Cities: The Air-Conditioned Metropolis

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In keeping with its big-city status, Houston has acquired the appurtenances of a modern U.S. metropolis, from big-league baseball and big-league football (the Houston Oilers. 1960 and 1961 champs of the American Football League) to a Museum of Fine Arts headed by James Johnson Sweeney, and a symphony orchestra whose current conductor is Sir John Barbirolli. But the city has not lost its frontier character. "There is freedom of movement here that I have not seen anywhere else," says a recent arrival. Says a Houston oil executive, aglow with civic pride:."This is the last frontier."

Lightly Governed. In the frontier spirit, Houstonians are jealous of their personal liberties, suspicious of authority. It is characteristic of the city that although the buses carry conspicuous NO SMOKING signs, passengers puff away as they please —and so do bus drivers.

As a result of its citizens' almost an archic individualism. Houston is probably the nation's most lightly governed big city. Property taxes are enviably mild, and the city relies heavily on private initiative and philanthropy to provide public facilities. Houston's only sizable public park is a gift from a rich donor. Much of the money for the city's lavish new medical center came from private contributions. Rice University, one of the Southwest's best educational institutions, is a privately supported, tuition-free school with a $70 million endowment.

When the city government lacked funds to buy the site for the new jet airport, private citizens bought the land, held it until the authorities arranged financing, then sold the tract to the city at cost.

Houston's individualism has its seamy side. Alone among major U.S. cities. Houston has no zoning laws. When a proposal to establish zoning is put before the citizens, they whompingly vote it down. Chicken coops abound within the city limits. In older Houston neighborhoods, many predominantly residential streets are sprinkled with small business places set up in what used to be private houses. A homeowner can never be sure that somebody will not open a pool hall or an auto-body shop in the house next door. Lack of zoning has contributed to the decay of old neighborhoods, speeded up the flight to the sprawling new suburbs.

Without zoning regulations, Houston is ineligible for federal urban renewal aid. but Houstonians are confident they can get along without it. Says Ralph S. Ellifrit, director of city planning: "When our little shacks rot away, you can just push them all over with a bulldozer. There's not going to be anything to it.''

The Smell of Money. That kind of nothing-to-it optimism is characteristic of Houston. It strikes newcomers even more vividly than the heat or the building boom. "I like the aura of optimism everybody has here," says a new arrival. "Everybody thinks he can do the job that's put to him, and he goes about it in a happy manner." In other cities, citizens sniff foul air and worry about pollution; in Houston, they savor the pungent odor that wafts from the refineries and chemical plants and cheerfully call it "the smell of money."