HOUSTON — On a recent Sunday afternoon, tears welled in Sharon Becnel’s eyes as she heard her now 34-year-old daughter reminisce about the scrapbook she lost to Hurricane Katrina. 

Inside the pages were Ronisha Johnson’s childhood dreams of becoming an actress and winning a big case as a lawyer. She had only packed for a weekend, not thinking she would need to take her beloved childhood memories.

“I didn’t realize whatever that last time was I walked out of that bedroom, I had no idea I would never see it again,” Johnson said from Alexander Deussen Park in Houston. “And that’s crazy.”

Becnel’s family evacuated the weekend before the storm — well ahead of the official order — and shared her aunt’s Sugar Land, Texas, home with nearly 20 relatives. Initially, it was temporary. But then they returned after the storm to find their two-story home uninhabitable, so they made do in transition at her aunt’s four-bedroom home. For four months, they carved out a sleeping space wherever they could, from closets to kids’ rooms.

“We worked it out,” Becnel said. “We banded together and did the laundry, kept the house clean, [and] took turns cooking.”

For years, the greater Houston area had been a summer getaway for Becnel. But the New Orleans native never imagined calling it home — until Katrina made landfall in Louisiana 20 summers ago.

“The storm put us out of our home and everything we knew,” said Becnel, a caterer and mom of three. “We had to come here and start all over, get used to Houston, [and] the way things were here.” 

While some Hurricane Katrina evacuees eventually returned to New Orleans to rebuild their lives, many of those who were displaced found not just refuge, but a new beginning in Houston. Nearly two decades later, the city that offered temporary shelter to hurricane survivors has become a permanent home for tens of thousands of people like Becnel. New Orleanians, who found stability and success as they redefined their identities, have also reshaped the city’s social, cultural, and economic landscape. 

As Houstonians, they launched businesses, enriched local schools and universities, revitalized neighborhoods, and left a lasting imprint on the city’s identity — all while preserving the vibrant traditions of their “Nawlins” roots. 

Creole cuisine flourished. Second-line parades — once a distinctive part of Black New Orleans communities — began popping up at weddings and community events across Houston, bringing brass bands, parasols, and joyful street dancing into the city’s celebratory fabric.

“There was an infusion of a whole new population and a spirit of life,” said New Orleans native and Katrina evacuee Mtangulizi Sanyika, who founded the nonprofit New Orleans Association of Houston. 

Sanyika, 82, who has been teaching African studies since 1968, said he intended to retire when he got to Dillard University in New Orleans, until Katrina struck and turned things upside down. He commuted 348 miles from Houston to New Orleans for five years before landing a position in town at Texas Southern University, where he eventually retired in 2014.

Sanyika’s organization was formed to support former New Orleanians as they transitioned to life in Houston after the hurricane. It held annual Katrina anniversary commemorations, which he said gradually dissolved around 2010 once evacuees were able to return to their homes in Louisiana.

“For a while, people saw Black people doing things that they hadn’t seen before. People don’t see Black people parading in the streets of Houston and second lining,” said Sanyika. “We brought another culture to the city of Houston, more than anything else.”

“Houston has afforded us a good life”

Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 5 storm, stands as one of the most catastrophic and costly natural disasters in U.S. history. It left roughly $201.3 billion in damages in its wake. The hurricane submerged nearly 75% of the New Orleans metropolitan area, killed more than 1,800 people, and displaced hundreds of thousands, leading to one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history. 

More than 250,000 evacuees found refuge in Houston. By 2006, Houston’s population surged by 9%, reaching nearly 2.2 million residents — the city’s largest single-year percentage increase between 2000 and 2022.

After Hurricane Katrina, Becnel remembers a grocery trip to a Sugar Land Target where a woman paid for their groceries. The woman had heard her family’s accent and immediately recognized they were from New Orleans.

“That’s when I realized that people all over Houston, all over the world, wanted to help families,” she said.

That was the first sign. The next came when her family eventually settled in the Houston suburb of Humble, where her kids loved attending the city’s high school, she said.

“They actually did better once they got here,” Becnel said.

She said the community’s generosity and selflessness, and the quality of the education, are what convinced her to stay in Houston. 

The same was true for New Orleans native Shauntell Black, who first evacuated to Atlanta after the storm with her then-2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. She didn’t like Atlanta and eventually moved to Houston in 2007 after reconnecting with a member of her sorority.

She loved how Houston gave New Orleanians a little piece of home: the ease of being able to get crawfish, red beans, or a hot sausage patty in local grocery stores, to stumbling upon brass bands and the familiar sounds of jazz.

As an educator, Black said she also appreciated the quality of public school education compared to New Orleans; she said her daughter excelled in Advanced Placement classes.

“Houston has afforded us a good life here,” Black said. “I can’t really say that I would have had this same life in New Orleans.”

Studies show that in the years after Hurricane Katrina, the students displaced from New Orleans who later returned had improved test scores, and the New Orleans education system made several reforms to improve the quality of education.  

Former city of Houston officials attribute it to the quick, coordinated effort led by then-Houston Mayor Bill White to ensure evacuees could rebuild their lives as quickly as possible.

White said he realized New Orleans would be uninhabitable once he learned the levees were breached. He went into action, reaching out to faith leaders, executives in the private and public sectors, Houston Independent School District and Houston Community College leaders to prepare for the influx of evacuees. 

He helped set up the George R. Brown Convention Center as a shelter and worked with then-Harris County Judge Ed Emmett to open the Houston Astrodome as well. 

“Our goal was to treat our fellow Americans like we would want to be treated if we were in that situation,” White said.  

While the broader governmental response between local, state, and federal agencies to Hurricane Katrina was marred by confusion and delays as the Federal Emergency Management Agency was slow to deploy resources, Houston distinguished itself as a compassionate neighbor. 

“It was really a coordinated effort where everybody came together,” said Linda McMillan, the former director of education and special projects for White’s office. “You couldn’t improve student learning alone; you had to improve their living conditions, you had to work with the parents, you had to work with the school districts, and we had to ensure they could get some type of jobs.”

The city’s response garnered national attention, earning White the 2007 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

“People said, ‘Oh, you rolled out the red carpet,’” White added. “No, what we did is our job.” 

Hurricane Katrina also prompted significant reforms, such as the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, which granted FEMA more authority and flexibility to mobilize resources quickly and more effectively. The act became a turning point in how the U.S. approaches disaster preparedness and response, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now, President Donald Trump has made significant cuts to FEMA and said he wants to eliminate the agency as soon as December 2025. 

“Katrina set the precedent for the nation,” said Chrishelle Palay, a Houston-native and the executive director of the Houston Organizing Movement for Equity (HOME) Coalition, who has worked in disaster recovery and advocacy since Hurricane Ike in 2008. 

Becnel, who previously cooked at an assisted living facility and sold dinner plates in New Orleans as a side hustle, has found that Creole cuisine is more in demand in Houston. She is now an entrepreneur and owner of a business called Idias Catering, which stands for “I do it all.” 

After nearly 15 years building her clientele and helping bring Creole food to weddings, baby showers, and corporate events, she is working on securing a food truck. 

“I didn’t expect to like it this much,” Becnel said. “I didn’t know that Houston would be home. I didn’t think I could live outside of New Orleans. You couldn’t tell me that I would be living here.”