On most days, you’ll find Jerry Figueroa with a ratchet or another tool in hand, working underneath the propped-open hood of a vehicle.

“No car comes in that’s the same,” Figueroa said. “Each day is totally something different.”

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He’s worked in automotive repair for fifteen years in West Oak Cliff.

The owner of J&E Express Auto Service on Clarendon Drive, just east of Hampton Road, is also spending time walking to neighboring businesses, many of them car washes, tire shops and others centered around the automobile.

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Figueroa said Tuesday he’s handed out countless fliers to express opposition to a proposed rezoning affecting a commercial corridor with several Latino-owned businesses.

“I think there is a lot of mistrust in the community,” Figueroa said.

Dallas City Council is expected to vote to approve a zoning change Wednesday that would allow new residential development along the corridor of Hampton Road and Clarendon Drive, which for decades have been home to a variety of small businesses.

District 1 council member Chad West says the intent is to create a neighborhood-centered zoning plan to address expected demand for development in the coming years and ensure whatever is built is more walkable with wider sidewalks and safer crossings.

“To get ahead of any commercial development that’s going to end up coming down Hampton or Clarendon to guide it in a way that’s in keeping with what the neighborhood wants,” West said Tuesday.

The proposed rezoning comes after the adoption of the West Oak Cliff Area Plan (WOCAP) in 2022 which is designed to provide long-range vision for mobility, use of open space and urban design.

West acknowledged the rezoning has been a long process that includes support from three of the six neighborhood associations in the area, with two others not taking a stance and another deciding to remain neutral on the proposal.

Zeke Hochberg, who lives in Hampton Hills, a few blocks from the commercial corridor, says he doesn’t want to see any existing businesses displaced, but said the city should be leading the direction for what the area may look like in the future, not the state legislature.

A new state law takes effect on September 1 that will allow mixed-use residential in any area zoned commercial across the state.

“No matter what happens, that change is coming,” Hochberg said. “While this rezoning may not be great, in terms of protections for them (business owners), nobody is being actively displaced by it.”

Figueroa disagrees.

He, along with others with La Alianza, say they will urge the council to reject the proposed rezoning and work to include solutions he says will better protect existing businesses.

In a statement Tuesday, La Alianza said it was formed in response to the proposed rezoning of approximately 35 acres in the historically Latino Hampton-Clarendon corridor, and described itself as a coalition of small business owners, residents and community leaders pushing for a citywide approach to address displacement concerns.

“This path must include enforceable and funded anti-displacement protections for vulnerable residents and small businesses, preserve our cultural identity, and ensure equitable investment in communities like ours,” the group said in a statement.

Joshua Fechter

The Texas Tribune

As Texas faces a housing affordability crunch, state lawmakers sent a signal Monday to residents who try to stop new homes from being built near them: It may get a lot harder to do so.

The Texas House voted Monday to advance a bill that defangs an obscure state law that property owners use to stop new homes from going up near them. House members gave preliminary approval to House Bill 24, a key priority of House Speaker Dustin Burrows.

The bill, which must clear a final vote, is part of a Republican slate of bills aimed at tackling the state’s high housing costs — chiefly by making it easier to build homes. Texas needs about 320,000 more homes than it has, according to one estimate.

That shortage of homes, housing advocates and experts say, has played a key role in driving up home prices and rents amid the state’s economic boom. Burrows and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have made tackling the state’s affordability crunch among their top priorities this legislative session. Lawmakers have advanced bills to relax local restrictions on what kinds of homes can be built and where and make it easier for housing developers to obtain city building permits.

HB 24 — authored by state Rep. Angelia Orr, R-Angelina — tackles a Jim Crow-era state law that makes it more difficult for cities to allow new development if enough neighbors object. If a builder seeks to rezone a property and 20% of neighboring landowners object, the city council needs a supermajority to approve the zoning change.

A group of Austin homeowners used the law a few years ago to convince a judge to kill a citywide zoning plan intended to allow more homes to be built.

The law drew renewed ire this year when neighbors near a proposed affordable housing development in San Antonio — a development touted by Gov. Greg Abbott — used the law to help stop the development. The project then failed to get enough votes on the City Council to move forward.

