Houston

• 1. Introduction

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  Houston was founded by land investors on the 30th of August 1836, at the spot where Buffalo Bayou meets White Oak Bayou. That point is now called Allen's Landing. The Allen brothers, Augustus Chapman and John Kirby, ran their first advertisement for the town just four days after buying the land. They named it for Sam Houston, the former general who had won Texas its independence from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto, fought 25 miles east of that landing. About a dozen people lived there at the start of 1837. Today the city holds 2.3 million residents, the most populous in Texas and the fourth-most in the United States. How did a notional town advertised in a newspaper become the world's largest medical complex, the home of Mission Control, and the most racially and ethnically diverse major city in the country? What happens when a city built on marshland refuses to write a zoning code? And why does Houston, almost alone among American cities, profit when oil prices climb?

• 2. Capital And Setback

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  James S. Holman became Houston's first mayor when the Republic of Texas granted incorporation on the 5th of June 1837. The Allen brothers had lobbied the Republic's Congress to make Houston the temporary capital, agreeing to provide a capitol building for the new government. By the time the Texas Congress convened in Houston that May, the town had grown from a dozen souls to about 1,500. That same year, Houston became the county seat of Harrisburg County, now Harris County. In 1839, the Republic moved its capital to Austin, and a yellow fever epidemic struck that year claiming about one life for every eight residents. Houston survived by forming a partnership with Galveston, its Gulf Coast port. Landlocked farmers carried produce to Houston and used Buffalo Bayou to reach Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico. Houston merchants profited twice, selling staples to the farmers and shipping their crops onward. Slave dealers worked in Houston, and thousands of enslaved black people lived near the city before the Civil War. By 1860, Houston had become a railroad hub for the export of cotton, with spurs from inland Texas converging on lines that ran to Galveston and Beaumont.

• 3. Hurricanes And Oil

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  In 1900, a devastating hurricane struck Galveston, and the disaster accelerated efforts to turn Houston into a deep-water port. The next year, oil was discovered at the Spindletop field near Beaumont, which launched the Texas petroleum industry. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt approved a one-million-dollar improvement project for the Houston Ship Channel. By 1910 the city's population had reached 78,800, nearly doubling in a decade. African Americans numbered 23,929 people then, close to one-third of the residents. President Woodrow Wilson opened the deep-water Port of Houston in 1914, seven years after digging began. By 1930, Houston was the most populous city in Texas and Harris County the most populous county. World War II reshaped the economy again. Petrochemical refineries and manufacturing plants rose along the ship channel to feed wartime demand for petroleum and synthetic rubber. The Brown Shipbuilding Company was founded in 1942 to build ships for the U.S. Navy. President Roosevelt's nondiscrimination policy for defense contractors gave black workers new opportunities, especially in shipbuilding, though not without resistance and occasional violence.

• 4. Medicine And Space

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  The M.D. Anderson Foundation formed the Texas Medical Center in 1945, a complex that now employs over 120,000 people and stands as the largest medical complex in the world. The arrival of air conditioning in 1950 drew companies south, where wages ran lower than in the North, and tilted the economy toward energy. In 1961, NASA established its Manned Spacecraft Center, renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973, and the city's aerospace industry grew around it. The center is home to the Mission Control Center. The Astrodome, nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World, opened in 1965 as the first indoor domed sports stadium on earth. Houston earned the official nickname Space City in 1967 because of the Johnson Space Center. In the late 1970s, the Arab oil embargo created a flood of petroleum jobs, and people from the Rust Belt poured into Texas. Space Center Houston now serves as the official visitors' center for the Johnson Space Center, with Moon rocks, a Space Shuttle simulator, and exhibits on the history of crewed spaceflight.

