For years, Sugar Land has been a model for how a healthy suburb can develop alongside a booming metropolis in modern America. Situated just 20 miles southwest of downtown Houston, Sugar Land has grown from a small town of a few thousand to a mid-sized city of more than 100,000 people in a matter of decades.
Sugar Land’s growth has continued virtually unabated — until recently.
Since 2019, the city’s population has dropped by nearly 10,000 residents, a loss of more than 8% of its population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And Sugar Land is not alone.
Several of Houston’s largest suburbs, including Pasadena, Pearland and Missouri City, have lost residents since 2019, all while the greater Houston area has exploded around them. Just like in Houston itself, the populations of some of the area’s biggest suburbs have stagnated in recent years as available land dries up, home prices skyrocket and the population ages.
In Sugar Land, city officials are well aware of the demographic shifts and taking steps to address them. The results could indicate whether the biggest cities in the Houston area continue growing through the middle of the 21st century, or whether other suburbs will become the region’s new boomtowns.
“It’s the life cycle of a city, and that’s just where we’re at,” said Devon Rodriguez, the director of redevelopment for Sugar Land.
“How you grow a rapidly growing new city is different than when you’ve hit that peak of your growth, in terms of land acreage, and you just have to do things differently and think about things differently. And so that’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Rodriguez said.
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Part of suburbia’s appeal to young families is that it historically offers people larger homes for less money, in relative proximity to a large urban center.
For many aspiring homeowners, however, those opportunities may be diminishing as home values rise at increasingly higher rates. Median home values for houses with a mortgage in Houston’s largest incorporated suburbs rose by an average of about 47% between 2010 and 2019. In the four years afterwards, those values jumped again by an additional 45%.
At more than $450,000, Sugar Land’s median home value in 2023 was nearly $100,000 more than any other of the Houston area’s largest incorporated cities.
“When we were developing the last 30 years, we were that place for young families where you could get an entry-level home on an entry-level salary, and that’s just not the case here anymore,” said Ruth Lohmer, the assistant director of redevelopment for Sugar Land.
Unlike burgeoning suburbs with plentiful available land, Sugar Land has developed all but 4% of the property within its city limits. It cannot address the affordability crisis by simply increasing its housing supply — at least not within the bounds of current zoning laws.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that a majority of Texas cities — with the notable exception of Houston — impose strict zoning laws that severely limit where multi-family housing can be built, exacerbating the housing shortage and driving up prices.
Sugar Land, like most Texas cities, makes multi-family zoning available in a fraction of its territory, according to research from the Zoning Atlas. Just 1% of the city’s zoned acreage is permitted for multi-family housing, compared to 69% which is set aside for single-family homes.
With the majority of Sugar Land already built out, city officials are taking what opportunities they can to amend zoning restrictions where possible, near areas that the city has identified as “regional and neighborhood activity centers.” The city also offers rebates to homeowners who make home improvements through its “Great Homes” program, which has doled out nearly $4 million over 250 projects in an effort to keep existing housing stock competitive.
Always love a story that includes the z-word. Houston has its own housing availability and affordability issues despite the lack of zoning, but the issue in Sugar Land is pretty clear. They’re doing something about it, though it’s not clear to me how much effect that will have. There are other factors in play, including the greater availability of affordable space in unincorporated and farther-out areas. I’m sure Sugar Land can recover, but it may just be that given the type of home that is dominant there, there’s a limit to how much population can physically fit inside its borders.
Would be curious to see Sugarland’s numbers against the neigboring area: Richmond Rosenberg and unincorporated Fort Bend county.