By the time Mtangulizi Sanyika got to Houston in September 2005, he and his wife were tired of moving. Sanyika, a lifelong resident of New Orleans and a professor at a historically Black college in the city, had spent weeks jumping from town to town after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Simultaneously, he waited for information about his mother and sister, who had been stranded in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital with no power and little food. Eight people died at the hospital while waiting to be evacuated, but Sanyika’s mother and sister made it out, and the family reunited in Houston, where some of their cousins lived.
Within a few months, Sanyika and his wife had set up in an apartment provided almost for free by the administration of Houston mayor Bill White, a Democrat, and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The Texas city staged an unprecedented resettlement effort after more than 200,000 displaced people arrived post-Katrina, many of them crowded into the Astrodome sports stadium. White’s evacuee rehousing program earned Houston nationwide praise, and it wa... Read more
