Far From Home, They Feel They’ve Arrived

Most of the 430 evacuees bunking in a former Air Force barracks here never would have left New Orleans, given the choice. Many lived in rough neighborhoods where decent jobs were hard to come by, but they were deeply rooted.

Forced out by Hurricane Katrina, they were airlifted to this city that sprawls across the treeless plains east of Denver. Acres of newly built identical homes; strip malls with signs in Korean, Spanish and Arabic; cool, dry air and distant mountains -- nothing like the Delta.

Yet many say, with a trace of wonder, that they like it here.

Struggling residents from one of the poorest cities in America say New Orleans no longer looks like a good place to rebuild their lives. They see an opportunity for a second chance elsewhere.

“You know that old saying, ‘If I knew then what I know now?’ Well, now’s my chance to apply it,” said Byron Hughes Sr., 39.

“God did this for a reason,” said his wife, Ruth Sanders, 44.

Similar conversations are taking place in shelters across the nation -- in Houston and Des Moines and San Diego; in Bluffdale, Utah, and Opelika, Ala.; by the beaches of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico.

“I can start all over and make something of myself here,” said Trenise Nafziger-Lewis, 23, who liked the job prospects in Aurora.

She worked two part-time jobs back home, as an office assistant and a gas-station cashier, and could barely pay her rent. At a job fair here last week, recruiters were offering $10- and $11-an-hour jobs, “with benefits from day one,” they promised. Suddenly Nafziger-Lewis was dreaming of homeownership.

“Any chance I can, I’ll save,” she vowed.

Hughes said he never realized how rundown the New Orleans public schools were until he enrolled his son in second grade here. “I was amazed how clean it was,” he said. He was astonished, too, when his son whipped through math problems he was struggling to comprehend back home.

“The teachers here take so much more interest in the students,” Hughes said. “They’re giving him the individual attention he needs.”

He thinks he can earn more money too -- at least $11 an hour, compared to the $9.50 an hour he was making as a truck driver in New Orleans. That would give him a little cushion to take his family out to dinner, or to video arcades, or to events like the church festival they stopped by last week and enjoyed so much.

“We weren’t doing bad there, but we really think we can do better here,” said Sanders, who ran a college cafeteria in New Orleans.

“We’re going to make it better,” she told her husband.

That willingness to settle somewhere new contradicts the conventional wisdom of social scientists.

Louisiana has the most stable and firmly rooted population in the nation; more than 77% of New Orleans residents were born in the state. (By contrast, just 53% of residents in Houston, 40% in Los Angeles and 20% in Las Vegas are natives of their states.)

Demographer William Frey points out that poor black residents of Louisiana have been especially reluctant to leave, even when the economy turned sour. During the late 1990s, when many middle-class families sought opportunities elsewhere, less than 3% of low-income African Americans left the state, compared with nearly 8% of poor whites.

“If anyone has a desire to go back home, they do,” said Frey, a professor at the University of Michigan.

It’s not clear where they would live if they returned, though. State officials predict that as many as 160,000 homes, or three-quarters of New Orleans’ housing stock, may have to be bulldozed. Recent history suggests not many will be rebuilt as affordable housing.

After Hurricane Ivan devastated the Florida Panhandle last year, rents in the Pensacola area soared from about $450 for a two-bedroom apartment to $650 a month or more. Most of the formerly low-income buildings are now luxury condos.

“A lot of people from all walks of life are leaving. A lot,” said Carolyn Appleyard, who works for the nonprofit group Rebuild Northwest Florida.

Environmentalists, developers and urban planners will push hard “to create a more compact and frankly a more expensive city” as they remake New Orleans, demographer Joel Kotkin predicted. “The places that had been home to the working class and the poor will probably not be redeveloped.”

Even if a family has the resources to rebuild, if relatives and neighbors have moved on and familiar stores have been razed, “they have less reason to stay,” said Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University

“I can’t imagine the population of New Orleans will do anything but decline.”

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin insists that won’t happen. But because he too has been displaced, Nagin recently rented a home in Dallas and enrolled his daughter in school there.

Like Nagin’s family, the vast majority of evacuees ended up in Texas in the days after Katrina; at last count, there were more than 200,000 in shelters, hotels and rented homes.

