Poor fellow, so very sad for him, my thoughts with his family
Let's face it, when taking off on 17L/R the Woodlands golf course is commonly mentioned as a good option for a forced landing in the event of an engine failure. But that requires being quite high already as the course threshold is 1.1 km from the end of the runway. With a glide ratio of 1: 8, you'd need to be at 500 ft and carry out a glide at best glide speed in no headwind to make it. Otherwise, it's such a built up area that I find it hard to find any option. What do you do if your engine fails in the 200-300 ft range? You're too high to land on the field and too low to make the golf course. I just find that building so close to the airport was a very irresponsible thing to do.
I'm not saying the unfortunate pilot was indeed taking off on 17 L/R as the wind yesterday was apparently a northerly, making 35 L/R rather the ideal runway.
I just thought I'd emphasize that there's hardly any place for emergencies to the south of the airfield . I might be ill-informed but it seems to me that the airport was there first. Dwellings came next.