Houston is a disaster. Used car dealerships inside of neighborhoods. Semi trucks on every conceivable road, because there is a factory behind the elementary school. A metroplex that takes hours to traverse, without accounting for traffic. It’s the only place I’ve encountered completely stopped traffic while trying to go to the grocery store down the road. I lived in Houston for a few years and couldn’t bear it.

Houston did/does have laws that are in effective zoning laws. Parking space requirements, setbacks, etc.

Also transit systems may be required. I imagine a place with truly no zoning laws and a transit system would have a lot of development near stops

God forbid your city becomes like Houston. Nobody wants to live there, everyone’s getting out of there and moving to California.

I can sense the snark from here, but from an outside-of-texas perspective Houston seems to be alternating between being underwater/flooded by a hurricane (Harvey), or frozen and lacking in basic electrical services because the grid can't meet the demand.

California sure has a lot of problems as well but people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

California has power outages way more often than Texas has, in fact it has widespread rolling blackouts right at this very moment. If Texas is a glass house, then California is really a soap bubble.

But this is beyond the point: none of this have anything to do with the topic of conversation, that is, zoning and urban planning. The truth of the matter is that, despite the Houston being widely panned for this on HN, people nevertheless flock into there en masse.