Critics of the law have argued the law deters developers from building much needed housing for fear that pushback from neighbors will kill their projects. Opposition to the law has created unlikely alliances with the Texas Municipal League, a lobbying group that represents more than 1,200 cities, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the influential conservative think tank, as each call for the law to be changed.

HB 24 would raise the petition threshold for objecting property owners to 60%. Even then, it would only take a simple majority of city council members to approve the rezoning. The bill also prevents property owners from using the law to block citywide zoning changes. For example, if a city council sought to change zoning rules to allow more homes in existing single-family neighborhoods, opponents couldn’t use state law to stop the change.

State Rep. John Bryant, a Dallas Democrat, argued the bill would eliminate homeowners’ ability to stop commercial and industrial uses from going up next door to their homes.

“A simple majority vote could take away the zoning that they relied on when they made their biggest investment in their home,” Bryant said Monday. “Suddenly, they have an industrial or commercial use right next door.”

Orr said she thinks it’s highly unlikely that cities will enact citywide zoning plans that put industrial uses next to neighborhoods as a result of the bill — which is intended to allow more affordable housing and multifamily housing development. A city council, she noted, “already makes a multitude of decisions based on a simple majority.”

Monday’s vote was a crucial test of how the broader Texas House would approach the housing affordability crisis this session. House members last week approved a bill — House Bill 23, another Burrows priority — that intends to make it easier for developers to secure building permits if cities don’t approve them quickly enough.

It’s unclear how House members will handle a slate of potentially more controversial bills that would relax local zoning rules to allow more homes to be built. The Texas Senate has advanced bills to allow smaller homes on smaller lots, additional dwelling units in the backyards of single-family homes and homes and apartments in places they aren’t currently allowed.

Those bills haven’t come up for a vote on the House floor yet, and similar proposals died in the House two years ago.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/05/texas-legislature-housing-nimby-bill/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Why Texas Republicans are trying to rein in high home prices and rents

Dallas Councilmember Cara Mendelsohn, left, and Floral Farms Neighbors United co-chair Marsha Jackson

Perhaps one of the spiciest debates of late among Dallas City Council members occurred Wednesday as residents of Southeast Oak Cliff’s Floral Farms — where “Shingle Mountain” once stood — were finally granted a rezoning that will prohibit new heavy industrial uses on a large tract of primarily undeveloped land near their homes.

Referred to as a “massive downzoning,” a 522-acre area near River Oaks Road, Union Pacific Railroad, McCommas Bluff Road, and Julius Schepps Freeway was rezoned from heavy industrial to agricultural, retail, and single-family residential. The Council’s action varied from staff’s recommendation which included an allowance for light industry.

Residents of the Floral Farms community have been fighting for the zoning change for about six years, claiming that the industrial uses have harmed their health and prevented them from having access to grocery stores and other services.

Marsha Jackson, co-chair of Floral Farms Neighbors United, said she wasn’t against business but is against polluters, citing the illegal roofing material dump that once towered over their homes years ago.

“We’re worried about our health, our community,” Jackson said.

Planning and Development staff said 113 notices were sent to property owners both residential and commercial within 500 feet of the zoning request. They received five replies in favor of rezoning and 22 in opposition, meaning a “supermajority,” or three-fourths city council vote was required to approve the item. That means 12 votes were needed to pass it, and that’s exactly what they got.

Floral Farms is located in Southeastern Dallas

Far North Dallas Councilmember Cara Mendelsohn cast the lone vote against the rezoning and Mayor Eric Johnson and Councilmember Carolyn King Arnold were absent when the vote was taken.

“They chose to live in this area and now they’re asking us to take a really significant financial hit,” Mendelsohn said. “The thing that happens around this horseshoe all the time is people decry the disparity between the tax revenue we have north and south of I-30. If we do this, we’ll have even less tax revenue coming from southern Dallas and less jobs for people in southern Dallas … From the very first time I met Marsha Jackson, I’m like, ‘Can we move you out? Can we buy your place?’ That, I think, should be our posture.”

The council member called the rezoning “a bad decision” and said just five people were complaining about it. She said she believes in neighborhood determination, but this isn’t a neighborhood; it’s an industrial area with 27 homes.

“I’ve met with Marsha Jackson, I’ve talked to Marsha Jackson, and she moved into her house, I believe in 1995, more than 20 years after that landfill was opened,” Mendelsohn said.

“It was a choice. She wasn’t redlined. She wanted to live there.”

