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Houston
Texas's sprawling energy capital, on the Gulf coastal plain
Houston sprawls across the flat Gulf coastal plain of Texas with almost no natural limits and almost no zoning, a city that grew on oil and grew without restraint into the fourth-largest in the United States. Nearly seven million people fill a metropolitan region that runs from downtown skyscrapers to refinery complexes along the ship channel to subdivisions reaching far into the prairie. It is the world capital of the energy industry, a major port, and home to the control center of American human spaceflight.
The city lies on low, flat land barely above sea level, drained by sluggish bayous that wind through the urban fabric. That flatness, combined with paved-over prairie and a subtropical climate of torrential rains, makes Houston dangerously prone to flooding, as Hurricane Harvey demonstrated in 2017 when it dumped record rainfall across the region. The Houston Ship Channel, dredged from Buffalo Bayou, connects the inland city to the Gulf of Mexico and made it one of the busiest ports in the country. The absence of formal zoning has produced a famously unrestrained pattern of growth.
The Allen brothers founded Houston in 1836 on the banks of Buffalo Bayou, naming it for Sam Houston and promoting swampy land with extravagant advertisements. It served briefly as the capital of the Republic of Texas before oil discoveries near the coast at the turn of the century set its course. Refineries, petrochemicals, and the corporate offices of the energy world made it rich, and the Johnson Space Center brought the space program. Today Houston is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the nation, an energy and medical powerhouse on the Gulf.