I have only been in Houston since January and yet, nearly since I stepped off the tarmac, I have been repeatedly informed that Houston is a unique city for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it has no zoning.

This fact, which is indeed significant, given that no other U.S. city that's in the modern world can make that claim, is offered with pride, often with a kind of fait accompli, sometimes as a kind of challenge, and sometimes with a slight sense of despair – or maybe it’s frustration.

Whatever the tone of the delivery, the lack of zoning is widely acknowledged as the single, most significant identifier of Houston.

A newcomer to Houston can’t help but notice the quirkiness of finding one of the fanciest restaurants in town facing a tattoo parlor or sitting next to a laundromat, or your dentist’s office being next door to the car repair shop. But more curious might be the lack of sidewalks, the mixing of school yards with high-traffic commercial areas, or the sudden appearance of a high-rise residence tower in a neighborhood of two-to-four-story buildings.

Even with these more tangible reminders of the by-product of no zoning, the reality of the city is a kind of natural selection organization. There is a theater district. There is a museum district. There are historic areas that have been allowed to stand. There is a medical center and an identifiable downtown.

While the quirkiness abounds, so do widespread private covenants and deed restrictions that stay with the land, not the owner. Parking requirements add another layer of restrictions and lot sizes and street sizes seem to have stiff regulation.

I am from Southern California. Every year, since I was conscious of such things as politics, there has been a legislative proposal to separate Southern California from Northern California. Every year the initiative fails. From what I can gather, Houston citizenry and their elected officials have been engaged in the zoning/no-zoning debate since World War I, every year with the same result.

The never-ending debate

Author Stephen Fox's historical description of Houston’s planning process as an “exclusive dependence on individual citizens committed to planning; the apathy, if not hostility, of the general public to the purpose and mechanisms of public planning; and the ambivalence of public officials who supported the ‘progressive’ appearance of planning, while only reluctantly according statutory authority and financial support to public planning agencies," would almost seem to apply today.

The ultimate determinant has been the real estate market. In the 1960s and ‘70s when Houston’s center had lost its shininess, new master-planned developments: The Woodlands, Clear Lake, Kingwood and First Colony, started to supplant the inner suburbs such as West University Place and Bellaire. In the 1960s to the late 1980s, 38 of Houston’s 45 high-rise buildings were built, many at the expense of earlier, historically significant “skyscrapers.”

The mid-1990s to the present brought a powerful reclamation of the inner loop and the downtown. Montrose, where I live, has experienced a decline in tattoo parlors and a rise in three-and-four-story townhouses. Downtown is urging people up from the underground tunnels with Discovery Green and the neighboring developments of the Four Seasons and One Park Place. Opportunistic “zoning” follows the development dollar.

Where there is no development, impetus is where we become aware of the impact of not having a codified plan. Houston is the only port city in the world that doesn’t acknowledge that it has a port.

The city was built in respect to the bayous, but only recently has the value of those bayous been re-elevated. Susan Rogers, a University of Houston College of Architecture faculty member, recently wrote “Houston is 25 percent vacant — amounting to more than 150 square miles of void — an area that could comfortably contain the city of Boston three times or half of New York City.”

The interstitial emptiness is not a developer’s dream, and lacking an overall strategy, those empty spaces are up for grabs by whoever garners enough support, or whoever has an entrepreneurial urge. This is the conundrum: Everyone seems to like the accidental brilliance of the risk-taker who creates the next food empire in the most unlikely of spots.

Yet there exists an impressive number of interest groups advocating environmental issues, flood control, mass transit, and quality of life. While a “General Plan for the City’s Future" is consistently supported by 83 percent of respondents in the Houston Area Survey, which was last conducted in February 2009 by Stephen Klineberg of the Rice University Sociology Department, the city has not adopted any kind of general plan for nearly half a century.

In my short time in Houston, I can see that zoning, per se, is too blunt an instrument to reticulate the complicated fabric of Houston today. However, charging forward in this century, with unprecedented population growth, environmental pressures, and volatile economic markets, without some kind of plan seems foolhardy at best.

Perhaps, Houston, as anomaly, will prevail: Ever reactive, ever opportunistic, until the opportunities run out.

Patricia Belton Oliver is dean of Gerald D. Hines School of Architecture at the University of Houston