Houston is having an election today, and it’s an interesting one: There’s an open mayor’s seat, and early voting has been unusually strong, particularly in — this is an unusual pairing — African-American neighborhoods and conservative neighborhoods. The nation’s fourth-largest city is well on its way toward becoming the third-largest — Houston adds to its numbers something close to the population of Santa Cruz, Calif., in a typical year — and it has all of the enormously complex problems and institutional challenges characteristic of 21st-century American cities. The big question in this election: Where should a man in a dress go potty?

Despite recent downturns in oil and gas prices, Houston is in better shape than you’d expect. The local economy is performing robustly, and unemployment is well under 4 percent. Houston has more than its share of violent crime, but it remains far, far safer than most U.S. cities, coming in right behind Minneapolis in the rankings at half the violent crime rate of Detroit and one-fifth the murders per capita of St. Louis. It is a city that is 44 percent Hispanic, 24 percent black, 26 percent Anglo, 28 percent foreign-born, with only half of its people speaking English at home, but it has relatively little in the way of ugly Chicago-style/Los Angeles-style/Philadelphia-style racial politics.

Read the article “With Its Bathroom Ordinance, Houston Takes Leave of Its Municipal Senses” on nationalreview.com.