It may go down in history as the Gulf Coast Diaspora. Or perhaps the Gulf Coast Gold Rush.

More than 1 million people from a three-state region have been scattered to points near and far because of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. They're homeless, or jobless, or both; young and old; rich and poor; native-born and those who'd adopted this place.

Some will never return.

The exodus of those with no homes or jobs - along with those who are just weary of putting up with hurricanes - could be as dramatic as the flight from the Dust Bowl, when drought caused poverty-stricken Okies to flee westward, or the decades-long Great Migration of blacks to the industrial cities of the North.

That would be the diaspora.

But there's something about this potential exodus that makes it different. In this case, there may be no end to the list of people and investors willing to fill the void, much as they've done for years in hurricane-prone Florida.

That would be the gold rush.

"We can look to Florida as sort of a bellwether. Have you seen people fleeing the beaches?" asks Ronald Cossman, a social science researcher at Mississippi State University.

Newcomers who were beginning to discover the Gulf Coast and its low cost of living before Katrina are unlikely to turn away now. They'll come in droves - and that could change the social and economic fabric of South Mississippi and surrounding areas forever.

Homes and jobs

The devastation wrought by the Category 4 hurricane that struck Aug. 29 is mind-numbing. Homes and businesses all across coastal Mississippi were swept away by winds and water. Portions of U.S. Highway 90 look like they were twisted and crumbled by an earthquake.

The hurricane obliterated coastal Pass Christian, Long Beach, Bay St. Louis and Waveland, and cut out beachfront portions of Biloxi, Gulfport, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula.

David Swanson, professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi and director of the university's Center for Population Studies, did a preliminary study that shows some staggering numbers.

In Mississippi, 80 percent of housing in Hancock and Harrison counties and 60 percent of housing in Jackson, Pearl River and Stone counties may have been destroyed. That translates to 127,146 housing units valued at $10.7 billion, and 293,991 displaced persons.

In four Louisiana parishes - Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines and St. Bernard - as many as 100 percent of housing may have been rendered uninhabitable. Two other parishes, St. John the Baptist and St. Tammany, may have had as much as 60 percent of their housing destroyed. The toll comes to 494,827 housing units valued at $48 billion and 1.1 million displaced persons.

Overall, Katrina wiped out 621,973 housing units valued at $59 billion, and displaced 1.4 million people, according to Swanson's preliminary numbers.

Figures compiled by the American Red Cross are more conservative. The Red Cross estimates of 171,000 South Mississippi dwellings, more than 65,380 or 38 percent, were destroyed and 38,600 sustained major damage. Add Louisiana to the mix and the number goes to 400,000.

And then there are the jobs, or lack thereof.

Government figures released Thursday show 279,000 people were thrown out of work by Katrina, a figure that doesn't include those not yet seeking unemployment benefits. Some private economists predict a half-million people or more will have lost jobs by the final count. The Congressional Budget Office puts Katrina-related job losses at 400,000 for the final four months of the year.

Add to that the number of people who are weary of dealing with hurricanes and it appears the movement of people will be significant, experts say.

"It's pretty clear not all of them will go back to doing what they did before," Swanson said.

He and others from the University of Mississippi have asked evacuees if they planned to return and found that 30 percent weren't interested in going back home.

Reluctant migrants

That's the bottom line question: How many will stay and how many will find a new place to call home?

It boils down to: What is built to replace what was lost; the financial means of the evacuees; and, to a large extent, their state of mind, ranging from attachment to place to fear of another hurricane.

Most who left did not want to, said Bill Frey, a Brookings Institute demographer who specializes in migration issues. He said this region of the country is characterized by residents with a strong attachment to place and culture.

"I think the people who left, especially in New Orleans, are people who would not have left under almost any circumstances," said Frey, noting a high percentage have lived their whole lives in the Crescent City.

"These are hard-core (residents) that stayed during economic downturns," Frey said. "They have this very strong attachment. These are very reluctant migrants."

The same can be said in Mississippi.

"We have one of the highest percentage of native-born," said Cossman, assistant research professor at the Social Science Research Center at MSU. Just over 74 percent of the state's population was born in Mississippi. In Louisiana the figure is 82.4 percent.

Ties along the Coast may be less strong. Census figures show just 52 percent of residents of the Biloxi-Gulfport-Pascagoula metro area were born in Mississippi.

Cossman said people will return to New Orleans and South Mississippi if they have a strong social network in the area - an emotional investment. And that, to a certain extent, will be determined by whether friends and relatives stay.

"If you're part of a family, a network or community, that's a pretty strong draw," Cossman said.

But, as with other large migrations, the evacuees may find ties elsewhere. Frey said evacuees may move from their initial place of refuge to areas of the country where they have traditionally migrated, and form expatriate communities.

New Orleans expatriates, for example, have a large presence in Oakland, Calif. Other people from Louisiana have migrated to portions of Texas and Maryland.

Emotional attachments aside, there are some very tangible financial reasons that will determine whether the displaced will stay away. A lot of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed due to storm surge did not have flood insurance, Cossman said.

"These people have lost their wealth. They had all that home equity, and now it's wiped clean and there's no one who is going to pay them back for that," Cossman said. "A lot who will want to rebuild will not have the resources to do that."

Those evacuees who did not have the means to leave on their own likely don't have the means to return. Cossman said these are the ones who will have a harder time getting back, though they might have the strongest family and community ties.

Frey said the middle class and the more affluent are in a much different position. They have a wider range of choices and might or might not return.

