I dislike the lack of zoning in Houston. It means you want to buy a home, but it's right next to a strip club, so it ruins the deal. You want to live in a nice and expensive neighborhood, but then a developer comes in and builds a 6 story apartment building right next to your two story house. And the lack of zoning means the traffic on the street of that apartment complex becomes horrific because there's now twice as many people living on that block.

You see a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods in Houston - places where people are building $700,000 homes where 80% of the same street are 1000 square foot shacks with people living in them making $20k a year. Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars. I don't know if this is the result of the lack of zoning, but I don't see this happening in other cities in Texas, so I have to think it's somehow related.