Last year, state officials gave housing affordability a top priority, and this week the Texas Senate Local Government Committee showed a commitment to go further.
During a committee hearing on Wednesday, some members, including Chairman Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston ), responded favorably to proposals to remove population thresholds from relatively young state laws that allow multifamily development without zoning, forbid kinship-based occupancy requirements, and establish a procedure for property owners to leave cities ‘ extraterritorial jurisdictions ( ETJ). Due to these limitations, just specific areas of the state are subject to the laws.
The Senate was asked to consider expanding state law by the conservative think tank The Texas Public Policy Foundation and the progressive volunteer Every Texas. All three laws were passed with bipartisan support.
- Senate Bill ( SB ) 1567 ), which was created specifically for College Station, forbids cities from regulating home occupancy based on age, familial status, or occupation. It passed the Texas House with 101 yeas to 29 nays last year, and it did so with only one opposing vote from state senator Charles Schwertner (R-Bryan ).
- SB 840, which was also passed last month, mandates that cities permit rezoning for personal development in commercial areas. The House passed 106 to 33, and the Senate passed it universally.
- SB 2038, which was passed in 2023, established a procedure for petitioning or voting to remove people from an ETJ city. The House passed 127 to 18 and the Senate passed 28 to 11.
We typically oppose preempt as an organization. We support nearby control wherever possible, and we believe that housing is in the first place a regional issue. However, we’ve heard about the outcomes that these bills have so far,” Every Texas scholar Shannon Holbrook told the commission.
Bettencourt referred to the set of state laws as” the bipartisan pièce de résistance act passages.”
There is no blue when it comes to housing and tax reduction. Red is absent. Just how much do green people have to pay for each unit, he said.
Some suburban towns passed ordinances last year that would obstruct SB 840, such as mandatory level or luxury requirements that would raise development costs. Some of these city governments, which are primarily concentrated in North Texas, adopted legislation at the eleventh hour before SB 840 became effective, according to Brita Wallace, general counsel for the advocacy group Texans for Affordable Solutions, which supports enclosure restructuring.
According to Wallace,” we are seeing some cities working very hard to lessen the effects of these reforms,” adding that “many rapidly-growing suburbs are left out” by the inhabitants threshold.
SB 840 merely applies to cities and counties with populations greater than 300,000. According to state senator (R-Weatherford ), that clause leaves out many fast-growing cities in Tarrant County.
Is it necessary to develop that to include more regions, and perhaps Texas’s entire county and city populations? Wallace was asked by King during the discussion.
Wallace responded,” It certainly makes sense to develop it, especially in areas where there’s rapid development.”
State Senator Royce West (D-Dallas ) said he “needs to have a conversation” with Arlington and Grand Prairie city officials about whether SB 840 was intended to be thwarted by the regulations.
Ben Crockett, a Texas Public Policy Foundation policy analyst and Texas A&M student who previously argued for the repeal of College Station’s kinship-based ownership law while a scholar, told the council that University Park in Dallas County also enacts a similar regulation because it falls outside SB 1567’s applicability limit.
” I recently heard from a young woman who lives in University Park and shares her home with another younger woman. Both of them attend Southern Methodist University. Because they live with someone they weren’t related to, Crockett said, both of them were just fined, I believe it was$ 2, 000.
The impact of SB 2038 is also uneven, according to Camm Lary, a companion at the public funding rules firm Allen Boone Humphries Robinson.
According to Lary, “many cities have supported SB 2038, but some have resisted, and there have been court cases,” and some have argued against it. Lary questioned whether exceptions could” create opportunities for numerous interpretations and sluggish down, if not prevent, some people from their relief.”
SB 2038 does not use to places that were freely annexed into a state’s ETJ in a state with a population growth of more than 240, 000 between 2010 and 2020. Additionally, it is incompatible with the ETJ of a town with a population of at least 1.4 million in a state with at least 2 million residents.
Lary also requested from the council to direct the council to allow SB 840 and other laws to apply to “every city and county rules.”
House and Senate leaders instructed committees to conduct an investigation into housing affordability this year, indicating a potential parliamentary priority for the upcoming 90th Congressional Session in January.
In the Texas House, a rival hearing was held in July. In a meeting where city representatives from Plano, Arlington, and Grand Prairie, three of the places that passed regulations last year that made SB 840 advances more expensive, the Texas House Land and Resource Management Committee, headed by state representative Gary Gates (R-Richmond ), discussed the same policy.
Gov. Greg Abbott has also made affordability of housing a key component of his reelection campaign.
