The Austin City Council has voted to allow three- and four-unit developments to be built in single-family residential neighborhoods, and a similar measure is heading to Dallas City Hall this week.
Advocates of the measure claim it will ease the housing affordability crisis by increasing the supply of housing.
“If you don’t build more housing, then the price of existing housing is going to go up,” said Vicki Been, faculty director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, per The Texas Tribune. “If you want to keep the housing affordable or make it more affordable, you need additional supply.”
Austin City Council Member Leslie Pool spearheaded the Home Options for Middle-Income Empowerment (HOME) initiative. The council passed the first of two phases on Thursday in a 9-2 vote.
“I think we can celebrate this moment and the achievement tonight as we create more housing opportunities across the city,” said Pool, according to The Texas Tribune.
Critics of the HOME initiative argue it will do little to reduce the cost of housing while destroying neighborhoods and communities.
Council Member Alison Alter, who voted against the measure, said she agrees “on the goal [of] working to create housing opportunities for those who the market often leaves behind: our public servants and service workers.”
However, she maintained that the initiative would not actually accomplish that goal.
“The devil truly is in the details, and we have not gotten the details right as proposed tonight,” Alter said, per The Texas Tribune.
As highlighted in a recent documentary entitled Subdivide and Conquer: The Realities of HOME, other opponents of the measure argued that the policy would increase developers’ profits without making housing more affordable for residents.
“More density does not equal affordable housing. This is a huge myth,” claimed architect and realtor Kimberly Kohlhass, who appeared in the documentary. “I don’t see this as a solution at all.”
“The developer gets paid by the square foot, and I’ve seen how they cram square footage into the attic that shouldn’t be counted as square footage,” she explained. “They’re not going to do a bunch of tiny homes on a lot. They’re going to maximize every square foot because that’s their job.”
Bill Bunch, executive director of Save Our Springs Alliance, noted that in 2021, one-third of the homes sold in Austin were sold to investors rather than people intending to live in them.
“Normally, you increase supply, and the prices go down, but it’s not that simple in a city where land can’t expand; you have a fixed supply of land,” he said.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, a similar measure is coming to Dallas City Hall.
Council Member Chad West submitted a proposal last month seeking a “discussion and possible path forward” for potential amendments to the Dallas City Code that would allow three- and four-unit homes in residential neighborhoods currently zoned for single-family homes.
The Dallas City Council Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee will begin discussing West’s proposal during its next meeting on December 12.
