This NY Times article reports on two recently-published Census Bureau reports that constitute the findings of the bureau’s first study on the social, financial and demographic impact of the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last summer on the Gulf Coast region:

After the twin barrages of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year, the City of New Orleans emerged nearly 64 percent smaller, having lost an estimated 278,833 residents, . . . Those who remained in the city were significantly more likely to be white, slightly older and a bit more well-off, . . . The bureau found that while New Orleans lost about two-thirds of its population, adjacent St. Bernard Parish dropped a full 95 percent, falling to just 3,361 residents by Jan. 1. [. . .] The black population of the New Orleans metropolitan area fell to 21 percent from 36 percent, the bureau found.
While the New Orleans area lost population, the Houston metropolitan area emerged with more than 130,000 new residents, many of them hurricane evacuees. Whites made up a slightly smaller percentage of Houston’s population ó 62.8 percent of the city in January compared with 64.8 percent last July, a month before Hurricane Katrina hit.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, median household income fell to $43,044 from $44,517, while New Orleans area’s actually rose, to $43,447 from $39,793.

Interestingly, the reports debunk widespread speculation that the New Orleans evacuees who went to nearby Baton Rouge, where the population grew by nearly 15,000, were disproportionately poor. The evacuees who landed in Baton Rouge ended up being more middle-class, while the poorer evacuees ended up going to more distant cities, such as Houston.