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Population recovery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: exploring the potential role of stage migration in migration systems

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Abstract

In this research brief, we explore how places affected by natural disasters recover their populations through indirect, or “stage,” migration. Specifically, we consider the idea that post-disaster impediments (e.g., housing and property damage) in disaster-affected areas spawn migration flows toward and, over time, to disaster-affected areas through intermediary destinations. Taking as our case Orleans Parish over a 5-year period after Hurricane Katrina, we show that stage migration accounted for up to about one-fourth of population recovery. We close by discussing the implications, limitations, and potential extensions of our work.

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Fig. 1
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Fig. 6

Notes

  1. Orleans Parish and the City of New Orleans refer to the same place. Hereafter, for consistency, we use the former. Parishes in Louisiana are equivalent to US counties.

  2. Although estimates of county-to-county migration flows produced by the US Census Bureau come close, these are problematic because the timing criteria for identifying migrants changed between the 2000 Decennial Census and the various county-to-county migration flow files in the mid- to late-2000 s from American Community Survey (ACS), raising issues of comparability.

  3. The IRS periodizes their estimates using a 2-year window where, for example, for the period 2005–2006, 2005 is the year in which migration occurred and 2006 is the tax-filing year. Hereafter, we refer to each period using the former year, the year in which migration actually occurred.

  4. While county-to-county migration flow data are available from the IRS for 2011 and 2012, “due to the methodological changes between (these and past estimates), the data are not directly comparable” (Pierce 2015: 2).

  5. To facilitate a clearer display, the y-axis in Fig. 6 has been adjusted so that the maximum value displayed is one-half the maximum value displayed in Fig. 5.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH center grant #R24 HD041023 awarded to the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and center and training grants #R24 HD047873 and #T32 HD07014 awarded to the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and by funds to Curtis from the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Friday Seminar Series at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington on May 9, 2014, the annual meeting of the Population Association of America on May 1, 2014, and the Inequality and Methods Workshop at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota on April 18, 2014. The authors thank Lori Hunter and Mark Ellis for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, 909 Social Science Tower, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Jack DeWaard

  2. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 350 Agricultural Hall, 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Katherine J. Curtis

  3. Brown University, Box 1836, 68 Waterman Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Elizabeth Fussell

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  1. Jack DeWaard
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Correspondence to Jack DeWaard.

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DeWaard, J., Curtis, K.J. & Fussell, E. Population recovery in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: exploring the potential role of stage migration in migration systems. Popul Environ 37, 449–463 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-015-0250-7

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