By David Allday

What we do have is a tendency to worry too much about our image. Often when a nationally prominent person comes to town, one of our local television reporters will ask, "what do you think of Houston?" I realize the reporter is just trying to get a good quote, but it does point up something that is hard to miss: there are those who believe our city's image needs improvement. While some people in other parts of the country do seem to have a negative image of Houston, for whatever reason, it's how we see our own city that counts.

Unfortunately, we sometimes seem to have a collective inferiority complex about Houston. Our politicians have tried to tap into those feelings from time to time. How many times has some city leader told us that we need to pass a certain measure if we want to be "a world class city"? When Houston was in the running for the Olympics a few years ago, we were told that we needed a light rail system because Europeans are used to trains.

People in other parts of the country may tend to look at Houston's negatives, but they overlook the tremendous positives we have here. Yes, Houston is hot a lot of the year, but on the other side of the coin is the fact that we have very mild, short winters. Buildings can be constructed more cheaply than in places with harsh winters, and work can go on year-round. The weather is one factor which helps keep housing costs low.

Yes, Houston is also flat. We have always been a sprawling, free-flowing city, and our terrain has allowed us to spread out. Houston has never known boundaries, or limits - geographical or otherwise.

The fact that so many people from other regions of the country have come here says that we have something that benefits them. They have not come here for restrictive laws, or an oasis of urban planning. For the most part they have been drawn here because of our economic success.

Yes, we have traffic problems, but we also have the economic growth which allows us to solve them. Mass transit by rail has yet to really catch on here. Houston has always had multiple business centers away from downtown, with no easy way to connect them by any kind of mass transit except buses, which have always been our mass transit system of choice. If allowed to choose, Houstonians probably prefer their own automobiles to any form of mass transit. Maybe that is part of the independent spirit of the West.

Today Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. People come here for freedom, inexpensive housing, our entrepreneurial spirit, and, yes, perhaps in part because we are a city not bogged down in a zoning bureaucracy. You could say that Houston is sort of "zoned by market demand." Of course, we are not a wide-open city for unbridled development, or for any other interest. Each group is subject to the give and take of politics. But given our history, and the current state of our development, it may be our destiny to serve as America's "master unplanned community." Lack of zoning may be a very negative thing to some people, but it was reportedly cited by Professor Bob Stein of Rice University as a reason we are one of the least segregated big cities in the country.