Katrina Evacuees Mired In Unemployment

(AP)  In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, Katrina evacuee Samuel Smith sits on a donated futon and watches a borrowed television in a subsidized apartment the Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided for six months. The unemployed truck driver just started looking for work.

That would infuriate U.S. Rep. John Culberson, a Houston Republican who wants what he calls "deadbeat" evacuees from New Orleans out of his city.

"Time has long since passed for the able-bodied people from Louisiana to either find a job, return to somewhere in Louisiana or become Houstonians," said Culberson, whose district neighbors the city's southwest pocket where many of 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees settled in Houston.

"You have to make an effort not to have a job in Houston," he said.

Labor analysts tend to agree.

But jobless evacuees, keenly aware that Houston is feeling far less compassionate than it was 10 months ago, insist that finding work in the nation's fourth-largest city is not as simple as Houston's 5 percent unemployment rate might suggest.

Neither the city nor FEMA track unemployed evacuees, but a Zogby poll commissioned by the city in March found that 85 percent of the 606 evacuees surveyed were out of work. Sixty percent said they were looking for jobs.

The spotlight on unemployed evacuees intensified in May. Houston Mayor Bill White, standing beside newly re-elected New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, said evacuees could answer Nagin's plea to return home, or they were welcome to stay in Houston, if they got jobs.

White said he wanted refugees "looking for work wherever they can find work," which city officials say should not be a problem given a healthy local economy and about 64,000 new jobs added in the past year.

Job counselor Ayodele Ogunye of WorkSource, the city's employment assistance program, said jobless evacuees complain about the overwhelming bus and rail systems that make navigation difficult, or the bureaucratic holdups like professional licenses that are invalid in Texas.

But some of it, Ogunye said, is in their heads.

The fear of a new hurricane season worried one of her clients so much that "it was like it set her back 10 months." Others do not know how to market themselves or lack confidence, which Ogunye thinks is traced to feelings of isolation in the "evacuee" corner of their apartment complexes, where no one socializes like their lifelong neighbors in New Orleans.

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