Mayor to evacuees: Get jobs already!

Nearly a year after they were displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thousands of evacuees in the Houston area are still jobless and relying on government handouts to live — but the handouts are going to stop sometime (no, really, they might), and Mayor Bill White says evacuees need to get ready for that day by finding jobs. "For those who are capable of working, then the job search needs to be time-consuming and aggressive and thorough," White told a group of state and local leaders and about 600 evacuees who gathered for an evacuee housing forum at the George R. Brown Convention Center yesterday.

It's really not an unfair request, we think, especially as the reality of tens of thousands of new permanent residents continues to set in. There are about 140,000 evacuees living in Houston, and a city poll commissioned in March found that 58 percent of them plan to make Houston their home — which means about 81,000 new Houstonians, most of whom are unemployed or making less than $25,000 a year. And based on the way things look, many evacuees will need prodding to get out there and find jobs: Analysts say anyone who tries to find work should be able to get work in Houston, but job counselors report a large number of evacuees who don't even make the effort. And so we end up with White pulling a dad-trying-to-get-deadbeat-kids-out-of-the-house routine. We'll see if it works.

Meanwhile, housing officials say Texas really needs $1 billion to cover housing vouchers, tax credits and block grants to meet evacuees' long-term needs. But will that happen? "No, that isn't going to happen," John Henneberger, director of the nonprofit Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, told the AP. "But there's going to be this huge need after March [when housing vouchers run out], and there's not a plan to deal with this." The state should find out next month how much it'll get from a nearly $1 billion hurricane relief package Congress passed; though most of the money will probably go to repairing homes and infrastructure in affected areas, some could be used to help with long-term evacuee housing.