Probably a few things, though it’s not clear what is on tap at this time.
If Texas wants to rein in its high housing costs, it needs more homes, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s office said Tuesday — the latest sign that the state’s high home prices and rents have become a growing concern for the state’s top officials.
Homebuilding in Texas didn’t keep up as the economy boomed and millions of new residents moved here over the past decade, the comptroller’s 26-page report found. That lag in homebuilding left the state with a deep housing shortage: Texas needs 306,000 more homes than it has, according to one estimate cited in the report.
That shortage has fueled competition for a limited supply of housing, especially in the state’s major metro areas — sending housing costs soaring, forcing many would-be first-time homebuyers out of the market and leaving more than half of the state’s tenants spending too much on rent.
Texas’ relatively low cost of living has been a major draw for new residents and relocating companies. But Texas could lose that affordability advantage if local and state officials don’t find some way to boost the state’s housing supply, particularly for lower- and middle-income families, Hegar said.
[…]
The comptroller’s report stops short of making explicit recommendations on what steps policymakers should take, but nodded to some potential solutions.
Among them: relaxing local laws that determine what kinds of housing can be built and where. Cities have laws called zoning regulations that determine how many homes can be built on a given lot and how much land is required in order to build a home.
[…]
There are additional ways for local and state officials to tackle housing affordability, the comptroller’s office said. State lawmakers, for example, could fund programs or incentives aimed at providing homes for low- and moderate-income families. Local governments could streamline their permitting processes in order to allow homes to be built more quickly, the report said.
Nicole Nosek — who heads Texans for Reasonable Solutions, an organization that pushed zoning reforms at the state level last year — proposed ideas to increase housing supply during a Tuesday breakfast meeting with the comptroller’s office, Texas Habitat for Humanity and the Austin Board of Realtors.
It should be easier to build homes in commercial areas, Nosek said, which many Texas cities don’t currently allow. The amount of land cities require single-family homes to be built upon, a requirement known as a minimum lot size, should also be reduced, she said.
The report is here and it’s pretty readable. Reasons for the strain on housing affordability include the state’s rapid population growth, the sharp decline in home construction following the 2008 financial crisis, constraints at the local level on construction, and home insurance rates. I’d say the Lege is best positioned to do something about that last one, though the report doesn’t discuss it.
For obvious reasons, I’m suspicious of any effort at the state level to meddle in local zoning and permitting ordinances. I personally would recommend the state focusing on supply issues, which is mentioned as one possibility on page 16 of the report. Fund or provide incentives to build low- to moderate-income housing, provide assistance for lower-income home buyers, put some brakes on insurance rates (maybe doing something about climate change, which is absolutely driving some of that problem, would be helpful as well), that sort of thing.
If there must be a state incursion into local matters, how about making it easier for local governments to seize and/or condemn abandoned properties? I know that one issue that tends to stymie local governments is that ownership of these properties is often murky, making it harder to pursue legal resolutions. Surely that’s something that state law could help facilitate. There does seem to be some consensus on Doing Something about housing affordability at the state level. Hopefully that can be harnessed and used for good.
By focusing on the supply issue, do you mean focusing on the demand side (providing funding to low-income buyers and putting a cap on insurance rates). Zoning reform is the main tool for fixing general supply issues unless the legislature decides to subsidize homebuilding companies regardless of how much they charge customers.