It has everything but zoning laws; parking minimums are enough to ruin a city's land use.

I think the OP was just pointing out that Houston doesn’t have zoning laws (in comparison to California). Note that this has not stopped Houston from becoming a sprawling suburb with massive amounts of parking lots. Houston didn’t build good density (or even a city really) despite the lack of zoning laws. I don’t think zoning is the culprit here but it’s difficult to compare cities and compare them across different states.

Also I’m not sure there’s a meaningful distinction between zoning laws and a local regulation like parking minimums. The effect is the same so zoning laws as a concept becomes a bit of a red herring unless we take zoning to include all general rules and regulations that govern how buildings can be built, transit, etc.

Houston's parking minimums are absolutely the main culprit for the amount of sprawl it has even in its downtown areas. Every single business needs a parking lot so everything is in a strip mall and therefore unwalkable.

Sure but I don’t think it’s helpful to try and separate those from zoning regulations here. Also I think even without those mandatory minimums a city like Houston is dead set on cars at all cost. Frankly, all of America is this way too it’s just that there are a few cities where geography has constrained sprawl. I fear for my own city, Columbus. The state, county, and city governments just do not understand that car-first infrastructure is a failed policy and will bankrupt us.

OT, but can I ask where you're from? I'm from CA and I generally hear "different from" (not "different to"). I've lived elsewhere in the US, but never Texas, and wouldn't have expected them to say "different to" — which I think of as being a British English construction. Do people say "different to" in Texas?

I’m a native Texan, also lived in CA, and “different to” also sounds somewhat foreign to me.

Midwest and I've definitely always believed "different to" was a British phrase and not even grammatical in US English (i.e. a native speaker who hadn't encountered it throughout life in UK publications would judge it as flat out wrong)

Native Brit, never lived in USA, "different to" sounds like what the King would say.

Interesting. What about the opposite? "Similar from" sounds incorrect to me. So why do we prefer "different from" and "similar to" vs. "different to" and "similar from"? Why is there any implicit directionality?

France is close to Germany but far from Canada.

Kefir is similar to yogurt but different from it.

You must conform to the law and not deviate from it.

The citizens of Saint Pierre and Miquelon might disagree with the first line in your statement.

Username "barbacoa" strongly suggests they live in TX/MX.

I'd guess it's the influence of Spanish, which uses "a" (~ "to" in English) for almost everything.

The username was part of what led me to ask. Probably not many UK/AU folks would choose that handle!

But you're right — I've heard some native Spanish speakers say "different to", and it's likely because they say "diferente a" not "diferente de" (where "de" typically translates as "from").

This situation raises an interesting philosophical question: is it ungrammatical for a native Spanish speaker living in CA to say this? I have always considered it to be an ungrammatical/incorrect usage. But coming from a British person I wouldn't consider it incorrect. I would consider them to be speaking a different dialect of English.

If a student said this in an English literature class in CA, my guess is that the teacher would correct the native Spanish speaker but not correct the British student. Or at least this would be my intuition as a native English speaker who studied linguistics a decade or two ago!

I wouldn't be surprised if it was regionally common/"not weird", but I don't know!

A personal data-point: I'm a native English speaker from norcal/oregon, and my wife is a native Spanish speaker from Monterrey, Mexico.

Since learning Spanish and being exposed to her good, but definitely not native, English, I didn't even notice "different to", and it doesn't seem particularly "weird" to me. But if I think about it I'm pretty sure it would've seened very weird to me back when I was in Oregon!

(It goes the other direction too. E.g., she's caught herself saying "vino rojo" instead of "vino tinto" and "hacer linea" instead of "hacer fila".)

In general I think it's pretty common when two languages are in close-contact to get some cross-contamination like that.

And prepositions are often pretty arbitrary.