Texas bill allowing smaller homes on smaller lots amid housing affordability crunch advances in House

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

---

The Texas House gave a thumbs Wednesday to a bill allowing smaller homes on smaller lots in Texas’ biggest cities, part of a broad push by state lawmakers to put a dent in the state’s high home prices.

But the House made significant tweaks that would limit how many new homes could be built under the bill, setting up a potential showdown with the Texas Senate over one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s biggest priorities.

Senate Bill 15 would reduce how much land cities say single-family homes in new subdivisions must sit on. The idea is to let homebuilders construct homes on smaller amounts of land, thus reducing the overall price of the home.

“This bill allows the option of building homes at different types and price points to meet the demand and needs of buyers,” state Rep. Gary Gates, a Richmond Republican who carried the bill in the House, said during initial debate on the bill Tuesday. “Lowering the size and type of residential housing will increase the amount of housing that can be built and lowers housing costs.”

Initially, SB 15 would forbid major cities from requiring homes in new subdivisions to sit on more than 1,400 square feet as first proposed in the bill. Gates amended that provision Tuesday to 3,000 square feet. The state’s biggest cities tend to require single-family homes to sit on around 5,000 to 7,500 square feet of land, a Texas Tribune analysis found.

The provision would only apply in new subdivisions with at least five acres of land, and wouldn’t touch existing neighborhoods. The bill would only apply to cities with at least 150,000 residents in counties with a population of 300,000 or more — 19 of the state’s largest cities, 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.

Wednesday's 86-43 vote came after a dramatic turn of events at the tail end of the legislation in which a Democrat tried to kill the bill on a technicality, but supporters managed to revive it in time to reach the full House before a key deadline.

Some Democrats weren’t convinced the bill would tame housing costs — though evidence broadly suggests that homes on smaller lots have lower values than those on bigger lots. Some of them expressed uneasiness about the state weighing in on what kinds of homes can be built and where, a power the state grants to cities.

“They (residents) didn't elect their state representatives to decide how their city would develop, not on that level, not with this kind of density,” said state Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, who previously moved to kill the bill on procedural grounds.

Romero successfully tacked on an amendment that will require cities to adopt a separate zoning category to comply with the bill, essentially meaning the bill wouldn’t automatically apply to existing single-family zoning categories. The bill's proponents say that provision effectively renders the bill moot.

A majority of the chamber’s Republicans and Democrats voted in favor of the bill Wednesday.

The Senate will have to sign off on changes the House made to the bill — or appoint a conference committee to hash out the differences between the two chambers.

Patrick said Wednesday he hadn't yet seen the changes House lawmakers made.

"We're working better than we ever have with the other chamber so we're really figuring out any rough spots between us," Patrick said.

SB15 is part of a constellation of proposals in the Texas Legislature aimed at curbing the state’s high housing costs, chiefly by clearing red tape and cutting local regulations in order to allow more homes to be built.

Texas needs about 320,000 more homes than it has, according to an estimate by the housing group Up For Growth. That shortage, housing experts and advocates argue, played a key role in driving up home prices and rents as the state boomed.

Lawmakers on Monday sent a bill to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk that would allow apartments and mixed-use developments along retail and commercial corridors. Both chambers have approved bills to make it harder for property owners to stop new homes from being built near them and encourage cities to allow the construction of smaller apartments. They've also approved bills to reduce hurdles to convert vacant office buildings into residences, make it illegal for cities to disallow manufactured homes and relax local rules in college towns that say how many unrelated adults can live in a home.

"Texas lawmakers stepped up this session because the alternative was frightfully clear: keep stalling, and we get California housing prices, a middle-class escape and a business exodus," said Nicole Nosek, who chairs Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a group that has pushed several housing bills this session.

But a separate bill to allow additional dwelling units in the backyards of single-family homes, which died in the House two years ago, died before it could come up for a vote ahead of a key deadline in the House on Tuesday night.

Alejandro Serrano contributed to this report.

---

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!