There are good reasons why Houston stays cheap. (I lived there for a couple of years.) It's a huge metro area with no zoning. That dissuades people from buil

There are good reasons why Houston stays cheap. (I lived there for a couple of years.) It's a huge metro area with no zoning. That dissuades people from building a castle when a toxic waste dump (or refinery) could go in upwind without warning. The city's large size and the ever-expanding radius to growing exurbs tends to dilute the value of existing homes which slows their appreciation. And the land in the region has no natural beauty. It's scrub. So creating a synthetic upscale suburb would be hard to sell economically. So neighborhood trendiness tends to arise organically, mostly from proximity to central neighborhoods (like University Village near Rice or Memorial in the museum district). Low home prices in Houston wasn't the result of an engineered or government-driven initiative. Like all economic change in Texas, it happened on its own. It's the same phenomena that have restrained home price inflation in Las Vegas. There's a lot of surrounding desert there and not much natural beauty to motivate gentrification in upscaleing the homes/suburb near a natural hot spot.