A symbol of Houston? Many would say the Astrodome, the indoor arena dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1965. But I might suggest Zone d’Erotica, a 24-hour sex toys boutique at the throbbing core of a district with some of Houston’s swankiest shopping malls, hotels, restaurants and homes.

The jarring placement is emblematic of Houston’s heedless, anything-goes-anywhere attitude to development. An entrepreneurial mindset has flourished, imbued with a chancer’s ethos in an oil town defined by cycles of boom and bust.

Houston did not become a great American city – the fourth biggest – through careful planning and aesthetic attention, like Chicago, or because of an immigrant-magnet location like New York, or thanks to the weather and scenery of Los Angeles.

It is above all pragmatic.

Despite alarming income inequality and air pollution, Houston promises abundant jobs and a cost of living low enough that even with a moderate income you can own a car and a nice big suburban family home.

But as the cleanup continues after Hurricane Harvey, we should find time to ask whether the city’s structure is as resilient as its character and if the seeds of Houston’s success are a factor in the scale of its losses. Sure, it rains a lot here in an average year, let alone this one; and it is not surprising that a place nicknamed the Bayou City would have an intimate relationship with water.

But this was the third bad storm in three years. Some parts that flooded were predictable, the usual suspects in heavy rains; others came as sudden shocks. A few may yet be submerged for days as the US Army Corps of Engineers continues to drain reservoirs.

If watching on television, with scores of journalists reporting breathlessly from knee-deep streets or civilian boats, it must have seemed like the whole city had become an aquarium exhibit for the eyes of the world, a sodden story on every street.

Being here, driving and walking around, the reality was more patchy: one street under four feet of water, homes and lives destroyed; a block away, nothing. On Friday, as usual, gardeners blew leaves off the lawns of middle-class homes; around the corner, boats and kayaks conducted rescue or reconnaissance missions on roadways turned waterways.

Some of the worst-hit neighborhoods were some of the richest, their million-dollar mansions by the Buffalo Bayou facing days underwater, a prolonged damp spell that will allow mold and mosquitoes to proliferate.

Twenty miles farther along the same bayou, residents in one of the city’s most-deprived areas, where many live in crumbling wooden shacks, told me they escaped damage despite living no less close to the water.

Members of the Wounded Veterans of Oklahoma help rescue flood victims. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The flood plain map feels like guide, not gospel; after Harvey there are no guarantees in a haphazardly-arranged city that does not care if a sex shop sits at the heart of a chic quarter or if homes and apartments sprout next to vulnerable bayous and reservoirs.

As many have observed, absorbent prairieland was sacrificed for concrete-covered progress. New malls and offices, their parking lots gently angled to guide water in another – any other – direction. Gentrification, Houston-style, is buying a lot, razing the old home and building a big new one, elevated for self-protection – so water deflects elsewhere, perhaps to your neighbours in their aging single-storey ranch house.

It’s notable that modern, so-called master-planned communities in the far suburbs flooded badly too. Those four-bed houses for $350,000 came with a hidden cost: not such a bargain if water mitigation strategies were built on the cheap. Constructing defences to handle moderate storms, not extreme ones such as Harvey, now looks like a failed bet given what we know about climate change.

But Houston would rather expand than preserve; that it is always facing forwards is both a strength and a curse. Even in elite neighbourhoods, older roads are so potholed that driving them is like being in the saddle of a bucking bronco.

You don’t move here for the ocean, mountains, or beauty – you come for the deal. Houston feels like one of the last places where it’s still possible to attain the postwar materialistic vision of the American Dream, whether you’re escaping high prices on the US coast or arriving from abroad.

Room to grow, energy jobs and a low-regulation, low-cost environment have helped this become one of the country’s most diverse and fast-expanding metropolitan areas, with a net increase of 2,600 people a week between 2010 and 2016.

Will people still come if they do not trust local, state and federal governments to keep them dry? If insurance becomes prohibitively expensive? Will they still think of Houston as a sustainable place to build a future?

A friend and his young family bought a house in an affluent area next to a bayou only a couple of months ago. They got a good price because of its so-called “100-year floodplain” location – a risk estimated at a 1% chance in any given year. “Do you think it’ll be OK?” he asked me at the time. Last week he got his answer as it swiftly filled with three feet of water, forcing them to evacuate. Already, he is thinking of moving; now, his children are frightened when it rains. “I’m sick of this 100-year bullshit; this is the new norm,” he said.

Volunteers Travis Adair, right, and Matt Vinks, throw a kitchen sink damaged by floodwaters onto a pile of debris in the aftermath of Harvey. Photograph: David J. Phillip/AP

He gambled and lost; and who would want to live near water in Houston after Harvey? The storm was bad enough even without the kind of winds that shredded coastal buildings when the hurricane made landfall 200 miles away. What if one day a monster barrels right up Galveston Bay and the ship channel, where 50-odd miles of petrochemical plants and refineries vital to the national interest are by the water and an economic and environmental catastrophe in the making?

Decisive and definitive solutions seem unlikely to emanate from cash-strapped local governments or a Republican-dominated state legislature that usually meets for 140 days every other year and is allergic to tax hikes and fearful of irking businesses with tight regulations. And this is the state that named the tycoon behind the Dakota Access pipeline to its environmental preservation board.

The 2017 legislative session was dominated by culture-wars issues; talk of regulation centered less on the energy or construction industries than on controlling transgender people’s access to restrooms.

As of last Friday, meanwhile – while Houstonians continued helping each other in ways that were profoundly touching but unsurprising to me, for kindness is the default setting in any context for the vast majority of the people I have met in my six years here – it became generally legal to openly carry swords, machetes and spears in public in Texas.

To live in a place where extreme weather is common and laws encourage the ownership, display and use of weapons is to accept a certain level of background threat, an understanding that violence is ingrained into the culture, whether inflicted by people or by nature. There seems little prospect of transformative change that might take the serrated edge off Texas’s frontier spirit.

As for the Astrodome, it is long-shuttered, superseded by a shiny venue next door as debate continues on whether to save it or raze it. In 2005, it sheltered thousands of refugees from Hurricane Katrina. Many stayed for good in hopes of finding a better life here and many found it; such is the promise and potential of Houston.

It is too large, too important, too dynamic, too ambitious, not to recover from Harvey. But without a radical rethink of how the city manages development and protects its residents, it seems inevitable that it will be soaked and saddened again.