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(often referred to as Cypress-Fairbanks, or Cy-Fair) is an unincorporated area of 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) twenty miles (32 km) northwest of Downtown Houston.
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.
The area around which Cypress sits now was populated by Atakapan 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 visited 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 was mostly rural until the 1980s 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 Cypress and Fairbanks volunteer fire departments joined together to form the Cypress-Fairbanks Volunteer Fire Department (now known simply as Cy-Fair VFD).