Meet the Californian who pushed Texas lawmakers to help fix the state’s housing crisis

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It began in Nicole Nosek’s backyard.

Nosek had convened a coterie of local homebuilders and architects for a picnic at her home in the wealthy Austin-area enclave of West Lake Hills. It was fall of 2021, and she and her husband, Luke Nosek, a venture capitalist who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and sits on SpaceX’s board, had two years prior moved to Texas from California.

The purpose of the gathering: figure out how to stop the state’s skyrocketing housing costs from getting worse.

In Texas, Nosek recognized the same factors that contributed to California’s unattainable housing market and spurred people and businesses to flee the Golden State: strict building and zoning regulations that make it difficult for cities to solve their housing crises and a “not-in-my-backyard” mentality among elected officials and homeowners that prevented change.

“We were looking around thinking we had just left nonsensical Bay Area housing policies,” Nosek, 35, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Yet we arrived in Austin to find those same nonsensical policies.”

Over fajitas, Nosek and her guests began to brainstorm what they could push at the Texas Legislature that would pave the way to increase the state’s woefully lacking housing stock. The state needs hundreds of thousands more homes than it has to meet demand, according to at least one oft-cited estimate by the housing advocacy group Up For Growth.

“We know how it ends: in $1.3 million home prices,” Nosek said. “We had seen that story, and if we were going to stop that story from playing out, that was the time.”

Fast forward to this year, when a bipartisan coalition organized by Nosek, who founded and chairs the housing advocacy group Texans for Reasonable Solutions, played a crucial role in pushing state lawmakers to pass substantial changes aimed at blunting the state’s high housing costs. At the coalition’s urging, legislators passed laws that made it harder for neighbors to stop new homes from being built and easier to build the kinds of homes, like townhomes and apartments, housing activists say the state’s biggest cities need more of in order to stave off a larger affordability crisis.

Those new laws will make a difference in keeping Texas’s housing issues from snowballing into those seen in California and New York, said Alex Armlovich, senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. Though California lawmakers have passed several bills in recent years to attack their housing costs, it will likely take years for reforms to be felt given the state’s exorbitant home prices and rents.

Meanwhile, Texas is getting ahead of the problem, Armlovich said.

“All of a sudden things started getting a little bit expensive in Texas, and they just brought the hammer down,” Armlovich said.

Allies credit Nosek with capitalizing on the growing public appetite for something to be done about housing costs and translating it into a winnable agenda for lawmakers to pursue. By the time state lawmakers were ready to dedicate attention to tackling the state’s housing woes this year, Nosek had already spent the better part of four years laying the groundwork for them — pulling together a slate of proposals from a broad bipartisan coalition of groups that, on their own, may not have worked together to tackle the housing problem.

That coalition ranged from conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation on the right to social justice group Texas Appleseed on the left. And on this issue, they were all rowing in the same direction.

“Because the coalition was diverse and robust, there might have been a lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily be on a call with normally,” said Felicity Maxwell, a longtime Austin housing activist who leads the group Texans for Housing. “But that was okay, because we had the same ideas and all wanted the same outcomes, and Nicole was the one who put that together and reinforced those relationships throughout the session.”

A YIMBY is born

Nosek moved from Orange County to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010 to attend the University of California Berkeley, where she later graduated with a bachelor’s in political science and rhetoric. There, she went on to work for congressional campaigns and for the marketing firm Ogilvy.

Even for a California native, living in the Bay Area was a shocking experience, exposing her to one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. While she worked as a paralegal, Nosek split a three-bedroom apartment with a family of three as well as a young tech worker. Even then, the rent ate up most of her paycheck.

“I felt lucky if I had $1,000 in my bank account at the end of each month,” she said.

Meanwhile, “yes-in-my-backyard” activists who organized as a backlash to NIMBYism began to push for policies to ease California’s housing crisis, advocating ways to increase housing density. Nosek joined their ranks, she said, and at one point did consulting work for YIMBY Action, a San Francisco-based housing advocacy group.

Nosek began dating Luke in 2018, and the couple moved to the Austin area the following year amid a tech migration from California to Texas. She founded Texans for Reasonable Solutions in 2022, the year after she hosted the brainstorming picnic, and began the work of selling elected officials on the idea of reducing regulations and red tape in order to solve the state’s housing woes.

Nosek quickly gained a reputation as a brainy, passionate and deeply informed champion for housing policy reforms.

