Houston is a prime example — of what depends on your point of view.

It’s an example of development run amok, of how sprawl can devour nature. It’s what you get when everything as far as the eye can see is designed around cars instead of people.

It’s an example, according to a very different interpretation, of how to create affordable housing. It’s proof that fewer regulations mean more prosperity, that the market knows better than any central planner.

It’s a Rorschach city, and it has been since well before Hurricane Harvey, occupying a special place at the center of a debate over how best to build in America. But even now, when something about the Houston model looks terribly fragile, its free-market boosters are doubling down on what the city should mean to the rest of us. And the storm’s legacy is poised to make this high-stakes fight over the Houston way even more raw.

“Houston reaffirms people’s pre-existing biases about how cities should be built,” said William Fulton, a longtime former planner and mayor in California who now directs the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.