BAKER, La. — It was not long after Hurricane Katrina, in late 2005, that local governments all over Louisiana started saying no to clusters of the tinny white shelters now known, infamously, as FEMA trailers.

They did not ban all the trailers, of course; just the ones for people who did not own land, who had no place else to go, who were mainly poor and black and from New Orleans’s toughest neighborhoods. Just the trailers for the hurricane’s most desperate victims.

But when everyone else said no, Harold M. Rideau, the mayor of this small city outside Baton Rouge, said yes.

“We agreed we’d do what’s right,” Mr. Rideau said recently. “It was a no-brainer as far as I was concerned.” Of course, it was not as simple as that.

But in large part because of the mayor, this city — nestled rather uneasily between farm country and the state capital — became home to Renaissance Village. With almost 600 trailers lined up like big tombstones, it was by far the largest encampment for hurricane victims run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now, almost three years after the storm that left New Orleans under water, the trailer park is closing. FEMA’s deadline is May 31. The number of trailers in the “village” is dwindling, to fewer than 200. White pipes mark trailer sites, but more than half of the pipes just poke up out of the weeds, with only muddy tire tracks or old Mardi Gras beads to show that anyone lived there.

As the remaining residents worry about where they will go next, the mayor took time before a recent Rotary Club lunch to talk about the lessons he had learned and how he had become a champion for people who sometimes seemed to get a kinder welcome in Houston than they did in their home state.

The biggest lesson from Baker’s experience may be how few of the predicted problems actually materialized, which Mr. Rideau attributes to lots of planning. Early on, he came up with a long list of things that he felt the trailer community would need, including laundry facilities and legal services.

Some of them he got, like bus service to and from town, job training and a shaded picnic area. But telephones were never installed, and he could never persuade anyone to open a small store so residents would have an easier time buying necessities like milk.

There were struggles, he said, to get the federal government to reimburse the city for its costs, to get post office boxes installed at the trailer park, to ease traffic jams in town, to get the dusty gravel roads around the park paved, and — oddly — to find a home for a new playground donated by the Baton Rouge Rotary Club and Rosie O’Donnell’s For All Kids Foundation. The state and federal governments did not want the liability, Mr. Rideau said, so the playground was installed in a park next to the municipal building, one of the few tangible changes that will remain in Baker after the trailer park closes.

Baker’s City Hall and its churches opened shelters before Hurricane Katrina hit, “with no thought that New Orleans would flood,” Mr. Rideau said. More than 2,000 evacuees poured into a city with a population of less than 14,000; about 500 children enrolled in Baker’s already struggling schools, he said.

He had expected to house people for two days; they stayed in the shelters for two months.
Traffic jammed the city’s streets, grocery stores were packed, lines at Wal-Mart seemed endless. Residents remember a lot of tension between the 504s (people with New Orleans area codes) and the 225s (those with Baker-Baton Rouge area codes).

Meanwhile, the mayor had been approached by a federal contractor about building a trailer park on state-owned property just outside the city limits. The city was asked to provide water and fire protection.

Not everyone in Baker was welcoming; there was a lot of worry about crime, the mayor recalled. Race may have played a role; Mr. Rideau, who is black, said that he was first elected in 2004 in part because of his vow to heal the racial divide in Baker, which before the storm was split almost evenly between whites and blacks.

But the mayor, a Vietnam veteran and graduate of Southern University at Baton Rouge who had retired after working for decades at the Exxon Mobil chemical plant here, said he felt compelled to help evacuees the way he had been helped when he was growing up poor in Bunkie, La.

“I’m going to die, I’m going to have to stand before the good lord and account for what I’ve done,” the mayor said. Besides, the evacuees “had nowhere to go — what are you going to do?”

Nobody who has visited the camp, much less lived in it, thinks it was an ideal place for evacuees, especially after it turned out that many trailers were tainted by formaldehyde fumes. But many people who have worked there credit the mayor with making it a more humane place than it otherwise would have been.

“I’m his biggest fan,” said Sister Judith Brun, executive director of the Community Initiatives Foundation.

Wilbert L. Ross Sr., a member of the residents’ council at the trailer park, said the mayor had intervened in crises, like when water was shut off to some trailers on the Fourth of July. Mr. Rideau also helped with some nagging problems, Mr. Ross said, like telling the police to back off when residents were getting tickets for trespassing or jaywalking because there were no sidewalks on which to walk to town.

In fact, Mr. Ross said, “I really care more about the mayor of Baker than I do about Ray Nagin,” the mayor of New Orleans.

For his part, Mayor Rideau said he thought that the federal government should have done more to rebuild housing in New Orleans, and more to help poor residents of the trailer park move on with their lives. But in general, he said, “I have no regrets.”

Neither, apparently, do most of his constituents; in February, Mr. Rideau was re-elected, by a margin of two to one.