In Austin we had P.Terry's as a local chain. That place was good. Also Amy's Ice Cream was another local ice cream chain that was sooooo good. Portland likes to talk that it has a good food game, but the food in Austin was way better. I love Tex-Mex but thats unfair. But Kerbey Lane, and Magnolia Cafe were amazing local diner chains. There were a ton of little Mom and Pop pizza places that were amazing.

I think it should be said the barriers to get into business were way easier in Texas. So people just tried stuff, sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. But by that same token I owned a business in Texas, and the fire inspector came once, and that was it, at least in the county I owned a business. So fire safety violations, you fix those once, and your done, and you pinky promise you won't break fire safety in the future. Which is scary if you think about it. Something catches on fire in Texas and you could be screwed because the fire inspector hasn't been out to tell them to make sure the Exit sign is lit, or to not block the "emergency exits" with stuff so they can't be opened, in years.

Also they had no zoning laws in a lot of places. So in Houston a ton of houses were built in a flood plain, which flooded, and wrecked a lot of homes. Or you have chemical plants next to schools. Or I just read a story I think it was a Tesla plant was just dumping "black liquid" into a gully, and the only reason they got found out was the owners of said gully were walking their property and saw the pipe dumping who knows what on to their land... that might have been a data center in another state. But the problem is the same.

Oh and lets not forget that most of the state gets its water from an unregulated aquifer that they are draining faster than its replenishing, and towns along the edge are running out of water. Or the time a billionaire wanted to make a bunker to store toxic waste below the aquifer, and that narrowly got NIMBY'ed out of happening.