Texas lawmakers to allow smaller homes on smaller lots

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

Texas lawmakers have sent a scaled-back zoning proposal to allow smaller homes on smaller lots to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk — a bid to put a dent in the state’s high home prices.

Lawmakers in the Texas House and Senate passed Senate Bill 15 this weekend after the proposal to give builders the flexibility to build smaller houses in the state’s largest cities kicked up heat from House Democrats, who repeatedly tried to kill the bill.

The Senate approved the bill by a unanimous vote Saturday. The bill was more controversial in the House, where lawmakers endorsed the latest version by a slimmer 78-57 vote Sunday. The bill found bipartisan support in the House, where a majority of Democrats and Republicans voted in favor.

“These are homes your employees, your kids and grandkids can afford,” said state Rep. Gary Gates, a Richmond Republican who carried the bill in the House.

SB 15’s passage caps off a session in which lawmakers passed an array of bills intended to tackle the state’s high housing costs, primarily by cutting local regulations and red tape in order to allow more homes to be built. Texas needs hundreds of thousands more homes than it has, according to one estimate. That shortage, housing advocates and experts have argued, played a key role in driving up Texas home prices and rents as the state boomed.

This year, state lawmakers sought to mitigate that shortage with a package of bills that would supersede local zoning ordinances and reduce other hurdles to building homes. Among the most far-reaching proposals they sent to Abbott would make it harder for residents to stop new homes from being built and allow apartments and mixed-use developments in more places, like retail and commercial corridors, in the state’s largest cities.

“Every city and every state that has implemented these policies at scale have seen that their their city becomes friendly towards the hard-working middle class, towards young families, towards senior citizens,” said Nicole Nosek, who chairs Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a group that pushed several housing bills this year.

SB 15, a top priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who runs the Senate, aims to force the state’s biggest cities to allow smaller homes on smaller lots in some places. Doing so gives homebuilders more latitude when it comes to the size of homes they’re allowed to build. Homes on smaller lots have generally been found to be less expensive than homes on bigger ones, research has shown.

The bill bars major cities from requiring homes in new subdivisions to sit on more than 3,000 square feet. That’s down from 1,400 square feet, which the Senate initially pitched. The state’s biggest cities often require single-family homes to sit on around 5,000 to 7,500 square feet of land, a Texas Tribune analysis found.

SB 15 doesn’t touch existing neighborhoods, and only would apply in new subdivisions with at least five acres of land. If Abbott signs it, the bill would only apply to cities with at least 150,000 residents in counties with a population of 300,000 or more. Some 19 of the state’s largest cities fit that criterion, per a Tribune analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. It also wouldn’t apply in cases in which homeowners association and restrictive covenants prevent smaller lot sizes.

The proposal spurred a lot of drama in the last days of the legislative session. The idea of the state telling cities what kinds of homes they can allow didn’t sit well with a contingent of House Democrats, who tried repeatedly to kill the bill on procedural grounds or gut it. They and some Republicans argued local residents wouldn’t get a chance to weigh in on new development resulting from the bill if it passed.

“Leave it up to the cities that know what's best for their city,” state Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Worth, said.

Romero successfully amended the bill on the House floor last week so the bill would only apply if cities adopted a new zoning category that allowed homes to the smaller lot size outlined in the bill. That provision would have effectively rendered the bill useless, the bill’s proponents argued.

House and Senate lawmakers ripped that amendment out of the bill in negotiations between the two chambers.

House Democrats had railed against the bill — taking seemingly contradictory approaches. Romero argued that homes built on smaller lots wouldn’t necessarily be cheaper.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, questioned Gates last week about whether the bill would create “future ghettos.”

Some Republicans, too, objected. State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, an Arlington Republican considered one of the House’s most conservative members, argued the bill would eventually lead to higher crime in places that saw homes on smaller lots.

Other bills lawmakers sent to Abbott aimed to make it easier to convert vacant office buildings into residences and would force cities to allow manufactured homes. They also relaxed local rules in college towns that say how many unrelated adults can live in a home.

Other ideas to allow more homes died quietly this session. A proposal to make it easier to build additional dwelling units in the backyards of single-family homes, which died in the House two years ago, missed a key deadline last week and died before it could come up for a vote. Another idea to allow houses of worship to build homes on their land never made it to the House or Senate floor.

---

First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!