Hurricane-hit areas of US see population slump

The pace of rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina has slowed, leaving some Gulf Coast areas with less than half the people they had before the storm.

And some of the hardest hit might never regain their population, US experts say.

The latest Census Bureau estimates, to be released today, say that 10 months after the hurricane, Orleans Parish in Louisiana had slightly less than half the people it did before the storm. Nearby St Bernard Parish had less than a fourth of its pre-storm population.

The estimates were for July 1 2006, but experts said few people had moved back since then.

“We’re still doing clean-up but not bringing many housing units on line,” said Greg Rigamer, a demographer in New Orleans. “We are in the process of rehabbing a lot of properties. It takes time to do that.”

Other Gulf Coast communities, meanwhile, have grown as hurricane victims fled to nearby cities and Americans continued a decades-long migration to coastal areas, according the new Census Bureau estimates.

Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, added more than 123,000 people from 2005 to 2006. Houston attracted many Katrina refugees.

The Census Bureau estimates annual county population totals as of July 1, using local records of births and deaths, IRS records of people moving within the United States and census statistics on immigrants.

Rigamer said the Census estimates for the New Orleans area were consistent with his research. The bureau’s findings include:

- Of the five US counties that lost the most people from 2005 to 2006, four were hit by Hurricane Katrina. The biggest decrease was in Orleans Parish, where the population dropped by nearly 229,000, to about 223,400. The others were St Bernard Parish, Louisiana; Harrison County, Mississippi, and Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. The other county in the top five was Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit;

- St. Bernard Parish had the biggest percentage decline from 2005 to 2006, losing 76.2% of its population, to about 15,500.

University of New Orleans political scientist Susan Howell said a lot of people were moving in and out of New Orleans even as the overall population number had stabilised.

Howell surveyed city residents last autumn and found that about a third were considering leaving the city in the next two years. She said the biggest reasons were crime, the slow pace of recovery and concerns about flooding.

“The full population will not come back,” Howell said. “But it will certainly, at some point, stabilise.”

“The question is, will it stabilise at a point where people will have a good quality of life?”

Al Palumbo, branch manager for a New Orleans estate agency, said it was a buyer’s market in many of the neighbourhoods that were hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

He said there were many opportunities for young people to move into areas they could not have afforded to live before the storm.

“I think this is going to be a younger town,” Palumbo said.