HOUSTON - Some live with family. Others reside in the apartments of welcoming strangers. But five-year-old Diamondneshay Ward survives in a car with her mother.

About 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees remain in the country's fourth-largest city. As of two o'clock Sunday morning, 5,263 of the evacuees live in the city's four major shelters: Reliant City, Reliant Center, the Astrodome and the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown. At one point, Houston housed as many 25,400 evacuees in its shelters.

City authorities and the displaced families say many of the evacuees who have moved out of the shelters dispersed themselves across the country to find more permanent lodging and jobs with friends and families. Many of the remaining evacuees plan to stay in Houston for an extended period of time. Some say they will never go back to New Orleans and may make Houston their new home.

Although there are tentative plans to condense the shelters into one, no one is sure which shelter will be used.

"It's a very fluid situation," said Frank Michel, Houston Mayor Bill White's communication director.

Regularly scheduled events have been canceled at the convention centers through the end of the month, Michel said. Until then, city officials are playing things by the ear.

Efforts are being made to move the evacuees into more permanent housing. As of Friday, 50 of the city's largest property owners had signed leases agreeing to house evacuees but not to price gouge, a crime that relatively few have committed, Michel said.

"We don't want to be in the shelter business," Michel said.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other members of her legislative team thanked the city of Houston repeatedly during a press conference.

"No state took as large a number, as heavy a burden, as did this state," Blanco said. "Y'all have redefined the word neighbor."

But not all Houstonians are happy about their new neighbors.

"There was concern about crime expressed early on by residents who saw people shooting at helicopters and television and thought: They're coming here," Michel said. "Some people made some assumptions."

Volunteer Sue Diegard, who lives a block from Reliant City - an area encompassing the Astrodome and its surroundings - said they worry about the increased crime rates, as well as job and housing shortages because of the evacuees.

"We're all in this together," she said. "This is our point in history, and it can either be looked back on in the history books as a negative or a positive."

Despite reports of rapes in the Astrodome and the Reliant Center, city officials insist crime is not a major problem.

Michel said the number of phones calls city emergency services have received are 3 percent less than they were during the same time period last year. Some weapons have been confiscated, but the vast majority of the 48 arrests in Reliant City have been for public intoxication. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous groups are beginning to meet.

Evacuee Walter Davis said he had one of the debit cards the Federal Emergency Management Association and Red Cross handed out to evacuees stolen from him by a volunteer.

After receiving the card, which had about $2,000 on it, he asked a volunteer for help because he didn't know how to use it. The volunteer took the card and told Davis he would have to go back to his bunk in the convention center to get his ID. When he came out, the lady was gone. She has not come back to work since. Davis contacted authorities to have the account frozen. No money was taken out. He is still working on getting another card.

Many of the new residents of Reliant City say they are grateful for the care they have received from the local authorities.

"Since I got to Houston, it's all been peaches and cream," said evacuee Wilford Jones.

When he arrived in Houston, Jones was still sick from a disease he caught from the infected water surging through New Orleans. He could not remember the disease's name.

"I was throwing up all colors: green, red, yellow," he said. "They put an IV in me and now I'm all better."

Many Houstonians serve as volunteers through organizations such as the Red Cross. Volunteer Andrea Morse, a sophomore at the University of Houston, said that when she arrived to volunteer yesterday she had to wait in line for an hour because there were so many people willing to give their time.

Texas A&M junior Erin Peterson said she volunteered because she had so much to give and could not stand not giving it.

"I'm a poor college student, so I don't have a lot of money, but I felt a little guilty not helping, so I gave what I could - my time," she said.