HOUSTON IS the only major city in America without zoning laws. You can build pretty much anything you want anywhere you want, except in designated historical districts. You’ll see some odd sights, such as a two-story family home adjacent to a roller coaster, or an erotic nightclub next to a shopping gallery, or a house made of beer cans. Solo skyscrapers suddenly pop up in residential neighborhoods. The absence of zoning is an artifact of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and 1960s, when zoning was viewed as a communist plot. But there was another group, of blacks and liberals, who saw
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