“She wanted to have a horse. She wanted to have big land. She wanted to be on a creek,” Mendelsohn continued. “That is certainly her choice, but to then do this to all these business owners because she made this choice, and again five homeowners are complaining, and we’re going to suddenly bring up every history item for the City of Dallas. This is a bad decision. You can criticize me all you want.”

Councilmember Omar Narvaez said such commentary was hateful and hurtful.

“I don’t care when Ms. Jackson moved in there or why she moved in there,” he said. “I get it if you don’t understand because of where your privilege comes from … but don’t put your definition of yourself and what you think that you can get on top of these residents and these business owners and all these people that are listening … For far too long we’ve had to deal with this and it’s not right, it’s not OK, and it’s not fair.”

Omar Narvaez

Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins

Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins, who represents the area that was rezoned, said the decision was not an easy one when considering the well-being of a community that was harmed for many years by Shingle Mountain, a six-story toxic dump that was removed by the City in 2021.

“One life means the world to me,” Atkins said. “It’s about people, about human beings. You can not justify a life about business, about dollars, if you have a loved one.”

The Dallas City Council was originally supposed to consider the Floral Farms rezoning case in December but postponed it in order to better understand the implications of Senate Bill 929, which addresses the procedures municipalities must follow when changing zoning regulations that affect existing property uses. The Council addressed the bill Wednesday as well.

Watch the Feb. 12 Dallas City Council meeting and read the supporting documents on the rezoning.

Senate Bill 929

The Council discussed Senate Bill 929, which limits the City’s authority to terminate nonconforming uses. The Council approved a resolution that controls the amortization and notice process, explained Bert Vandenberg, chief of general counsel in the Dallas Attorney’s Office.

“The nuance in the motion makes it comply with the actual SB 929,” Vandenberg said. “The portion that deals with the procedure for amortization was retroactive in the bill to February 1, 2023, and we are making our code comply with that.”

Caleb Roberts, executive director of the environmental justice advocacy group Downwinders at Risk, said he understood that the state had “bestowed” the senate bill on the Dallas City Council.

“Good zoning policy, good environmental justice is still able to happen through SB 929,” Roberts said. “This shouldn’t stop any good zoning policy from happening in this city.”

Environmental justice advocates celebrated the passage of the Floral Farms rezoning after Wednesday’s council meeting (Downwinders at Risk Facebook).

Industrial vs. Residential

Several business owners were opposed to the zoning change and referenced Shingle Mountain as one bad apple that harmed the surrounding residences because Dallas Code Enforcement failed to shut it down sooner.

Attorney Chris Bowers, representing American Industrial Trading, pointed out that there’s a limited number of homes and most of the industrial companies in the affected area are not causing any hazards to the environment.

“The stated purpose of this massive downzoning from industrial to agriculture is to ‘protect health and safety of area residents from industrial uses,’ but let’s look at that statement,” he said. “The area has only 25 residences according to Dallas Central Appraisal District. The zoning map shows a neighborhood to the east but that neighborhood was bought out by the city in the ‘90s and I was a part of that. No one lives there today. Second, and perhaps more importantly, AIT, my client, does not pollute and in fact many of the other uses here do not pollute … This area has been ideal for industrial uses for 100 years because of its proximity to three major freeways, a railroad line, and the city’s landfill.”

Mendelsohn’s Opposition

In response to a question from Mendelsohn, Planning and Development Deputy Director Andrea Gilles said the closest residence is about 1,500 feet from a landfill that opened in the early 1970s. Mendelsohn said the landfill has an offensive odor and people shouldn’t live near it.

“They’re not trash,” she said.

The area was annexed in the 1950s, zoned industrial, and homes were allowed there through “cumulative zoning,” Gilles explained. People moved there because it was a rural area with a massive tree canopy and access to creeks and trails, Gilles opined. A portion of the area is industrial but there’s a large area that is undeveloped, she said.

“We’re not recommending this influx of new residential subdivisions but the fact is, people live there and we want to make sure that we’re honoring that and that has not been honored for the past decades,” Gilles said. Residents have expressed interest in building a park in the undeveloped area.

HKS renderings for a proposed park at Floral Farms

There are about 50 businesses in the area and none will have to cease operations based on the zoning, Gilles said.

