Amid housing affordability crisis, Texas House votes to take some power from NIMBYs

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As Texas faces a housing affordability crunch, state lawmakers sent a signal Monday to residents who try to stop new homes from being built near them: It may get a lot harder to do so.

The Texas House voted Tuesday to advance a bill that defangs an obscure state law that property owners use to stop new homes from going up near them. House members gave final approval to House Bill 24, a key priority of House Speaker Dustin Burrows. The bill cleared the chamber by an 83-56 vote, with a majority of the chamber's Republicans and Democrats voting in favor.

The bill is part of a Republican slate of bills aimed at tackling the state’s high housing costs — chiefly by making it easier to build homes. Texas needs about 320,000 more homes than it has, according to one estimate.

"This is a good bill that will improve housing availability and affordability," said state Rep. Angelia Orr, R-Angelina, the bill's author.

That shortage of homes, housing advocates and experts say, has played a key role in driving up home prices and rents amid the state’s economic boom. Burrows and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have made tackling the state’s affordability crunch among their top priorities this legislative session. Lawmakers have advanced bills to relax local restrictions on what kinds of homes can be built and where and make it easier for housing developers to obtain city building permits.

HB 24 — which now heads to the Texas Senate, where lawmakers have already approved a similar bill — tackles a Jim Crow-era state law that makes it more difficult for cities to allow new development if enough neighbors object. If a builder seeks to rezone a property and 20% of neighboring landowners object, the city council needs a supermajority to approve the zoning change.

A group of Austin homeowners used the law a few years ago to convince a judge to kill a citywide zoning plan intended to allow more homes to be built.

The law drew renewed last year when neighbors near a proposed affordable housing development in San Antonio — a development touted by Gov. Greg Abbott — used the law to help stop the development. The project then failed to get enough votes on the City Council to move forward.

Critics of the law have argued the law deters developers from building much needed housing for fear that pushback from neighbors will kill their projects. Opposition to the law has created unlikely alliances with the Texas Municipal League, a lobbying group that represents more than 1,200 cities, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the influential conservative think tank, as each call for the law to be changed.

HB 24 would raise the petition threshold for objecting property owners to 60%. Even then, it would only take a simple majority of city council members to approve the rezoning. The bill also prevents property owners from using the law to block citywide zoning changes. For example, if a city council sought to change zoning rules to allow more homes in existing single-family neighborhoods, opponents couldn’t use state law to stop the change.

State Rep. John Bryant, a Dallas Democrat, argued the bill would eliminate homeowners’ ability to stop commercial and industrial uses from going up next door to their homes.

"This has been in the law a long time for a good reason," Bryant said. "I urge you to vote against the bill to protect homeowners. Give them the same homeowner protection that they've had for many years, the same protection that you had when you made your decision to buy your house."

Orr said as the House considered the bill Monday during an initial vote she thinks it’s highly unlikely that cities will enact citywide zoning plans that put industrial uses next to neighborhoods as a result of the bill — which is intended to allow more affordable housing and multifamily housing development. A city council, she noted, “already makes a multitude of decisions based on a simple majority.”

Some lawmakers worried the bill would provide a backdoor to allowing casino and sports gambling in Texas. Efforts to legalize casino and sports gambling in the Texas Legislature are on life support. State Rep. Andy Hopper, R-Decatur, unsuccessfully tried to amend the bill to exempt proposals to rezone land to allow casinos and sports gambling facilities.

Tuesday’s vote was a crucial test of how the broader Texas House would approach the housing affordability crisis this session. House members last week approved a bill — House Bill 23, another Burrows priority — that intends to make it easier for developers to secure building permits if cities don’t approve them quickly enough.

It’s unclear how House members will handle a slate of potentially more controversial bills that would relax local zoning rules to allow more homes to be built. The Texas Senate has advanced bills to allow smaller homes on smaller lots, additional dwelling units in the backyards of single-family homes and homes and apartments in places they aren’t currently allowed.

Those bills haven’t come up for a vote on the House floor yet, and similar proposals died in the House two years ago.

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