Cypress is an unincorporated community in Harris County, Texas, United States, located completely inside the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the City of Houston. The Cypress area is located along U.S. Highway 290 (Northwest Freeway) is twenty-four miles (35 km) northwest of Downtown Houston. The Cypress urban cluster ranks 50th in the top 100 highest-income urban areas in the United States.
Large scale residential and commercial development beginning in the 1980s transformed the once rural area into one of the Houston area's largest suburban communities.
History
The recent find of a San Patrice projectile point at the Dimond Knoll site nearby on Cypress Creek attests to a human presence in the area by 7500 BC. By the early historic era, the area around present-day Cypress was populated by Atakapa and Akokisa Indian tribes, but they soon disappeared after the appearance of German settlers in the 1840s.
The German heritage is most notably reflected in the names of some of the major thoroughfares of the area, such as Huffmeister and Telge Roads. General Sam Houston and his Texas Army camped in the area on March 22, 1836 on the way to Harrisburg, which is now in East Houston, just days before the Battle of San Jacinto.
The area remained mostly rural until the early 1990s when developers began construction of several master-planned communities. The area is often referred to as Cy-Fair or Cypress-Fairbanks, which comes from when the Big Cypress School and Fairbanks High School combined in the 1930s to form Cy-Fair High School and the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. In March 2008, the Cypress Historical Society (CHS) was formed as a non-profit corporation with its primary mission being "...to discover, educate, promote, collect, preserve and make available to the public, historical documents and artifacts of the Cypress area". The CHS organization holds regular events aimed at exposing Cypress' residents to the historical and cultural foundation upon which the area was built.
Geography
Cypress is located near the intersection of US Highway 290 and Spring-Cypress Road. Cypress is located within the Cypress Creek and Little Cypress Creek watershed. There are no official boundary lines for the exact area, but roads commonly mentioned to bound the area include FM 529 road as the southern border, HWY 6 and FM 1960 as the eastern border, and HWY 249 as the northern border.
Cypress has two distinct geographic profiles separated by Highway 290. The area northeast of US 290 is forested and thickly wooded, while the area southwest of 290 is predominately ranch land and grassy prairie dotted with scrub brush, Live oaks and Post oaks.
Cypress falls under the jurisdiction of Harris County Precincts 4 and 5 (separated by Cypress Creek).
Several of the subdivisions are built around man made lakes.
Major arteries include Highway 290 to the South and State Highway 249 to the east.
Climate
The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Cypress has a humid subtropical climate, abbreviated "Cfa" on climate maps.
Due to its close proximity to the gulf coast, Cypress is occasionally hit by landfalling tropical storms and hurricanes; the most significant storms to impact the area in recent history have been Hurricane Alicia in 1983, Hurricane Ike in 2008, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017. According to Risk Factor, for the next 30 years, Cypress has a minor risk of flooding, meaning that it is probable that flooding may impact the every day life in the area. 20% of all the properties in Cypress have a greater than 26% chance of being severely flooded over the next three decades.
Demographics
As of the 2010 US Census, there were approximately 122,803 people, 39,705 households, and 32,762 families living in the zip codes labeled as Cypress. There were 41,761 housing units for a total occupancy rate of 95.1% at an average density of .
According to the 2020 American Community Survey, the Cypress zip code with the lowest median household income is 77040, with $60,572, and the zip code with the highest is 77433, with $112,167. In addition to that, 12.1% of the population lives below the poverty level. 74.47% of employees in Cypress work for private companies, 11.47% are governmental workers, and 9.21% are self employed. Furthermore, 49.81% of households in Cypress has children.
In Cypress, the racial makeup of Cypress was 44.4% of the population being Hispanic/Latino.