Mendelsohn argued that the zoning change was akin to Dallas turning its back on businesses and taking away their equity.

Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Adam Bazaldua said it was unbecoming and embarrassing for a leader to minimize the importance of a neighborhood.

Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Adam Bazaldua

“We’re here to represent every resident of the City of Dallas, and clearly it’s a residential neighborhood if 27 homes exist there,” he said. “I think we need to look back at the history of our city, why we have it so segregated, why we’re always speaking about equity, why we are still bringing in policies to undo practices from leaders in the past.

“We cannot continue to perpetuate the haves and have nots of our city.”

“We cannot continue to allow rhetoric from the policy decisions that we make here on the horseshoe to minimize the importance of some residents in our city, some of the most vulnerable, some who have been dealing with things that other parts of our city that you do consider residential have never had to worry about. Never,” Bazaldua continued. “To ignore the plight of people that you don’t personally understand is not leadership. It is embarrassing.”

A new breed of activists wants Texas to tame costs by building more housing. But longstanding opposition to such policies remains strong.

TEXAS, USA — This article was originally published by our content partners at the Texas Tribune. Read the original article here.

The scene was a familiar one at Austin City Hall: The City Council once again was seeking reforms to curb the capital city’s sky-high home prices and rents, and opponents had turned out in force to try to block them.

The central idea behind the reforms: Austin needed a lot more homes and it would have to relax certain city rules to see them built.

On a Thursday in May, more than 150 people signed up to denounce the changes. Among them were homeowners who complained the overhaul would wreck the character of their single-family neighborhoods and anti-gentrification activists who feared it would further displace communities of color.

Such critics — often referred to as NIMBYs, which stands for “not in my backyard” — have long held sway in Austin and other cities. But something was different this time.

As Austin grew and its housing costs soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, a diametrically opposed group of advocates who push cities to allow cheaper and denser housing — known as “yes-in-my-backyard” activists, or YIMBYs — had gained new footing at City Hall. That day at City Council, they showed up in numbers that rivaled their opponents and urged council members to pass the reforms.

By that point, they barely needed to convince anyone. Austin YIMBYs had laid the groundwork for the reforms during the last citywide election when they successfully backed candidates who vowed to tackle the housing crisis head-on. Those efforts resulted in a YIMBY supermajority on the City Council that includes Mayor Kirk Watson. After hours of testimony that stretched past midnight, council members approved the reforms.

The moment was the capstone of a fledgling but precarious political realignment in Austin, where forces steadfastly opposed to more housing had long used their influence to kill ideas aimed at allowing more places for people to live. That philosophy, YIMBY activists have argued, hamstrung the city from adapting to needs brought on by its robust growth and caused real-world harm.

“If you put your neighborhoods in amber, you’re literally saying ‘people can’t live here,’” said Felicity Maxwell, a board member of the Austin YIMBY group AURA. “We can’t stay like that. There’s no way to make your city freeze. And if you do, there’s a lot of dire economic and social outcomes because of that.”

That reckoning now shows signs of spreading beyond Austin as the state finds itself in the grip of a crisis that has forced many would-be first-time homebuyers out of the market and left tenants paying exorbitant rents.

YIMBY activists in Dallas have pushed local leaders, with mixed results, to embrace the idea that the country’s ninth-largest city should make it easier to build homes besides standalone single-family homes on large lots and big apartment buildings. In cities like El Paso, San Antonio and Fort Worth, policymakers are eyeing ways to add more homes and beat back their housing crises.

As the nation grapples with high housing costs, YIMBY ideas have hit the mainstream and caught the attention of some of the state’s top Republican leaders, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, as well as Democratic leaders who are increasingly nervous the state’s once-celebrated housing affordability is slipping.

“People ask me, ‘What are the things that worry you the most?’ Usually one of the things I mention is affordability of housing and where we’re going to be in another 5, 10, 15, 20 years. That worries me as much as anything else,” said Comptroller Glenn Hegar, a Republican and the state’s chief treasurer whose office published a report in August embracing the notion that Texas needs more homes to bring down costs.

The housing crisis will only get worse if nothing changes, YIMBY activists argue — but reforms to ease it are far from a sure thing.

Housing is deeply personal. Everyone needs shelter. Owning a home, the most widely accepted engine to build generational wealth, represents the biggest investment most people will make in their lives. Many homeowners don’t want to see their neighborhoods dramatically transformed. In many places, resistance to new development holds strong.

