Where to live in Houston

Where the neighborhoods come from. Houston has no zoning, so there is no zoning map of neighborhoods to borrow, and the City draws no single layer of neighborhoods that fits a guide. What it does keep at neighborhood size is three things, and each guide here uses one of them. Its 88 super neighborhoods, set up so that residents of neighboring communities could work together on what their area needs, cover the city, and where a super neighborhood is the neighborhood it is the boundary: Midtown, Gulfton, Alief, Kingwood, Clear Lake and the wards among them. Where a super neighborhood is far larger than the name, as it is for Houston Heights, Rice Military, Oak Forest and River Oaks, the boundary is the area the neighborhood's civic club or association filed on the Planning and Development Department's civic clubs map, which the department describes as neighborhoods as the community identifies them, first gathered to try to locate deed restrictions. Downtown and EaDo are their management districts, special districts the Legislature creates, because the Downtown super neighborhood takes in most of EaDo. Each guide names which boundary it uses and what the name covers, and its population is the 2020 census count of the blocks inside it. Only the City of Houston is covered. Bellaire, West University Place and Southside Place, set among Houston's own neighborhoods, are separate cities with their own councils and tax rates; so are the six Memorial Villages (Bunker Hill, Hedwig, Hilshire, Hunters Creek, Piney Point and Spring Valley), Pasadena and the region's other cities. The Woodlands is unincorporated, governed by a township rather than a city, and the Katy-area subdivisions such as Cinco Ranch sit outside the city limits in its extraterritorial jurisdiction, served by municipal utility districts. None of them is here. And a Houston mailing address is not proof of a City of Houston address: the appraisal district's record for a property, which lists the city, county, school district and any utility district that tax it, is the one to read.

The five areas are ours. The City does publish divisions, and none of them is a way to choose where to live. Its eleven lettered City Council districts, A through K, are electoral and are redrawn after each census. Its 88 super neighborhoods are the right size for a guide and far too many and too uneven for a grouping: Museum Park covers 360 acres and the Kingwood Area 19,206. The management districts are funded by a levy on commercial property and leave most houses out, and Plan Houston, the City's first general plan, is organized around goals rather than regions and, in its own words, is not about establishing land use controls. The grouping here uses the names residents use instead, and which neighborhood lands in which area is our judgment.

What is not here. Inside the limits this selection still leaves real places out. Near Northside, Sharpstown and Westbury are super neighborhoods with boundaries of their own, and Woodland Heights has both a civic association and a City historic district; they were left out to hold the first set to twenty, and they come as the guides do. Garden Oaks, beside Oak Forest, has no civic club area on the City's map to draw it by, so it has no guide yet.