Significant numbers also took refuge in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri and northern Louisiana. The remainder are spread among 31 states that each took in anywhere from 200 to 4,000 people. Colorado is housing about 1,500 at the former Lowry Air Force Base and several other sites.

In a survey conducted at Houston shelters last weekend, displaced adults were divided on their futures: 43% said they wanted to move back to their hometowns, though 44% said they planned to permanently relocate.

“But the more interesting question is not how many are going to stay here, but who’s going to stay,” said Barton Smith, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.

Smith fears that the most skilled and industrious evacuees will head back home to take advantage of what’s sure to be an enormous need for construction workers and oil pipeline crews.

“Are we going to end up keeping mostly the people who are on welfare,” Smith asked, or the elderly and disabled?

“That’s one scenario, and it’s not a positive one for us,” he said.

Talking with evacuees in Aurora suggests another possible scenario: That hard-working people will choose to stay where they have landed. Their hometown may soon have plenty of jobs, but having experienced life elsewhere, if only for a few weeks, they now see New Orleans’ failures more clearly.

“New Orleans was not healthful, not a positive place for me to be,” said Courtney Thirsty, 23, a child-care provider studying accounting.

She and her boyfriend, who wants to be a music teacher, plan to finish college here -- and celebrate their unexpected escape from what Thirsty called “a horrible place to live,” especially for teenagers whose “only option was to go into the military or to sit on the corner selling drugs.”

“Like my grandma told us, ‘You’re out now,’ ” Thirsty said. “And we’re probably going to stay here.”

Because her grandmother lives nearby, Thirsty chose Colorado as a destination. Many other evacuees did not. They boarded a FEMA flight when they were instructed to, and learned only in the air where they were headed.

The abrupt transition has been disorienting.

But it has also been enlightening.

“Up here, it looks like there’s a park on nearly every corner,” Hughes said. “And when we go, we don’t have to worry that we’re going to be shot at. Back home, the drug dealers had taken over everything.”

There are fewer than 20 murders a year in Aurora, which is Colorado’s third-biggest city, with a population of about 276,000. New Orleans, which has a population of about 485,000, is one of the nation’s most violent cities. Before Katrina struck, it was on pace for 300 homicides this year.

Keyon Ford lived in one of the most dangerous housing projects in the city, but still thought she had it good. Working as a certified nursing assistant, she earned enough money to send her 8-year-old daughter to private school and to buy the hip-hop CDs she cherishes.

“We had nice things. I liked being with my friends,” said Ford, 26. “I was what you’d call living.”

She lost it all to Katrina. But as she looked out at the Rocky Mountains, Ford said she was starting to see the destruction of her old life as a blessing.

She has already enrolled in the local community college; to her delight, she said, she can get a registered nursing degree much quicker here than she could have back home. Her daughter has started classes at a Catholic school; the nuns have waived the tuition. There are tents full of donated clothes and toys outside the barracks she now calls home.

“We take it day by day,” Ford said. “I know there is a God and he has something in store for me.”

Her voice-mail message reflects her determination to make the most of her fresh start. “I’ve made some changes in my life,” she tells callers. “If I don’t call you back, you’re one of those changes.”

She ends the message: “Peace.”

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Better living

A shuttered Air Force base in Aurora, Colo., is now home to 430 people evacuated after Hurricane Katrina. Many never wanted to leave New Orleans. But after a week or more in the booming Denver suburb, some have concluded that it’s a better place to live than the flooded city they left behind. Here’s a look at the demographics of the two cities

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*--* Aurora New Orleans Median household income $46,507 $27,133 Median value, owner-occupied house $144,600 $87,300 Living below poverty line 8.9% 27.9% Unemployment rate 5.3% 5.6% Student population 32,500 67,922 Students receiving free or reduced-cost meals 40% 77% Fourth-graders proficient in reading 43% 13% Fourth-graders proficient in math 38% 17% Eighth-graders proficient in reading 41% 5% Eighth-graders proficient in math 17% 7%

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Population/Ethnicity

Aurora: 275,936

White: 59%

Hispanic or Latino: 20%

Black: 13%

Asian: 4%

Other: 4%

New Orleans: 484,674

Black: 67%

White: 27%

Hispanic or Latino: 3%

Asian: 2%

Other: 1%

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Sources: 2000 U.S. Census, Colorado Department of Education, Louisiana Department of Education, ESRI