My mom is from San Anton, and her family is from nowhere N TX.<p>Houston failed by allowing residential areas to be built in flood plains ("sacrifice zones") and near polluting petrochemical plants that blow up about once a year. And, it's regularly ravaged by hurricanes and just yesterday a derecho blew out skyscraper windows, collapsed a brick wall, and knocked out power for what maybe weeks. Not much of the HTX metro area can be called "a good place to live" with a straight face. Zoning rules should prevent people from living in dangerous areas, which HTX has clearly failed at.
I live in a townhome in the area talked about in the article (inside the 610 loop). As a local, this article felt spot-on and matched local understanding of how Houston manages residential land-use hyper-locally through deed restrictions and the like.<p>Curiously unmentioned in the article were TIRZ, but those are mostly used to manage commercial areas, not residential.
The mistake of cyberpunk sci-fi like <i>Blade Runner</i> is that the setting is always future Los Angeles or Tokyo, when Houston has been a much better candidate for the international, multilingual, steel-and-glass-and-concrete megacity of the future.
Sounds like Houston had minimal rules on land use prior to 1998, and then they relaxed land use even further and things got better. Seems like a lesson a lot of cities could learn from.