Returning to New Orleans in the Year after Hurricane Katrina: Disparities by Race and the Effects of Flooding

The presence of location-specific capital in New Orleans for residents of the city may have been a major draw for displaced residents to return to the city; however, much of this capital may have been lost in the aftermath of Katrina due to the evacuation and resettlement of residents (Paxson and Rouse, 2008). [...] The total area under the dashed line in Figure 1 represents the normalized proportion of the pre-Katrina adult population that returned to their dwellings in New Orleans in the year after the hurricane—which, as shown in Table 2, is about 31% of the adult population. [...] Of particular interest is a comparison of the height of the conditional distribution of the returned adult population to that of the pre-Katina distribution of this population, which reveals the conditional likelihood of returning to New Orleans by flood depth. [...] The overall race difference in the odds of returning to 23 the same dwelling is summarized at the bottom of the panel and is calculated as the weighted sum of the race interaction effects—with the pre-Katrina category population means serving as the weights—and the main race effect. [...] We uncovered evidence of an important social network effect on the likelihood of returning to the pre-Katrina dwelling in our analysis that used two separate measures of flood depth—one at the block level, which proxied for flood damage to the dwelling, and the other for the local area, which, we suggest, is consistent with the presence of social network effects and the presence of a coordination.