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Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

Houston still has de facto zoning [0] and minimum parking requirements. The sprawl is not ideal, but prices are still far lower than other places.

1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...

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Pretty good article that explains the facets. I feel like the article undersells Houston zoning a bit though. You still see far more bizarre stuff in Houston than you would see in other places. The article makes the point that you don’t see churches next to brothels, which is a pretty extreme example, but you definitely do see some stuff you would not see in other cities: residential lands abutting churches on one side and industrial locations on the other with some retail location right behind. It’s a bit of a crapshoot in a lot of places and even if it’s not when you move in it could be later.

Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.

Over time Houston's land use code has gotten more restrictive to prevent close proximity of nuisance uses[1]. As for churches, they are very often allowed in residential areas regardless[2][3]. Houston's zoning regulations are still some of the most permissive in the country, but that's only relative to other American cities. Ever since the Euclid v. Ambler (1926), zoning in the US grew rapidly more restrictive, far more so than much of the rest of the world. The primary reason Houston doesn't look like Tokyo (with its more liberal zoning[4][5]) is that it still has a lot of the worst parts of zoning as the parent comment points out.

[1]: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ (see Ord. No. 2020-1092)

[2]: https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-view...

[3]: https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan...

[4]: https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_00... (japanese, pptx downloads, my japanese isn't good enough to navigate and find better documents, but if anyone knows of them that would be helpful)

[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshis...

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