses them to review research findings on mobility—both evacuation and migration—after Hurricane Katrina and reveals a need for a comprehensive social, temporal, and spatial framework for explaining inequality in population displacement and recovery.

Abstract: Hurricane Katrina created a catastrophe in the city of New Orleans when the storm surge caused the levee system to fail on August 29, 2005. The destruction of housing displaced hundreds of thousands of residents for varying lengths of time, often permanently. It also revealed gaps in our knowledge of how population is recovered after a disaster causes widespread destruction of urban infrastructure, housing and workplaces, and how mechanisms driving housing recovery often produce unequal social, spatial and temporal population recovery. In this article, I assemble social, spatial and temporal explanatory frameworks for housing and population recovery and then review research on mobility - both evacuation and migration - after Hurricane Katrina. The review reveals a need for a comprehensive social, spatial and temporal framework for explaining inequality in population recovery and displacement. It also shows how little is known about in-migrants and permanent out-migrants after a disaster.