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Houston
The fourth-largest U.S. city, on the Gulf Coast plain
Houston sprawls across the flat, low coastal plain of southeastern Texas, about 50 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico but linked to it by the Houston Ship Channel, a dredged waterway that makes this inland city one of the busiest ports in the country. The fourth-largest U.S. city, it grew explosively in the 20th century on oil, shipping, and — lacking any zoning code — almost unlimited room to spread outward across the prairie.
The land is nearly dead flat and only a few feet above sea level, threaded by slow bayous and prone to flooding from the heavy rains and hurricanes that come off the warm Gulf. That same warm, humid climate and the oil beneath the coastal plain built Houston into the energy capital of the country and a center of shipping, petrochemicals, and aerospace — home to NASA's mission control.
Houston's flat, sprawling, unzoned geography produced one of the most spread-out big cities in America, a low metropolis of more than seven million pushing ever outward across the Gulf plain.