“We are encroaching upon becoming an unaffordable city,” Cheong said. “Especially for those that are most in need of housing, at the lower-income and middle-income strata. The picture is not all dire, but it's certainly one that I think we need to be paying closer attention to.”
Cheong was one of three panelists in a wide-ranging housing discussion hosted by the Texas Tribune last Thursday. She was joined by Nicole Nosek, the chair of Texans For Reasonable Solutions, Austin City Council member José “Chito” Vela and Joshua Fechter, the Texas Tribune’s urban affairs reporter, who served as the moderator.
The panel was part of a daylong symposium, “A Blueprint for Texas Cities: Growth, Challenges and Opportunities,” held at the University of Houston-Downtown. The event was guided in part by a policy agenda established in the Texas Metropolitan Blueprint. Published in January, the blueprint was a collaboration between the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Urban Lab, the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative and the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.
Making homeownership more accessible
Nosek, whose organization’s mission is reducing barriers to homeownership, said Texans in the lowest income brackets need more assistance. She pointed to policies being discussed in the current state legislative session, like Senate Bill 15 filed March 4 by Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston.
The bill would reduce minimum lot size requirements for single-family housing to 1,400 feet statewide. Houston was an early adopter of this practice. The city established such an ordinance in 1998, leading to an Inner Loop housing boom. The ordinance was expanded citywide in 2013. In a 2023 analysis, the Bipartisan Policy Center highlighted the benefits.
Austin’s city council passed a similar reform in 2024, reducing minimum single-family lot sizes from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 square feet.
“It’s really incredible what a bipartisan coalition has come out for SB 15,” Nosek said. “This is a major bill that would allow starter homes in new neighborhoods of 5 acres and more. A lot of folks at the state legislature recognize the problem, and are tackling these solutions in very broad, bipartisan approaches.”
Rise in multifamily supply provides reprieve in Austin
Cheong referenced the Kinder Institute’s 2024 housing report, which said homeownership is increasingly unattainable for Houston and Harris County households. The 2023 edition’s focus was on the majority of residents in the city and county being renters and housing cost-burdened.
In Dallas, 52% of residents are renters, and nearly half of households in Austin and San Antonio rent.
For Vela and his fellow Austin City Council members, enacting policies that increased the supply of multifamily units has helped address the burden of high rent costs. He cited Austin as an exception in Texas and across the country.
“We’re building more housing than cities that are much larger than us, and the effects are what everyone expected,” Vela said. “It’s been very rewarding to see the rents drop in Austin. When rents drop, that’s money that is going to health care, education, recreation, savings or to whatever that family wants. I do not want my constituents paying 50% of their income in rents.”
Homelessness policy faces a crossroads
The Texas Metropolitan Blueprint’s final prescription for housing policy in Texas was to build on recent progress in reducing homelessness. It referenced Houston as an exemplar, and said “state policymakers should grant all of Texas’s cities the flexibility they need to craft solutions that are tailored to their local conditions.”
Vela said potential cuts to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are setting off “massive alarms,” and that this is the wrong time to reduce funding for affordable housing and homelessness efforts.
In Houston, Cheong said there will be heavier dependence on philanthropy to pay for such initiatives.
“Houston has just announced a $70 million effort to end homelessness,” Cheong said. “While that’s led by the city, there is an implicit reliance on the philanthropic sector for very strong and significant contributions.”
