Texas House Committee Is Set to Hold Hearing on Housing 'Crisis'

The state House of Representatives Committee on Urban Affairs will hold an interim charge hearing in Houston on Thursday to discuss the lack of housing options in Texas.

Texas' population is growing, and with that increase comes a decrease in available housing options, particularly options affordable to those in lower-income brackets, something advocacy groups are looking to rectify at the upcoming meeting.

In recent months, rental and home purchase prices have been skyrocketing across the state. In part, those rising prices are being driven by institutional buyers, such as hedge funds, buying large numbers of homes.

Last year in Dallas County, institutional buyers purchased 43% of all homes sold; in Tarrant County, they bought up more than half of the homes sold. The national average was around 12%.

Angelina Lopez, the clerk for the Committee on Urban Affairs, said there is a great need for housing right now in the U.S., where there is less housing available today than at any time in the past 30 years.

“There’s a current shortage of more than 500,000 homes in Texas,” Lopez said. “So the state [is] feeling that crisis, especially in workforce and senior housing.”

Workforce housing means affordable rental or ownership housing that is close to a person’s work and can include households earning 60% of area median income or lower.

Lopez said much of the need is within the lowest incomes, and the committee invited several groups to speak about this problem, including the Texas State Affordable Housing Corp., the Texas Apartment Association and the Texas Builders Association to testify at the meeting.

The committee will also hear from representatives of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, an Austin-based group aimed at alleviating the housing shortage in Texas.

Texans for Reasonable Solutions' chair, Nicole Nosek, said in by email that the nonprofit has been facilitating working meetings with housing and political experts, hosting events to build grassroots support, and building a team to confront Texas’ housing problem since fall of last year.

“We want legislators to understand what works and what doesn’t work when planning for Texas’ future,” Nosek wrote. “We are focused on safely building more houses more efficiently to accommodate ALL Texans: lower income, middle class and beyond … [our] stakeholders plan on discussing their experience and issues building homes and data on solutions that work in addressing housing shortages.”

According to the group’s site, they place part of the blame for the this crisis on homebuilding stagnation, a problem intensified by the pandemic, an increase in home prices and a general lack of home availability.

In a press release, the group shows how fees might also affect housing development. They show estimated data for the top five metro areas in Texas, showing that one of the most expensive costs for developers in Dallas is a fee that is charged in order to connect to the city’s water system called a tap fee.

However, unlike Austin, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, Dallas doesn't have an impact fee, which cities charge for infrastructure improvements.

“Dallas has no impact fees because it was built out before impact fees existed statewide,” wrote Nosek. “There has been discussion of implementing them, but they haven’t, seemingly because there’s not much developable land left to collect from.”

The committee plans to discuss problems and possible solutions to the state’s housing issue at the meeting. “We asked quite a few folks with a wide range of perspectives to come and give us their two cents,” said Lopez.

The meeting is open to the public and a live stream will be available on the city of Houston's website.