Texas short on housing: What a new study says about local challenges

AUSTIN (KXAN) — A new study from the Texas Comptroller shows just how widespread housing affordability challenges are in Texas.

According to the report, Texas is more than 300,000 homes short of what it needs and Texans from major cities to rural communities are struggling with housing costs.

“It means to me that even as Texans who kind of see themselves as being pro-market and wanting to build, build, build, we’re not building enough,” said Steven Pedigo, the director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “We’ve got to build more to keep up with the population gain that we’re seeing.”

The study identifies local challenges including: do cities need to better manage large investment groups who can out bid and drive up costs on single-family homes? And how do cities best regulate their land? The latter is something the city of Austin has discussed for years.

“At the local level it remains one of the biggest parts of our affordability toolkit and we have to tackle that,” said Awais Azhar, deputy director of HousingWorks Austin. “It’s interesting that the state is beginning to think about how do they sort of provide guidance to localities to work this localized issue.”

The report noted the pushback some communities, like Austin, have gotten while working through land development code changes.

“Homeowners want to maintain high property values to earn the greatest return on their investments, and they may oppose projects they believe may de-value their property. This resistance can result in project delays, increased costs and even cancellation of new housing projects, exacerbating housing shortages and affordability issues,” the report says.

‘Not about the wisdom of the policies’: City of Austin back in court over zoning notification process

Several years ago, the city worked through a complete rewrite of its land development code — which governs what can be built where — but that rewrite was successfully challenged in court in 2020.

Now, Austin City Council is working through individual changes to its rules, most notably including the passage of the ‘HOME’ initiative which, in part, reduced minimum lot size requirements and allows building of more units on a single-family lot.

Still, housing experts say there’s a lot more to be done.

“I worry that if the city doesn’t do it, the city and state has this kind of back and forth friction and I wonder if we don’t take care of it does the state kind of step in and start to mandate cities like Austin and Houston and Dallas to do more. That may actually happen and we’ll see how that plays out in terms of the politics of that,” Pedigo said.

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