Katrina Evacuees Seek Jobs, Anchors

The two women never met but probably crossed paths in an abandoned supermarket -- now a disaster recovery center -- on the south side of town where railroad tracks crisscross the terrain.

Monique Moses and Pauline Gallien spend lots of time at the center, on opposite sides of the partition. Moses is a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans. She is looking for a job. Gallien is a longtime Houstonian whose job is to find jobs for people like Moses. Right now, neither is having much success.

Their frustration embodies the question now facing this East Texas metropolis, which took in more evacuees -- an estimated 200,000 -- than any city outside of Louisiana: What is to be done with the thousands who, with their basic needs met, face the most vital step in their long-term recovery?

“I need to work,” says Moses, 26. “I can’t be like them that sit on their butts all day. I gotta have something to do. I just don’t know if this is the place I can do it.”

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Before Katrina wrecked her hometown, Moses worked as a shift manager at a Radley’s restaurant. Both her apartment and the restaurant were destroyed.

Four months after Katrina, she and her two daughters are resettled in southwest Houston. Her girls, ages 5 and 6, are enrolled in school, and their apartment has most of the accouterments of a home. The only missing piece is a livelihood to keep it all together.

Moses says she has pounded the pavement and filled out applications everywhere: McDonald’s, Wendy’s and the Home Depot, to name a few places. She has worn her best “customer service” face, smiling until her cheeks hurt. Day after day.

Only one employer, a Jack-in-the-Box, gave her an interview. The manager offered $6 an hour, and Moses told him she needed at least $8 an hour to survive. He never called back.

Her only lifeline has been the disaster-recovery center operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She has come to know the building well: a flat, sprawling, swarming place where workers from dozens of organizations stand by to help evacuees on almost every aspect of reestablishing their lives.

Moses has gone there seeking help on numerous fronts -- housing, transportation, insurance claims -- but never stopped at the cluster of tables devoted to placing people in jobs. Moses, like many evacuees, has never used an employment service.

If she had stopped, she probably would have met Gallien.

Gallien, 40, works for a nonprofit employment agency called the WorkSource, whose main service is matching clients with jobs listed in a database. Gallien’s station sits near the front entrance of the FEMA center.

From 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, WorkSource staffers sit behind folding tables, equipped with the barest of tools -- a notepad, telephone and computer -- greeting every evacuee with, “How can I help you?”

Even now, Gallien and her three colleagues see 100 to 130 evacuees a day. Some need help filling out unemployment forms or putting together a resume; many have just moved into more stable housing and are beginning to seek work.

“The typical person we’re seeing now is lower-skilled, a menial worker or restaurant worker, with a lower education level, not as strong in the communication skills,” Gallien says. “A lot of times they got by doing odd jobs and got paid on the side, so they don’t have an employment history.”

Gallien says these clients “face a real challenge” in Houston, where about 20% of residents live below the poverty line.

“Houston was full of people with the same backgrounds before the evacuees got here,” she says. “For every low-skilled evacuee, there are two Houston people with the same skill level competing for the same job.”

A recent federal survey suggests that 21% of Katrina evacuees actively seeking work are still unemployed.

The proportion could be higher in Houston, where the job market, so tied to energy production, remains tight. The city’s unemployment rate, roughly 6% in November, has consistently hovered above the national average.

“The folks with skills in the oil and gas industry found jobs,” says M. Ray Perryman, head of a Texas economics analysis company. “People who fill low-wage, service- and retail-type jobs -- it might take awhile for the economy to absorb them.”

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A reciprocal relationship has long existed between New Orleans and Houston, 327 miles apart. Houstonians traveled to New Orleans for culture and cuisine; New Orleanians went to Houston for jobs and better schools.

So when the storm hit, and New Orleanians needed a place to go, Houston put out the welcome mat and busloads of evacuees headed in this direction.

Houston, population 2 million, offered the most generous resettlement program of any large U.S. city.

An enormous city-led task force, using a voucher program, paid for 12 months of housing for more than 100,000 evacuees.

In mid-December, Mayor Bill White declared that Houston was “full.”

It’s not clear whether FEMA will help pay for proposed expansion of city services to handle the increase in population.

The Houston Police Department has requested 400 new officers, school districts have pleaded for additional teachers, and social service agencies have outlined the need for more funding.

But all the talk of expansion may be moot if evacuees don’t stay.

As many as 50,000 evacuees have already left the city, according to city officials.

“How many stay depends a lot on how many find jobs,” Gallien says. “The answer to that question nobody knows yet.”

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Moses is mulling over a Plan B. “I can’t find work, we can’t stay,” she says.

She has no emotional tie to Houston -- a government-hired bus driver brought her and 50 other evacuees to the Astrodome a day after Katrina. She has been here ever since. She’s not sure she even likes this city, which seems to have no real center.

In fact, this flat, humid, sprawling metropolis is the largest U.S. city without zoning laws, and the lack thereof has created numerous indistinct commercial districts and helter-skelter neighborhoods.

The Moses family moved into an apartment complex in the southwest, a once middle-class area turning into a lower-middle-class neighborhood of small, sagging houses. The Pines of Westbury is made up of 940 units divided among cubic two-story brick buildings evenly spaced over 5 acres. Most residents are black or Latino. Katrina evacuees occupy about 90 units.

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon, and Moses keeps glancing at her watch.

Her apartment is a hangout for evacuees at the Pines, and she’s expecting a small group to come over. She sinks into her couch, lets out a sigh and wonders out loud what happened to all her FEMA money.

“It went fast,” she says incredulously.

Aside from the housing voucher that allowed her to move into this complex, she got $2,000 in emergency funds and another $2,358 for move-in costs. The money went toward furniture, clothing and groceries. Then she rented a car for a month to look for work. That cost a grand.

Since then, job-hunting by bus has worn her out.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s her boyfriend, Lionel Robinson, 35, just back from Laredo, Texas. He lives at the Pines too, just around the corner. Like Moses, Robinson is a New Orleans native who lost everything to Katrina, including a job he treasured. He was a city bus driver making close to $50,000 a year.

Recently Robinson landed a job as a long-haul truck driver making 37 cents a mile. One recent week, he drove only 1,200 miles, including the trip to Laredo, earning $444 before taxes. “Not enough,” he says.

He, too, is looking for another job.

Within minutes, Moses’ girls come through the door with a neighbor and two young cousins. One of Moses’ aunts arrives with a teenage daughter. Hugs and how-are-yous are exchanged. Soon the apartment bustles with chatter.

The adults gather around the dining table, and the subject quickly turns to the future.

They are all in the same boat: dislocated, scratching for income and feeling uncertain about everything.

“We can’t stay here,” says evacuee Rosezina Jefferson, Moses’ oldest friend from New Orleans. She moved into the Pines with Moses’ help. “I might stay here for a minute, but one way or another, I’m going back home.”

“There is no more home,” Moses says. “Home ain’t home no more.”

Moses has another idea: road trip.

The others turn silent.

Moses says if she and Robinson don’t have good jobs by next summer, she’ll take the insurance money she’s been waiting for -- her car was destroyed by the flood -- and use it to pay for a job-seeking, home-finding road trip all over Louisiana.

She’d leave the kids with their father, and she and Jefferson and Robinson would hit the highway for a month. They’d go to smaller cities like Lafayette and Lake Charles, places closer to New Orleans.

“A road trip? For a month?” Jefferson says.

“A road trip,” says Robinson, considering the idea.

You must have a plan, Moses says.

And the plan is, “Come June, July, August, we’re getting in a car and going. If there’s nothing for us here, we’ll have to find it somewhere else.”