Mike Gossman, administrator of the Cedar Lakes Surgery Center, will be able to rebuild. He lost his home in Ocean Springs, as did every neighbor on his street. He had all the insurance he needed, including flood coverage, he said.

He's displaced, but not dispersed to another part of the country. He's staying with his in-laws in Ocean Springs. He'll be moving into another house in Woolmarket so he can rebuild - if insurance premiums don't rise too much.

"We want to rebuild. We have deep roots here, with good friends and neighbors," said Gossman, who was born in Pensacola and has lived in Biloxi, New Orleans, Slidell, Tampa and Clearwater, Fla.

He said it never crossed his mind to move out. "This is my home. Why would I leave?"

But many of those who evacuated to north Mississippi and beyond will look for a job there - and if they find one they may never return to the Coast, Cossman said.

"Maybe what you'll see is the breadwinner coming back, but they may leave their family in place in Starkville or Memphis," Cossman said.

If rebuilding takes too long?

"Six months or a year from now are they going to come back? If there are opportunities for them, they will," Frey said.

They will if Florida is any indication.

The Sunshine State rebounds

Florida might be the best example.

Stan Smith of the University of Florida thinks South Mississippi will have a temporary population loss, but it will primarily be because it will take time to rebuild.

"I think when you're looking at say the Alabama-Mississippi Gulf Coast, you might have a similar situation to Florida, especially after Hurricane Andrew. There were a whole lot of units destroyed or damaged and a lot of people moved out short-term, but most of them eventually returned," he said.

The permanent loss for Miami-Dade County after Andrew was 40,000 residents, of which 15,000 left the state entirely. That, Smith said, represented two years of growth. It was more than made up in short order.

"After that, the growth continued as it had been before," he said. "My guess would be that most people (in Mississippi and Alabama) will decide that, either because of the other amenities of the area or family ties, it's still a pretty good place to live."

New Orleans, Smith said, is a different case. One of the key reasons is the number of homes left uninhabitable is large - and most were damaged by floodwaters.

"My understanding is that a pretty substantial part of the housing stock was fairly old. Given the contamination as well as the water damage, thousands of homes are going to have to be demolished," Smith said.

A lot of rethinking will have to be done on just how to build a city that is below sea level and depends so much on a system of levees to protect homes and businesses. That could mean different types of housing for the flooded areas.

"It may price it out of the range of low-income people that might have been there before," Smith said.

The inflow

Swanson said with every emigration others flow in to replace them. But past ones did not involve anything like a rush. Any vacuum caused on the Gulf Coast may be quite different.

He said he knows new residents will come, "but I don't know what it's going to look like." For now, most of the newcomers fall into the category of cleanup, repair and construction workers, he said.

The first to come are the "pioneers," generally single men or men who left the family elsewhere. They come to earn money, then return home. But some will end up staying and bringing their families.

"They're not considered residents, but they're there," Swanson said of the newcomers. "Some who come down - it's the classic story of migration - some of them stick and send word back to their hometown."

One of the most notable groups of newcomers are Hispanic, going where the jobs are and clustering with friends. They include workers from Mexico as well as U.S.-born Latinos.

But there will also be the well-to-do, looking for an opportunity to buy up waterfront property that traditionally is the most valuable. One real estate agent in Jackson County said a New York developer was seeking to buy land along the Coast, including sites to build homes for themselves. And just last week a condo developer inked a deal to buy some beachfront land in devastated Pass Christian for $2 million.

"If I had property down there I would not sell to the first person who came along," said Swanson. "It's high-amenity property."

The rebuilding

That the cities will be rebuilt is a given.

It was suggested early on that maybe New Orleans should not be rebuilt because it sits below sea level and the rupture of the levees proved so costly. But it's not the only place in that position. Look at the Netherlands and Venice.

Besides, rebuilding is part of the human condition. It happened in Chicago after the 1871 fire, in Galveston after the 1900 hurricane and in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

The nation after World War II embarked on efforts to rebuild European and Asian cities devastated by years of armed conflict.

The rebuilding will take tens of billions of dollars. And what will eventually rise in New Orleans and South Mississippi will look different. Some of the things that made New Orleans unique remain, including the French Quarter and the Garden District. But scant little of South Mississippi's unique waterfront vista is left.

Author Harry S. Dent Jr., chief economist of High Street Financial, an investment management firm in Tampa, said the rebuilding will mark the beginning of a boom.

"As we saw with Hurricane Andrew, there was a building boom and rejuvenation," he said. "You get to redo things right."

For the areas devastated by Katrina, that could include putting Mississippi's casinos on land instead of in the water - and New Orleans can make levees better. Dent likened it to the way a forest fire permits new growth.

Gulfport-based contractor David Dennis, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of New Orleans, said this is a time to put a master plan together that could include everything from height restrictions to new zoning options.

But just how to "redo things right" could be a source of tension between newcomers and long-time residents.

There are already early indications the condominium boom just begun in South Mississippi - 65 projects and 11,000 units on the drawing boards before the hurricane - is likely to kick into high gear.

Two structures on the Gulfport shoreline left standing were the twin Legacy Towers. The sales manager said it proved beachfront condo construction is safe.

But that raises another issue: Will the codes and the new buildings make it too expensive for some to live here?

Past migration studies focused on the social conflicts that arose in areas where Okies and Southern blacks settled. This time, how the place they left - the Gulf Coast - redevelops may be prime material for study.

Dennis has high hopes for this area's future.

"The idea is to take this as an opportunity - a tragic opportunity," he said.