In North Dallas, neighborhood groups recently sought to recall their City Council member over her support for ongoing plans to replace a low-lying, waning shopping center called Pepper Square with shops, restaurants and almost 1,000 apartments. She later opted not to seek reelection, though she said the development fight didn’t influence her decision.

The groups argued in part the redevelopment would clash with nearby single-family neighborhoods. That flummoxed Melissa Kingston, a member of a key city panel that voted in August to advance the proposal. If they don’t want more housing in their single-family neighborhoods, Kingston told them at a recent meeting, that housing needs to go somewhere as the region grows.

“What I’ve heard you all say is, ‘We don’t want it in our neighborhood and we don’t want it anywhere near our neighborhood,’” Kingston said. “That’s not reality. Cities change, and they either change for the better or they change for the worse. But they don’t stay the same.”

A shift in Austin

The state’s housing crisis is effectively a new problem for state and local leaders — mainly because, for the longest time, Texas used to be cheap.

The state’s poorest residents have usually struggled to find housing they can afford, but housing used to be inexpensive and plentiful for middle-class families — especially when compared with Texas’ chief rivals, California and New York. Now the crisis has crept up the income ladder. Worries have begun to percolate that if Texas doesn’t contain housing costs, it could eventually wind up in the same boat as those states — with homes completely out of reach for typical families and residents fleeing for cheaper states.

At the heart of the state’s housing affordability woes lies a deep shortage of homes. Homebuilding lagged as the state’s economy boomed over the past 15 years and millions of new residents moved here. That left Texas, which builds more homes than any other state, with a shortage of 306,000 homes, according to an estimate by housing policy organization Up For Growth.

A growing body of research in recent years shows that stringent local restrictions on what kinds of homes can be built and where, known as zoning regulations, ultimately limit the overall number of homes and thus contribute to higher costs. In Texas cities, standalone single-family homes can be built almost anywhere homes are allowed. But it’s largely illegal to build other kinds of housing like townhomes, duplexes and small-scale apartments in those same places, a Texas Tribune analysis found. And cities set aside comparatively little room elsewhere for those kinds of homes as well as large apartment buildings.

Relaxing those regulations, research shows, helps cities add more homes and contain housing costs.

Austin officials have sought for much of the past decade to update those rules, but longtime homeowners opposed to new housing have often frustrated the city’s biggest efforts. Just before the pandemic, some homeowners convinced a judge to kill a major overhaul of the city’s land development code that would have allowed denser housing.

Then came the pandemic. Housing prices in the Austin region skyrocketed amid record-low interest rates, the rise of remote work and sustained population growth. The typical home in Austin went for more than $500,000. Rents took off, too, rising three times faster between 2019 and 2022 than they did in the three years preceding the pandemic, according to Zillow data.

Austin’s housing crisis had become undeniable. How to solve the problem became a dominant theme in the city’s 2022 elections.

“People just kind of got to this point where they had had enough,” Council Member José “Chito” Vela said. “They just were like, ‘okay, what we were doing on housing for the last 20 years is clearly not working.’”

The council members YIMBYs helped elect passed several reforms aimed at juicing the city’s housing stock.

The most contentious new policies aimed to broaden the kinds of homes that can go in the city’s single-family neighborhoods. Late last year, council members voted to allow up to three housing units in many places previously limited to detached single-family homes.

The council then reduced how much land the city requires single-family homes to sit on, known as a minimum lot size requirement. For more than 80 years, that requirement had sat at 5,750 square feet in much of the city. In May, they reduced it to 1,800. The idea was twofold: allow smaller and cheaper homes and make it possible to build more homes overall. At the same time, they enabled the construction of apartment buildings along the city’s planned light-rail line and closer to existing single-family homes.

Within two years, the council made more sweeping changes to the city’s zoning rules than it had since the Reagan administration. Council members recognized they needed to act fast and make up for lost time, Maxwell said.

“Everything came together so that nobody wanted to say ‘no,’” said Maxwell, who now sits on the city’s Planning Commission. “They wanted to say, ‘yes.’”

