“Houston doesn’t have zoning laws.”
Houston had lots of vacant land to the southwest of the Greyhound station not far from downtown when I was last there that was simply ideal for Yuppie housing.
We bought a house in the Houston metro area (Spring, TX) in the 1980s. We’d take the two Sunday newspapers and review the real estate sections. In both papers there would be a double page open section with a map of the greater Houston area. There be dots on the map with a different number on each dot. Each dot represented not a house but a new housing development. There were over 200. It was the end of a boom in Houston and the begging of a bust. Work took us back to the New York area and in a few years we could neither rent our house in Spring any longer or get it sold (and the house was only 5 years old). After a year of still making the mortgage payments with no sale or renters, we notified the mortgage company we were done. They auctioned it and got just the remaining principle which wiped out all our equity.