“I've got the bug, and I'll admit Nicole, before your work, this issue wasn't on my radar screen the way it should be,” Glenn Hamer, who heads the Texas Association of Business, told Nosek during a January panel in Austin. “Now it is at the top of the list, because I think nothing short of the American Dream is at stake here.”

Nosek made in-roads with the state’s Republican establishment, scoring meetings with Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Dan Patrick and then-House Speaker Dade Phelan — and later, Dustin Burrows, the current speaker.

Nosek also became a fairly sizable political donor. Since 2022, she’s given nearly $160,000 to state lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, and political action committees including Defend Rural Texas, the Texas Senate Leadership Fund and Texans for Lawsuit Reform. Texans for Reasonable Solutions’ PAC, almost exclusively funded by her, meanwhile has given more than $100,000 to state lawmakers. At the local level, Nosek gave $25,000 to a PAC supporting Kirk Watson in his 2022 Austin mayoral bid and $4,200 to Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. She has also donated to City Council candidates in Austin and Dallas.

To opponents of housing reform, Nosek became somewhat of a bogeyman using her fortune to unduly upend their neighborhoods. The fact that she’s a Californian, too, has been an easy talking point for opponents to use against her. State Rep. Ramon Romero, a Fort Worth Democrat, derisively referred to Nosek’s group as “Californians for Reasonable Solutions” as House lawmakers debated a bill to allow smaller homes on smaller lots this year.

Some of her eventual allies were initially skeptical about her because of her home-state credentials, Nosek said. Republican lawmakers tended to ease up when she couched her ideas in free-market terms, she said, and framed California’s high housing costs as a cautionary tale.

“I led with, ‘here's how California destroyed their housing market,’” Nosek said. “If you want to learn how to drive your middle class, young families and businesses out of your state, copy California in overregulating homes.”

Lessons learned

The coalition’s first attempt to push the Texas Legislature to adopt statewide housing reforms largely fizzled.

In 2023, Nosek and her housing allies managed to get lawmakers on board with a package of bills to allow homebuilders to more quickly obtain city building permits and to allow homes be built on smaller sized lots than many cities require.

Those ideas found favor in the Senate, but largely died in the House. Only the permitting bill passed into law.

At a coalition meeting after the bills failed, Nosek busted out a whiteboard to diagnose what went wrong.

They reached a few conclusions. For one, they didn’t meet with enough House lawmakers, particularly Democrats, so legislators didn’t quite understand what the bills did or why they were needed. The coalition had also bet that the proposals’ highly technical nature would allow them to squeak through under the radar. That didn’t work.

At that point, dealing with housing costs was largely alien to state lawmakers — particularly because housing remained so much cheaper than other large states. To the extent that legislators dealt directly with cost-of-living matters, they did so by trying to rein in the state’s high property taxes.

That changed between legislative sessions. The cost of living played a central role in the 2024 presidential campaign, propelling President Donald Trump back to the White House.

In Texas, home prices and rents remained stubbornly high even as the state’s population growth slowed and the housing market cooled.

State officials and legislators were catching on. Patrick and Phelan tasked lawmakers with studying ways to reduce housing costs before lawmakers returned to Austin this year. Glenn Hegar, the state’s former chief financial officer, issued a report last year that painted a dire picture of the state’s growing affordability crisis. The subtext: if people can’t afford to buy a home here, the state’s economy could be imperiled.

“I did not want us to wait to become California,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who carried major housing bills this year and in 2023. “You want to get the problem resolved before you become California.”

The second try

Heading into this year’s Legislature, Nosek and allies realized they couldn’t get their proposals through the Legislature quietly. They needed to demonstrate they had loud, broad support. Some 60 organizations including homebuilders, architects, chambers of commerce, environmental groups and others signed onto or endorsed the coalition ahead of the 2025 legislative session.

At the same time, Texans for Reasonable Solutions shook up its own lobbying team and expanded its ranks.

That coalition pounded the pavement, meeting regularly with lawmakers ahead of and throughout this year’s session, Nosek said. Nosek made the trek to lawmakers’ offices, too, often with her newborn in tow, she said.

Nosek and her team deliberately crafted a slate of bills for this year’s session she said aimed to neutralize opposition from not-in-my-backyard activists, known pejoratively as “NIMBYs.” The bills that made it to Abbott’s desk this year don’t touch existing neighborhoods, where the thought of more homes going up nearby can kick up heavy opposition from existing homeowners.

Instead, the slate focused on places where homes currently can’t be built like retail and commercial corridors, vacant office buildings and large lots that don’t already have homes on them.

