Bill White was less than two years into his first term as Houston’s mayor when Katrina broke the levees in New Orleans as a Category 3 storm. He later said he supersized Houston’s hurricane response out of compassion for the storm victims, reflecting that “you should treat your neighbors the way you’d want to be treated.” As the city’s Astrodome filled with evacuees, who arrived by the busload after New Orleans vacated its own infamous stadium, FEMA offered to help White secure thousands of temporary trailers and hotel rooms for them. But he and his administration declined, instead asking them to reimburse the city for long-term housing in apartments.
“We knew it was going to be a while before they could go back,” White told Grist. “The Red Cross-style shelters that [FEMA was] set up to do, that obviously wouldn’t work for an event of this magnitude.”
Wary of federal bureaucracy, White set up a bespoke housing voucher program with aid from the private sector, cajoling hundreds of apartment landlords across the city to donate units to the cause. Nonprofits and faith organizations such as the Catholic Charities volunteered to help evacuees with case work as they applied for disaster assistance or sought temporary jobs. White had no guarantee from FEMA that the agency would reimburse him, but he promised the landlords that he would convince the feds to pony up, and in time he did. This tremendous act earned the city national praise. Even the local newspaper in its cross-state rival, Dallas, named Houston the “Texan of the Year” in 2005.
But despite White’s efforts, the city’s goodwill was not unlimited. Because large landlords could choose which apartment complexes to house evacuees in, most ended up clustered in older buildings, many of them in worse-off parts of the city, said Sanyika. The majority didn’t yet have jobs or cars, let alone any familiarity with Houston geography. As city politicians tell it, these conditions led to flare-ups of the old gang conflicts that had divided New Orleans’s largest public housing complexes.
In August 2006, a 64-year-old man named Rolando Rivas was shot and killed at a car wash in southwest Houston, after what appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. A few days later, police arrested three teenagers in connection with the crime, all of whom had left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The car wash murder was an isolated event, but it supercharged a media narrative that had been building for months. The Houston Chronicle and several national newspapers blared with negative headlines — “Houston ties murder increase to Katrina,” “Katrina evacuees wearing out welcome in Houston,” “Katrina Evacuees Exporting Violence to Houston.”