I live in a townhome in the area talked about in the article (inside the 610 loop). As a local, this article felt spot-on and matched local understanding of how Houston manages residential land-use hyper-locally through deed restrictions and the like.
Curiously unmentioned in the article were TIRZ, but those are mostly used to manage commercial areas, not residential.
Zulip is more of a Slack-like instant chat system with threading as a first class citizen; CQ2 looks like threads only exist in the context of one "root" document vs a channel in zulip where threads can intermingle.