To court conservative lawmakers, Jose Melendez, campaign director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Taxpayer Protection Project and one of Nosek’s chief allies, emphasized that the slate of bills would cut local regulations and red tape in order to let the free market address the housing problem.

“I not once changed my message in terms of saying, ‘look, it’s very simple economics: we have all this demand, here’s how we create more supply and we need to let the free market work,” Melendez said.

Having conservatives on board proved handy. During the session, a proposed North Texas housing development geared toward Muslims drew a storm of right-wing outrage. Talk brewed in conservative circles that bills to allow more housing backed by the coalition would allow similar developments elsewhere. In a bid to blunt opposition, Nosek and Melendez assembled talking points to debunk that rhetoric and circulated it among those lawmakers. It was Nosek’s idea that the messaging should come from TPPF, a conservative voice, Melendez said. That move was enough to peel off some lawmakers who might have otherwise helped sink the bills, Melendez said.

For left-leaning lawmakers, Brennan Griffin, senior deputy director at Texas Appleseed, said the bills would help families lower on the income ladder access economic opportunity in the state’s major urban areas.

“The thing that we learned very quickly was that these issues were not at all familiar to many representatives,” Griffin said. “So a lot of representatives were just sort of like looking to the main people that they often look to.”

Many of the proposals involved overriding city zoning regulations that restrict what kinds of homes can be built and where. Democratic lawmakers, in particular, have been on the defensive as GOP-backed bills over the last decade have sapped authority away from cities, often run by Democrats.

Indeed, city officials from the Dallas-Fort Worth region among other places testified against the bills in committee. However, Bennett Sandlin, executive director of the Texas Municipal League, said defeating the housing bills wasn’t a top priority for their group at least partially because the bills didn’t reach into existing neighborhoods and were somewhat limited in scope.

It helped that at least one bill sought to give cities increased leeway to allow more housing, advocates said, and that some cities like Austin and Dallas had recently pursued such reforms at the local level.

Still, the push encountered opposition. Some lawmakers weren’t convinced that allowing more homes to be built would, despite evidence to the contrary, help moderate housing costs. Some also didn’t believe that superseding cities was the way to solve the state’s housing woes.

Those concerns undergirded a push by Romero, the House Democrat from Fort Worth, to temporarily kill a bill to allow homes on smaller lots in some areas of the state’s biggest cities. Romero killed the bill on procedural grounds late in the legislative session before it could come before the Texas House for a vote.

Nosek watched Romero’s move play out on a livestream on a television at home during her son’s birthday party over the Memorial Day weekend. She called Melendez, who was sitting in the House gallery. Initial disappointment turned to hope as the coalition — with the help of Melendez and an expert in legislative procedure on Nosek’s lobbying team — was able to set a path to revive the bill by getting it quickly amended, and bringing it back for a vote.

State Rep. Gary Gates, a Richmond Republican who carried the bill in the House, as well as members of the coalition, including Texas Public Policy Foundation and Americans for Prosperity, pressed House leadership to let the bill return to the House floor. It didn’t hurt their cause that the bill was among the lieutenant governor’s top legislative priorities.

The gambit worked and the bill ultimately made it to Abbott’s desk.

“It's great for business for developers,” Romero said in an interview. “What remains to be seen is, is it going to be good for neighborhoods?”

What’s next?

Not everything housing advocates wanted made it over the line. A bill to automatically allow houses of worship to build homes on land they own died quietly. Another bill to let homeowners build accessory dwelling units — otherwise known as ADUs, casitas, mother-in-law suites or granny flats — in their backyards never came up for a vote in the Texas House.

But much if not most of what advocates sought made it through. Even more esoteric ideas that weren’t among the coalition’s top priorities — like a technical bill to essentially allow smaller apartment buildings and thus a wider variety of housing stock — made it through amid the push.

It seems like lawmakers’ appetite for housing reforms hasn’t been satisfied. Bettencourt and Gates said they want the accessory dwelling units bill to make a comeback in two years. Gates said he would like the state to abolish city requirements that new homes provide a certain amount of parking spots, which can drive up costs for property owners and tenants.

Nosek’s coalition hasn’t settled on what ideas it would like to pick up in two years. For now, Nosek said she’s monitoring how the bills play out in the real world, including whether and how cities implement them.

“We're here to solve problems,” Nosek said.

Disclosure: Apple, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Appleseed, Texas Association of Business, Texas Municipal League and Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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