The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals plan to re-open for business this week in Houston ran into a logistics problem — furniture for the Court’s personnel could not be delivered until this weekend. Accordingly, the Court has pushed back its re-opening date to September 21 and the new deadline for filing non-emergency pleadings is October 10. Here is the Court’s announcement and related Order.
Meanwhile, this Chronicle article on the Fifth Circuit’s operations notes that none of the Court’s files in its New Orleans offices appear to have been damaged by the flood.

This Washington Post article reports that a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health has found that less than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters in Houston said they will return to the Crescent City and that about two-thirds of those who plan to relocate are probably going to settle permanently in the Houston area.
The findings in the survey are consistent with my anecdotal experience in talking with evacuees while volunteering over the past couple of weeks at the George R. Brown Convention Center and at my family’s church here in The Woodlands. Few of the evacuees who I have spoken with plan to return to New Orleans, primarily because they have lost everything and they do not believe that they will have any employment opportunities for a long time if they were to return. Those who have relatives in larger cities in the region tend to gravitate toward those family members, but few of the evacuees have any desire to move away from the region. I helped cook breakfast for some evacuees this past Tuesday morning, and one nice man put it to me in this way with a wry smile: “If we were to leave [the region], where would I fish?”
Finally, every evacuee with whom I have spoken has expressed heartfelt gratitude for the kindness and hospitality that Houstonians have shown them. One of my sons and I are looking forward to working the morning shift (4 a.m. to 10 a.m.) tomorrow at the Brown Convention Center, and it appears that we will be helping the last group of evacuees at the Brown prepare to move on to smaller shelters or apartments. Houston officials are projecting that the Brown Convention Center shelter may be able to be closed by as soon as the end of this weekend. The Astrodome and Reliant Convention Center shelters at Reliant Park are currently scheduled to be closed by early next week, although the Reliant Arena shelter at Reliant Park will probably continue to be City’s center for processing evacuees to smaller shelters and permanent housing for several more weeks.
Finally, the NY Times carried this nice piece about Houston‘s civic efforts to assist the evacuees from the Gulf Coast.
Update: Just got word that the Brown Convention Center will close as a shelter after dinner next Tuesday, September 20.

The Port of New Orleans re-opened on a limited basis yesterday and plans to be at 80% of capacity within three months. Moreover, the nearby Port of South Louisiana and Port Fourchon on the Gulf Coast have also partially restored service, and the Port of Pascagoula, Miss. expects to resume service by early October. Although the focus of analysis on the economic effect of Hurricane Katrina has been on the oil and gas industry, the economic impact on shipping along the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico has also been severe, so the reopening of the ports in the New Orleans area is good news.

Former Houstonian Christine Hurt of the Conglomerate blog passes along a new Houston-based blog by two South Texas College of Law professors — Tracy McGaugh and Kathy Bergin — who are making daily treks to Reliant Park and sometimes to the George R. Brown Convention Center to provide insight into the experience of the evacuees at both locations. The new blog is called White Washing the Black Storm: We Are Watching.
Each day, the profs volunteer at the medical aid table and ask what medicine is needed. Then, the profs go to a local drugstore and buy the medicine needed. The blog has a link where you can donate to the cost of the medicine, which the profs have been largely subsidizing.
The blog also provides somewhat unvarnished commentary on the goings on at each shelter, which is an important component of the complete story regarding Houston’s extraordinary effort to provide for the evacuees. It’s not all peaches and cream out there, folks.

Petroleum futures fell to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels for the first time since the storm yesterday on news of heavy losses in refined products and market concern that that high gasoline prices have depressed demand for product. Earlier posts on the developing economic effects of Katrina over the past couple of weeks are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Benchmark light, sweet crude oil futures for October settled at $63.34 a barrel on the Nymex Exchange, while Nymex gasoline futures for October settled down 8.60 cents at $1.8737 a gallon. Losses in heating oil futures on the Nymex were also substantial as the October contract settled down 8.22 cents at $1.8143 a gallon.
Despite the downward trend in the gasoline futures market, news on the Gulf oil and gas production front remained measured. Although operations at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port were fully restored yesterday for the first time since the storm, oil production in the Gulf of Mexico showed only marginal improvement during the weekend as about 57.4% of daily output remains offline. Almost 60% of the daily total was offline as of this past Friday.

Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington and runs the smart Fly Bottle blog. In this TCS Central piece piece (blog link here), Mr. Wilkinson deliciously exposes the muddled thinking behind three recent op-eds written by NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman that all contend that the principles of limited government and economic libertarianism caused the tragedy in New Orleans.
When I read Ms. Dowd’s piece earlier in the week, it occurred to me that her remark “when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens” rather naively presumed that less limited but competent government is a realistic alternative. However, Mr. Wilkinson’s op-ed takes that observation several steps further and concludes:

Dowd, Krugman, and Meyerson evidently loathe free markets and limited government. And they also loathe the Bush administration. Apparently it would be nice for them if they could bundle their hatreds into a package of loathing, tie it up in spite, and burn it. So they try. But the package won’t hold together, and they can’t bash Bush without burning themselves. The most cursory inspection of the front page indicates that the difference between him and them is simply the details of their hostility to economic freedom and small government.

Read the entire piece for some refreshing clear thinking.

Following on this post from earlier in the week regarding the economic impact to Houston of the arrival of thousands of former New Orleans residents, Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution provides his typically insightful analysis on the issue. Tyler notes that there are economic benefits and costs attributable to the arrival of the former New Orleans residents, and concludes:

Both the costs and benefits of resettlement will be overstated by partisans. The Houston boom won’t last long, and the costs will net out to put the city in a roughly break-even position.

My sense is that Tyler’s view is largely correct because most of New Orleans’ larger businesses that could provide a big employment boost for Houston (i.e., the port, refineries, etc.) will remain in New Orleans due to the huge capital investments there. The one difference with the exodus from New Orleans from other analogous circumstances is the decimation in New Orleans of small businesses, which were the largest employer in the area. The jobs with the big employers will return to New Orleans relatively quickly, but the replenishment of the supply of jobs attributable to small businesses — particularly small service companies — will take much longer because a huge number of those businesses were wiped out by the storm and do not have the capital or demand necessary to re-start their business in the New Orleans area any time soon. Whether any significant number of those jobs are ultimately re-created in the Houston economy remains to be seen.
On a related economic note, the Chronicle’s business columnist, Loren Steffy, has a good column in which he notes the prejudicial impact that the Bankruptcy Amendments of 2005 will have on many people who have been rendered insolvent as a result of Hurricane Katrina, not the least of which is the fact that such amendments increase the cost considerably of filing an individual bankruptcy case.

As noted in this earlier post, the closing of the credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp.’s purchase of New Orleans-based Hibernia Corp. had been delayed by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Today, the parties to that transaction announced that Hibernia had agreed to a 9% reduction in the purchase price as the price of the deal was reduced to $5.0 billion from the original price of $5.35 billion. Cap One had planned to close its purchase of Hibernia this week, but the acquisition is now scheduled to close in the fourth quarter.

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The title of this post is from Holman Jenkins’ insightful Wall Street Journal ($) column today in which he decries the role of federally-subsidized flood insurance in promoting the risk-taking that helped turn New Orleans into a disaster waiting to happen:

Professions of shock about the extent of the New Orleans disaster may be understandable from the broader public, but not from Louisianians themselves. Their disaster was the most predicted disaster in recent memory. The city’s vulnerability was well documented and this is one case where you can’t blame the press for taking its eye off the ball.

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This NY Times article provides a good summary of the response of the Houston business community to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the business opportunity that it represents. The article focuses on the short term business opportunities, although the more signficant economic impact to the overall Houston economy would be the potential population and job growth that could result from the exodus of New Orleans citizens to Houston. Nevertheless, the article is an interesting read of how Houston businesses are responding to the aftermath of Katrina, so check it out.
Update: Tory Gattis has good insights into the probable long-term economic impact of the hurricane on Houston’s economy.