Houston by Night
Welcome to Houston. That's in Texas.
Everything is larger in Texas, and if you talk to any Texan for more than a few minutes they are virtually guaranteed to remind you of this fact. At length. Even when things are objectively smaller, Texans will endeavor to arrange things such that they are at the very least, as large as possible. And so it is that Houston is the fourth largest city in the US, despite being the ninth largest city. Semi-connected neighborhoods which by the standards of Washington-Baltimore would be in another city's limits or even in another state are all joyfully thrown into the nominal city limits of Houston proper, and the result is one massively large mayoral office.
Houston is in many ways the third city even just in Texas. Dallas-Fort Worth is more populous and more dangerous, while Austin is the political capitol and more culturally and technologically relevant. And yet, no Houstoner (sometimes pronounced "Hew Stoner") would ever describe it that way, because they are Texans and they think about things in the way that they are big and not in the way that they are small. Houston is the major port in the area, dwarfing even the throughput of New Orleans (especially since those nasty hurricanes the last couple of years). Houston is so important as a cargo port that it dwarfs the strategic importance of any other Texan city - a fact that any Houstoner worth their belt buckle will be certain to bring up in any conversation about the city.
When speaking like a Texan, remember to describe things in the ways in which they are big and not in the ways in which they are small. It's part of the mindset. It's not lying, it's bragging. So a Houstoner would say that "Houston is bigger than Dallas" while a Dallas resident would say "Dallas-Ft. Worth is bigger than Houston." Both statements are true, but the subtle differences in the statements change the meaning. The local accent is loud and slow, but it's not ignorant.
City Statistics
Houston is a sprawling metropolis that has absorbed a tremendous amount of land around itself. The entire city metropolitan area is about five and a half million, and nearly half of those live in the actual city limits of Houston. On the supernatural side, there are about 800 Makhzen members in town, with Covenant, World Crime League, and Communes contingents supplying about 100 members each.
The city has an enormously important port, that handles about 200 million tonnes of cargo a year. The port complex is 40 kilometers of shoreline, and has rail and road connections that allow it to serve as a way point for much of the state and even the nation as a whole.
Houston is filled with violence and crime, having the highest murder rate of any city with over a million residents. Back in the 80s, Houston was the murder capital of the whole country, but a narrow nod to a modicum of law and modernity brought that into sufficient control that there are now numerous cities in the quarter-million range that have more murders per capita than Houston does. Still, other crime is largely unchecked and ignored. A car is stolen every 10 minutes in the Houston area, no one thinks this is weird.
The original part of Houston are the 6 "Wards" (of which the first four are somewhat more original than the other two). But as the city has grown and annexed more territory, it has become 9 districts. And even that doesn't cover everything, because some people aren't really in any of the districts even now.
City History
Houston was created out of whole cloth by some real estate speculators n 1837 following the events of the Texian secession conflict. As such, Houston does not have a history separate from that of the Texas Republic and the State of Texas. Even its name is taken from general Sam Houston of the Texan separatist army. But these carpetbaggers weren't just corporate whores looking to make a buck on land speculation and a cheap allusion to the name of a recent war hero - they were also sponsored by supernatural creatures associated with the Makhzen. One Baali named Archibald Corll ended up fronting much of the seed money and so it was that the city had its first Prince before there was a single standing structure or living soul in the domain.
Texas was originally a slave state, and in the first few decades of Houston's existence, the Makhzen leadership were allowed to explicitly own people, and brought in humans from Africa for the express purpose of being human beasts of labor and in some cases food. Some of the immortal "old timers" get all misty eyed and nostalgic talking about these "good old nights" and that's more than a little creepy. There was even an abortive attempt to keep things like that after the civil war ended, but it was eventually considered too dangerous and abandoned on June 19th, 1865 (still more than 2 months after Lee's surrender at Appomattox).
