“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”

To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”

The article's actual content:

>All the same, it doesn't seem that tight regulations, or less development, have prevented flooding in other cities. When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it had far less impervious surface than Houston does now; in fact, its population had been declining in every decade since 1970. Alas, the tragedy wasn’t about that anyway, but about infrastructure that collapsed and spilled water into a flood plain--a flood plain that had been developed despite New Orleans' strict zoning laws. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, it damaged a metro area that, overall, is both denser and more regulated than Houston. In the last decade alone, flooding has also hit Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Colorado, and various other regions with diverse geography and regulations.