Dislocation and return of New Orleans residents one year after Hurricane Katrina

Narayan Sastry, University of Michigan

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Louisiana, on the morning of August 29, 2005. Virtually the entire population of the city was displaced and forced to resettle, which some did temporarily and others permanently. Little is know about where displaced residents settled and who returned to New Orleans and who did not. In this paper, we use new data from the restricted version of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) to examine the location of pre-Katrina residents of New Orleans in the year after the hurricane. The aim is to describe the displacement and return or resettlement of this population and to analyze the factors that determined these individuals’ locations. The ACS data will provide a unique opportunity to examine the geographic dispersion of New Orleans residents throughout the U.S. in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.