As south Florida and the Caribbean brace for Hurricane Irma — and Houston begins to face the destruction left by Harvey — the future of these cities is up in the air.
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans more than a decade ago, many of the city’s residents were evacuated to the Houston Astrodome. And afterward, with nothing to go home to in New Orleans, many of those evacuees stayed in Houston.
So in the aftermath of Harvey, as people go home to houses full of mold and flooded cars, will Houstonians stay?
A team of researchers tracked migration patterns after 5,000 natural disasters in the U.S. that took place between 1920 and 2010.
Matthew Kahn was one of those researchers. He's the chair of the Economics Department at the University of Southern California.
