Cypress is an unincorporated part of northwest Harris County, divided by U.S. 290 into wooded land toward Cypress Creek and open prairie on the other side. Which half you live in says a lot about the termites, rodents, wasps and ants you will meet.
Cypress is an unincorporated community about 24 miles northwest of downtown Houston, inside that city's extraterritorial jurisdiction but with no municipal government of its own. Roughly 200,839 people lived in its two ZIP codes, 77429 and 77433, at the 2020 census. German settlers arrived in the 1840s, and thoroughfares such as Huffmeister Road and Telge Road still carry their names.
The area stayed mostly rural until the early 1990s, when developers started building master-planned communities, several of them around man-made lakes. Northeast of U.S. 290 the land is forested and thickly wooded. Southwest of the highway it is ranch land and grassy prairie dotted with live oaks and post oaks. All of it lies in the Cypress Creek and Little Cypress Creek watershed, and the community has taken hits from Hurricane Alicia in 1983, Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017.
