HOUSTON, Sept. 11 -- Houston's newest neighborhood has its own Zip code, hospital, ATMs and a playground with swing sets and slides. There's a government and, already, opposition leaders. Sunday, the archbishop led Catholic Mass.
They've named the neighborhood Reliant City, after the sports and convention complex that includes the Astrodome and that has sheltered the largest number of hurricane evacuees. The "Town Square," complete with ribbon-cutting, went up this weekend -- a collection of basketball hoops, washers and dryers, and air-conditioned tents with game rooms and lounges on a lot where Astros fans used to park for baseball games.
A team of health inspectors tests the food that is delivered around the clock on flatbed trucks -- buns, barbecue, chicken sandwiches, apples, grits. Antique brown trolley cars evoking simpler times have turned from tourist buses into shuttles for stranded survivors. And yellow school buses pull up at 7 a.m. to bring Louisiana's children to new classrooms where they may not sit tomorrow. By 4 p.m. they are dropped off back at their current address, Reliant Park, Zip code 77230.
Thirteen days ago, this was an aging sports stadium and convention center in semi-retirement, hosting the occasional rodeo, car show and high school football game. Now it is an encampment that has sheltered, fed, and arranged aid and services for more than 24,000 people -- the largest in Red Cross history, officials with the relief organization say. Thousands more are staying in smaller shelters scattered across the suburbs of this sprawling oil city.
Life here is a mix of organization and improvisation, kindness and false starts. Parents stand in lines for food, donated clothing and other pieces of their new lives, from food stamps to Section 8 housing vouchers. Then they wait. Others sit on plastic crates on a sidewalk outside the Astrodome and stare into the crowd of people walking purposefully by.
Adolphe Lamothe Jr. inhaled his cigarette and rested his swollen ankles on the curb. "It's the best that can be done right now," he said of his Texas home, a cot surrounded by other cots. "I'm used to being relaxed in drawers and an undershirt. I don't take too well to strangers.
"I just try to keep busy trying to take care of things," the taxi driver added.
Lamothe, 50, held a working cell phone, retrieved from a plastic bag in which he also sealed his charger and $240 in cash before jumping into the floodwaters from his roof in New Orleans. Now he was waiting for a call from Verizon to pay his bill.
Two men took a water break a few feet away, a maintenance crew working double shifts. Their job was to unclog dozens of stopped-up toilets and showers, and refill bathroom soap dispensers. "Everything that can break is breaking," one said. "It's like a Super Bowl every day, but that's one actual event. This keeps going."
The population here has thinned from its peak over Labor Day weekend to about 6,000 Sunday, as families move to hotels, temporary apartments and private homes. Officials say their goal is to close the shelter in a week, but they acknowledge that, as with so much of the relief effort, plans to "demobilize" might need to be put off a few days.
There is an increasing sense of permanence here. The post office, which dispenses envelopes and stamps from the stadium's old ticket windows, received its first letters to evacuees last week. The mail was quickly sorted, and a list of lucky people was taped to the window: Harold Cordes; May Della Guidry; Janika Polk; Tia Marie Nellum; "Fraise, Russell, Shellie or Demitriss."
On the Astrodome floor, the rows of cots where strangers slept next to other strangers have become neighborhood blocks, the beds now moved into squares of reunited families and new friends. "This is my house," said Raymond Grant, 41, gesturing to a clump of cots where, he, his wife and five children were sleeping last week.
