Nearly all residents of New Orleans were displaced by hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Narayan Sastry has tracked displaced New Orleanians using census data. He found 53% returned within a year and the rest resettled – mostly in parts of Texas and Louisiana. He says: “Most of the displaced adults likely faced considerable economic and institutional barriers in being able to move back to the city, such as the lack of affordable rental housing.” He found that those who remained displaced tended to be demographically different from those who returned within a year. For instance, black residents were significantly less likely than non-blacks to have returned in the first year.

More about Sastry’s 10-year study of New Orleans Katrina evacuees shows demographic differences between returning and nonreturning >