"This is a city where you can make your fortune and not have people looking over your shoulder saying: 'You can't do that,'" says Houston native Carlos Hernandez, with evident pride, adding quickly: "Enron was taking that to the extreme. That's just criminal."

But from the beginning, Houston's wide-open ethos has been an invitation to criminals. "Houston is a city that started as a land scam. It's still a wildcatters town," says Jim Hightower, the Texas writer and wisecracker. Back in the 1820s the city's roguish developers sold scrip for 5 or 10 cents an acre that didn't actually convey property rights to any land. It was a scam that makes pushing stock that's not based on real revenues look pretty tame.

To this day, locals eschew government oversight so much that many suburbanites here don't even live under any city government. They inhabit unincorporated districts run by the residents, in a barely governed super-sprawl of cheap housing. Here's how it works: A developer buys a piece of the endless raw prairie land outside city limits. He puts a trailer on it and has his construction foreman move in. Then, an only-in-Texas "election" is held. The sole voter -- the construction foreman -- votes in favor of developing the property, and voila! -- a new district is created complete with tax-exempt bond status.

When the new 'burb is built and inhabited, the developer turns it over to the citizens, who repay the debt from the bonds with property taxes. There are some 400 of these unincorporated districts in the Greater Houston area, and you only really hear about them when the City of Houston cherry-picks a wealthy one, annexing it to assume its lucrative tax base -- usually against vehement "Don't tread on me!" protests from the residents.

In the unincorporated areas and the city proper that together make up the sprawling greater Houston area, population 4.5 million, lies a case study in what is wrought by living according to the commandment "There shall be no zoning." Sublime, helter-skelter juxtapositions are everywhere. Right next to an eight-lane freeway, a Discount tire store huddles near a traveling carnival; children spin themselves silly on blinking rides that rival NASA's anti-gravity chambers, under the vacant gaze of an overly made-up model looming down from a billboard advertising an all-night porn store. And don't miss the 20-story office building right across the street from a neighborhood of brand-new monster houses, with no niceties like landscaping buffering the commercial district from the residential one. Neighborhood deed restrictions impose some conformity, but those rules end at the property lines -- then, hallelujah! Anything goes! There were a few years there in the early '90s when the Houston City Council did impose zoning, albeit after the fact, but by 1994 the citizens had voted to repeal this brazen act of government intervention.

"Strip malls and strip clubs. There's a Gap on every corner next to a Starbucks," says Tracy Delmer, a speech pathologist who has lived here all her life. "It's all about trying to make your strip mall prettier than the other strip mall down the street."

The flip side to freedom from nasty government oversight is some of the worst air pollution in the country. Some 2.5 percent of the world's total refining capacity lies in the greater Houston area, and Houston's high ozone readings are rivaled only by Los Angeles. The state, in true Texas laissez-faire style, has been notoriously lax on environmental regulation, allowing old petrochemical plants to be grandfathered in when introducing new, watered down environmental rules, which just means that those old, polluting plants never seem to die off.

"That's Texas. If the federal government forces Texas to do it, they do it," says Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental lawyer. "But otherwise, it's all up for grabs."

Is it any wonder that few people seem to come here just for fun? "People don't say 'I went to Houston last summer,'" says Delmer, "like they say 'I went to Seattle.'"

"All over the country, if people hear they're being transferred to Houston they want to commit suicide," says Amy Jaffe, a local energy policy advisor, who still finds the distaste outsiders have for Houston puzzling. It's not as if Houston is some kind of cultural wasteland, she notes, enumerating a laundry list of Houston's sophisticated worldly charms, from the opera to the ballet to the symphony.

All of which, it should be noted, are funded almost entirely by private sources.

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