The Long-Term Recovery of New Orleans’ Population After Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina created a catastrophe in the City of New Orleans when the storm surge caused the levee system to fail on August 29, 2005. The destruction of housing displaced hundreds of thousands of residents for varying lengths of time, often permanently. It also revealed gaps in our knowledge of how population is recovered after a disaster causes widespread destruction of urban infrastructure and housing. In this article, I identify social, spatial, and temporal explanatory frameworks for housing and population recovery and use them to review research findings on mobility—both evacuation and migration—after Hurricane Katrina. The review reveals a need for a comprehensive social, spatial, and temporal framework for explaining inequality in population displacement and recovery.