Hurricane Katrina displaced more than 400,000 people from the New Orleans area and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, according to a Census Bureau report to be released today, one of the most comprehensive looks at the hurricane-induced migration. The figures show that the New Orleans metropolitan area, and not just the city, remains vastly shrunken in population four months after the storm, having lost 378,000 people, and that those who remained were more prosperous and were far more likely to be white. Whereas the population of the New Orleans region was 54 percent non-Hispanic white before the storm, that proportion had grown to 68 percent in the months after the storm, the figures show. ‘We knew the city was becoming whiter and less poor, but now we know the entire New Orleans region was,’ said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the new figures. ‘This is the first real numbers on this. Everything else has been guesswork.’ The figures show that the Gulfport-Biloxi region lost 41,000 people from before Katrina to January, ranking it second among metropolitan areas for population loss. But in contrast to the New Orleans region, the Mississippi […]