In the years following the Civil War, Houston's Mehtar Council invested heavily into industry and transportation, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the city was the largest rail hub in Texas. In the year 1900, Storm Lords pitched in to send a hurricane to devastate Galveston. This shattered Galveston as a port, and Houston received investment to expand its port facilities from all over the region and the nation. With millions of dollars of national monies, the Houston development projects proceeded ahead and Houston has been the port of record in Texas ever since.
The city has had a love affair with things that move all through the 20th century and continuing to this day. Ship building facilities become a major industry during World War II. The city airport has become a major connection point for numerous airlines, and of course the Manned Spacecraft Center is so famous that people in space characteristically talk to "Houston" whenever they have a problem.
Population booms have not been continuous, but rather came in distinct waves. In the 1950s, air conditioning made the city seem livable to a lot of people who had not otherwise considered the place as fit for human habitation. And in 2005, almost a quarter of the population of New Orleans was forced to up stakes and move to Houston after a hurricane made landfall right in New Orleans.
Power
Houston has one of the wealthiest Princeps in human terms in all the Makhzen. In no small part, this is because much of the Makhzen rests in the poorer parts of the world, but in no small part this is because Makhzen members got in on the ground floor of the city and simply have always owned large sections of it (at least, as far back as the city existed as an incorporated entity). The Princeps controls a substantial amount of real estate in the area, and has interest in a not insubstantial amount of Texas oil wealth. The net result is that whoever the Princeps happens to be at the moment gets to live in a McMansion that looks like it's from the set of Dallas and every member of the region's Makhzen government draws an actual wage for doing so. And the higher you get in the Makhzen, the more money you make. Mehtar pull 7 figures, and some of the higher ranked Harpies get similar salaries.
The Makhzen in Houston was set up by supernatural creatures that were consciously emulating the escapades of the railroad barons of the early 19th century. As such, the domain as a whole is called a "Barony" and while the Prince wields incredible wealth and power, the Mehtar Council retains the ability to recall and replace them at any time with a simple voice vote. The Mehtar are called "The Board" or "The Senior Partners" when in mixed company to avoid breaking the Vow of Silence, and the names carry over even to discussions amongst supernaturals. There are 8 members of the Mehtar Council, and each one is the head of a "department". Each department has rules on how one goes about replacing the department head. The departments are named by the numbers 1 through 9 (for historical reasons, there is no longer a 6th department), and the businesses covered by each are pretty scattershot and bizarre. Each department has a name other than a number in the charter, but these names are not used because they are now almost wholly irrelevant and in some cases embarrassing (such as the "Department of Indian and Negro Management" that is currently engaged mostly in dealing with agricultural properties and military contracting and whose members are much happier to be called "Unit 3").
The Storm Lords have their North American head office located in downtown Houston, and while many members are also members of the Makhzen, the heads of the organization in town maintain a separate existence. They have a lot of connections in the news and aerospace worlds, and the independent Storm Lords are tolerated within the Prince's domain.
Places to Go
Houston is titanic. The land area is simply not even comprehensible to people who haven't been to Los Angeles or Oklahoma City. There simply is no sense of connectivity between anything outside of the downtown area except through the expediency of getting into a car (or an SUV, this is Texas) and driving there. Within downtown Makhzen domination is so complete that pedestrians travel through tunnels six meters under the ground where they are protected from direct sunlight and there are extra super secret tunnels that you need a Makhzen distributed electronic keycard to unlock and travel through.
The Lyndon Johnson Space Center in Houston is such an iconic piece of of the space program that people just call it "Houston" and everyone knows what is being talked about. There is no way you could ever get there on accident, since it's divided from the rest of town by a substantial amount of basically empty space. Still, there are totally tours of the facilities often enough that there's a visitor's parking lot and showing up without having any NASA credentials is not even weird. There are about a hundred buildings on the compound, and only one of them houses the Madness Network's Evil Plant Research Facility.