• 5. The City Without Zoning

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  Houston is the largest city in the United States without formal zoning regulations. In referendums held in 1948, 1962, and 1993, voters rejected efforts to separate residential and commercial land into distinct districts. The result is a city with no single downtown core of employment. Multiple skylines have grown across it, in Uptown, the Texas Medical Center, Midtown, Greenway Plaza, Memorial City, the Energy Corridor, Westchase, and Greenspoint. Other rules played the role zoning would have. Mandatory lot sizes and parking requirements shaped development much like Sun Belt zoning elsewhere. In 1998, the city cut mandatory lot sizes from 5,000 square feet to 3,500 square feet, and housing construction surged. Supporters credit these patterns with keeping housing affordable and sparing Houston the worst of the 2008 real estate crisis. The city issued 42,697 building permits in 2008 and ranked first among healthiest housing markets for 2009. In 2019, home sales reached a record of 30 billion dollars. The absence of zoning also let homes rise in flood-prone areas, a choice that would be tested by water.

• 6. When The Water Comes

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  Tropical Storm Allison dumped up to 40 inches of rain on parts of Houston in June 2001, then the worst flooding in the city's history, killing 20 people in Texas and causing billions in damage. In August 2005, Houston sheltered more than 150,000 people who fled New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. One month later, about 2.5 million Houston-area residents evacuated as Hurricane Rita approached, the largest urban evacuation in United States history. Smaller disasters followed. Seven people died in the Memorial Day Flood of May 2015 after 12 inches of rain fell in 10 hours, and eight died in April 2016 when a storm dropped 17 inches. The worst arrived in late August 2017, when Hurricane Harvey stalled over southeastern Texas. Some areas took over 50 inches of rain, breaking the national rainfall record, and the death toll passed 70 people with damage estimated at up to 125 billion dollars. Mayor Sylvester Turner argued that zoning would not have helped, saying "zoning wouldn't have changed anything. We would have been a city with zoning that flooded." In 2018 the City Council passed a rule requiring homes built two feet above the 500-year floodplain, by a vote of 9-7.

• 7. A Majority-Minority City

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  The 2020 census counted 2,304,580 residents, a startling figure beside the 2,396 people recorded in 1850. Houston is a majority-minority city, and a 2012 report from Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research found Greater Houston the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the United States, ahead of New York City. The proportion of non-Hispanic whites fell from 62.4% in 1970 to 21.8% in the 2020 figures. Hispanic or Latino residents rose from 11.3% in 1970 to 47.0% in 2020. The Houston area holds the largest African American community in Texas and west of the Mississippi River, and has been called a black mecca akin to Atlanta. Montrose tells one chapter of this diversity. Before the 1970s, gay bars were scattered around downtown, and after they closed, LGBT Houstonians gathered at Art Wren, a 24-hour restaurant in Montrose. They settled the neighborhood and helped maintain its properties. By 1990, according to one account, 19% of Montrose residents identified as LGBT. In 2009, Houston became the first major American city to elect an openly lesbian mayor.

• 8. An Energy Capital

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  Houston has the second-most Fortune 500 headquarters of any U.S. municipality within its city limits, a roster led by Phillips 66, Sysco, and ConocoPhillips. Oil and natural gas anchor the economy, joined by biomedical research and aeronautics. Unlike most places, high oil and gasoline prices help Houston, because so many residents work in energy. The Port of Houston ranks first in the United States in international waterborne tonnage and second in total cargo tonnage. The metro area surpassed New York City in 2013 as the top U.S. market for exports, and petroleum products, chemicals, and oil and gas equipment made up roughly two-thirds of those exports. The region's gross domestic product reached 633 billion dollars in 2022, the seventh-largest of any U.S. metropolitan area and larger than the GDP of Iran, Colombia, or the United Arab Emirates. Newer industries are taking root. Since the 2020s, technology startups have become the fastest-growing sector, and on the 4th of April 2022, Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved its global headquarters from California to the Greater Houston area. Ninety-one foreign governments keep consular offices in the metropolitan area, the third-highest count in the nation.