(MONEY Magazine) -- When Fred Fogarty was transferred to Houston in 1999, he and his wife Susan checked out every city in the area before deciding to live in Sugar Land. Now they can't imagine being anywhere else. Fred, an investment adviser, has since set up his own business in the city too. "We like to do family-oriented things, and we wanted to be outside the hustle and bustle of Houston but still have the big-city feel," says Fred, 40. "It's an amazing spot." That's a sentiment shared by many in Sugar Land, one of the country's more diverse communities.

The area's heat and humidity tended to remind Asian immigrants of home, and in the 80's, as Sugar Land became less a sleepy small town and more a land of good jobs and affordable housing, more Asians moved in. Today the city is almost a quarter Asian, and Sugar Land is home to mosques as well as Hindu and Buddhist temples. The city's head count has tripled since 1990, and Mayor David Wallace expects it to hit almost 200,000 within the next 10 years.

That expansion will follow a detailed plan; no area will join without utilities and services already in place. To limit the impact of sprawl, Sugar Land requires brick storefronts as well as extensive landscaping around shopping centers. Though town namesake Imperial Sugar Co. recently closed its refinery, the city is teeming with software, engineering and energy firms such as Fluor Corp. and Unocal. Sugar Land recently revamped its airport to better accommodate corporate jets.

The booming school population has led to crowding, but the district churns out dozens of National Merit semifinalists each year, and SAT scores are consistently higher than state and national averages. And in few desirable cities does a buck go so far: $200,000 buys a roomy house in a landscaped neighborhood with a community pool. "We were thinking that this would be a nice place to have children," says Suja Pappan, 37, a local teacher who moved here with her husband Phillip nine years ago. The couple now have a two-year-old son. "The schools are exemplary," Suja says. "Houses are reasonable, and there are all different varieties of people here. It's a good fit."

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