The Houston Grand Opera is a justifiably award winning opera company with the kind of old world feel that makes you want to capitalize the word "Culture". It may seem out of place in Texas, the land of cowboy boots and giant belt buckles, but the fact is that Houston is very urban. The truth is that the Grand Opera is perfectly at home here, and it is the cowboy boots that people wear that are an act. The name of the building is the "Wortham Theater Center" but people mostly call it "The Opera". As all good operas, it has its own phantom. Supernatural sources refer to him as "kind of a dick."
The River Oaks Garden Club is housed in the old Forum on Civics that used to be run by Boss Hogg (seriously). The Hogg estate donated it to the University of Texas and it has since gone on . It is the most important historical building in Upper Kirby. This is a distinction that even most residents don't understand or care about, because it is manifestly obvious that they live in "River Oaks" since everything in the area had the words "River Oaks" put on them by the Hoggs. The Garden Club is ridiculously exclusive, and isn't like Boss Hogg's organization in The Dukes of Hazard. It's way classier than that. It's more like The Skulls.
George Bush International Airport is one of the largest airports in North America, and is the fastest growing airport in North America. It is the headquarters of Continental Airlines and serves over forty three million passengers a day. It sends planes to more destinations in Mexico than any other US airport. And - this is important - it is named after Bush Senior not Bush Junior. Houston residents get kind of testy about that.
The Old Imperial Sugar Refinery is a factory that got shut down in the satellite town of Sugar Land. The power is still on, and Imperial Sugar displays a giant cross there at night in order to disrupt the sleep of unbelievers. Also it's basically "The Factory" from Buffy. Monsters are given free reign there, and can plug anything they want into sockets. Power and water are not monitored, and the good old boy cops do not respond to calls to go out there. So seriously a succession of monsters just sets up camp there to do supervillain stuff. If something weird is going down, "Let's go check The Refinery" is a pretty reasonable suggestion.
Houston in Horror
When you say "Texas" and "Horror" in the same sentence, people immediately think Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Which is fine and all, because it is a classic of the genre. And while it does not actually take place in Houston or in a part of Texas that is particularly similar to Houston, it is a good bet that any Houston based campaign will have the obligatory ride out of town to the backward wilderness part of Texas where people like Leatherface live in squalor with the rest of their ill-bred families of Mutants. There are seriously six movies in that franchise, and some of them are even pretty decent. The lonely wilderness of the Texas Desert is also home to such movies as No Country For Old Men and Blood Simple, and you can really drive home the relentless isolation that everyone has out there.
But the great empty places are a place for Houstoners to visit. Actually living in Houston is more like Office Space. If you go out of town, you're in Giant Gila Monster or Rocky Horror Picture Show territory, but in town it's pretty much Reality Bites and Urban Cowboy. There is also the undeniable Mexican influence, especially in nearby cities that were actually part of Mexico before the Texian War. You can get cheapo stuff like Cemeterio del Terror if you like. Actual Horror set in actual Houston is pretty rare. Houston is traditionally the "big city" that people go to escape the horrors of the desert where no one is there to hear you scream. Still, there are some second rate movies to look up for ideas: The Outing is a movie set in Houston about an Ifrit who has laser eyebeams because he is an Iraqi bard; and The Swarm is a terrible movie about a Swarm composed of bees that attacks Houston for no reason.
Houston has tried to make itself look futuristic since the seventies, and many of the sets for the original Logan's Run are just regular buildings there. Houston is also known for not being taken seriously, and a good portion of the "horror" films with Houston in it actually comedy films such as Student Bodies and My Best Friend is a Vampire (where vampires are the heroes).
You can really hammer in these themes, and probably should because it's how supernatural society feels about itself in that city. The corporate monster culture of Houston is seen as an island of stability and civility that is surrounded and under siege by monsters that don't "get it" and want to break everything they have worked to create. The Sheriff regularly sends teams out into the wilderness to take down monsters and criminal gangs that are causing enough problems in the boonies to cause the baleful eye of public investigation to fall on the Big T (that's for Texas). And outright monsters come to town to make trouble on a fairly regular basis.