Housing advocates, builders and real estate experts agree that the state simply isn’t building enough homes to keep up with its booming population and economic growth.
and require cities in counties with more than 300,000 residents — a portion of the state that includes more than 21 million people — to adopt a minimum lot size of 1,400 square feet for a single-family home, the standard in Houston but significantly smaller than in most other major urban areas.
, a Houston Democrat, reintroduced a bill to set up a state fund to finance housing for middle-income workers like teachers, firefighters and health care workers. “None of these bills are going to magically provide more housing,” said Matthew Festa, a land-use professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “What they’re going to do is allow people to build it if there’s demand for it.”Advocates believe the housing supply issue has the potential for broad bipartisan agreement this session. Many Democrats sympathize with proposals to make housing more affordable for low-income households.
Neighborhood groups regularly try to block new housing by protesting at local zoning and city council meetings. But as the state grows, some have gotten more aggressive.
with lower incomes. That’s because higher-income households that can’t find housing that caters to them in a neighborhood wind up competing with lower-income households for the housing that does exist — which in turn drives up the cost of the existing housing stock.
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