With Fewer Residents Paying Taxes, Rockport's Financial Future Looks Grim After Harvey
We’ve heard countless stories about the repairs and rebuilding that will continue for untold months to come in Texas cities devastated by Hurricane Harvey, but here’s something that doesn’t get much attention – it’s a kind of downward spiral that’s getting worse and makes the possibly of rebuilding grow more distant.
Andy Uhler, a Marketplace reporter based in Texas, has been looking into the economic impact in Rockport, where Harvey first made landfall. The bottom line is that many people’s homes in Rockport don’t exist anymore, so people have left.
“Officials – the mayor, county judges, whomever – are saying ‘Look, I don’t blame you if you don’t come back, because FEMA has given you money to go somewhere else, to get a hotel, to rent a property, because we don’t have any places for people to stay here in Rockport,’” Uhler says.
There’s no way to know if, or when, Rockport residents might return.
Uhler says Rockport’s mayor C.J. Wax recently told him, “If you have to live as far away as Portland [Texas] to find a place to live and you were working in a restaurant, are you going to drive back here to work in a restaurant or are you going to get a restaurant job in Portland? Especially if the compensation is about the same.”
Read more: http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/with-fewer-residents-paying-taxes-rockports-financial-future-looks-grim-after-harvey/
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