I live in the western suburbs of Houston. It's pretty much a Biblical scale disaster here, but you all already know that.
I'm not a fan of Joel Osteen, but I can't blame him or others in his organization for not getting their facility open. If it's true that there is no kitchen or showers, and I believe that given my understanding of his organization, then it's not a good place to shelter a large number of people for an undetermined length of time. My church out in the suburbs sheltered a bunch of Katrina refugees and you do need appropriate facilities. We had to enlist the high school across the street to provide shower access; there is no high school across the street from Osteen's facility. We do have a kitchen and plenty of nearby fast food and we managed to keep them all fed for a month while we helped them find housing and jobs, but it was a huge effort. Osteen doesn't really run an organization that many of us recognize as a church, so he doesn't have the kind of plant infrastructure that a church would have, and that's the kind of infrastructure that can serve as a long term shelter. If it were a matter simply of getting people out of the wind and rain for a few hours that's one thing, but the situation here requires much more than that. Had he thrown open his doors it could have been Superdome II.
Furthermore even if his facility did have the appropriate capabilities, the city has been paralyzed. How many people does it take to open and run his facility and how were they supposed to get into Greenway Plaza when every intersection and underpass in Houston has been completely impassable due to water accumulation? If they were actually emergency services personnel then maybe we could expect them to have the resources and accountability to handle the conditions which have been prevailing here, but they aren't. They aren't even a church, which might have a mission that motivated and equipped a similar service ethic. Believers find plenty to criticize in Osteen's presentation, but I can't expect him to be something he's not or to do something for which he is not physically equipped.
On the flip side one could argue that Jim "Mattress Mac" MacIngvale's stores aren't equipped to be shelters, but he opened them as shelters. And apart from the expected scale of the relief effort that Mac or Osteen might be assumed to provide, that would be a fair rebuttal. While Mac certainly advocates positive thinking I am forced to conclude that he shows his faith by his works. And Joel Osteen does as well.
Having said all that, I find absolutely hilarious the satirical article about Osteen sailing his yacht through the flooded streets of Houston and throwing out copies of his book while shouting shallow aphorisms of positive thinking.