That was a marked reversal from previous years, when homeowners and neighborhood groups that wield tremendous influence made one thing clear to local politicians: Touch our neighborhoods and pay for it at the ballot box. But in the face of a devitalizing affordability crisis, complaints about how different types of homes like duplexes or triplexes might change the feel of a neighborhood lost some of their bite.

“We don’t have the luxury of not doing anything,” Watson, Austin’s mayor, told The Texas Tribune.

YIMBYs’ opponents are deeply skeptical of their proposals. They argue that some city efforts to allow more housing will spur builders to further target Austin’s low-income neighborhoods and flood them with expensive new housing that will hasten the displacement of Black and Latino residents. Those fears fueled advocates with Community Powered ATX — a coalition of progressive activists based in East Austin, which underwent rapid gentrification over the last 15 years — to rally against the changes.

“We want more deeply affordable housing to be built,” said Alexia Leclerq, a Community Powered ATX co-organizer. “What they’re proposing is not part of the solution. It’s actually making it worse.”

Zoning reform proponents have long countered that displacement in East Austin came about because city rules hampered the city’s overall housing supply and forced development pressure upon only a few parts of town. They point to research that shows loosening regulations to allow more homes across a city may actually safeguard neighborhoods more vulnerable to displacement.

Austin got a glimpse of the effect building new homes has on housing costs even before the zoning reforms were approved. Though rents remain above pre-pandemic levels, a boom in apartment construction in the Austin region drove rents down last year — in newer high-end apartments and older, cheaper apartments alike.

“You’re seeing significant price drops at the lowest end of the market that are really helping out the neediest people here in Austin,” said Vela, who represents a portion of East Austin.

YIMBYs now face the task of protecting their supermajority in the November elections. And while the reforms in Austin represent unprecedented victories for YIMBYs in Texas, their ideas face a steep climb elsewhere.

Can Dallas move forward?

Some 200 miles north on Interstate 35, an attempt to mirror Austin’s moves imploded before it had a chance to get off the ground.

Housing in Dallas, too, grew much more expensive amid the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region’s vast growth.

“If our city doesn’t do something now, it’s just going to continue to get worse,” said Dallas City Council Member Chad West, who represents the northern part of the city’s Oak Cliff neighborhood. “I want a city where my kids, when they’re old enough to want to move here after college … that they can afford to rent in the city if they want to, or eventually buy a home in the city if they want to, as opposed to having to live in a suburb of Dallas and drive in.”

West took inspiration from Austin’s efforts. Late last year, he and four council colleagues called on the city to explore similar ideas, like allowing new homes to sit on less land and up to four homes where now only one or two may go.

Opponents on the City Council moved fast to squelch the ideas.

“People who bought a home deserve to have the predictability that their neighborhood will stay intact and not turn into something that … is now single-family with multifamily mixed in,” Council Member Cara Mendelsohn, who represents Far North Dallas, said during a February discussion. “People don’t want that. I don’t want that for Dallas.”

West’s effort fizzled. Then came ForwardDallas, an update to an 18-year-old document that guides how the city should use its land. The plan seeks to encourage more kinds of housing — like townhomes, duplexes and small apartment buildings — in existing single-family neighborhoods.

A budding group of Dallas YIMBYs backed those ideas. About 40 people — a mix of homeowners and renters largely organized by the Dallas Housing Coalition, a group of housing developers and pro-housing organizations — testified in support of ForwardDallas before it landed in front of City Council.

“If we think of our city as one large single family, not only is the size of that family growing, but the members of that family are also growing and their needs and their wants and desires and priorities are changing with it,” said Hexel Colorado, a Dallas urbanist, at a council meeting.

In practice, ForwardDallas is little more than a list of recommendations, not a firm policy change. But it was enough to trigger opposition from existing homeowners and neighborhood groups who feared the plan would imperil their single-family neighborhoods.

Yard signs that said “SAVE Single-Family NEIGHBORHOODS from FORWARD DALLAS” and “HANDS OFF! SINGLE-FAMILY NEIGHBORHOODS” proliferated in some neighborhoods. Irate residents packed community centers to blast the plan. A group of homeowners trekked down to City Hall more than once to testify against it.

Single-family housing is “essential and critical to the overall mix of housing options for people who currently live in Dallas and want to move to Dallas,” said Melanie Vanlandingham, an East Dallas neighborhood advocate. “ForwardDallas doesn’t recognize that.”

More than 100 people showed up to City Hall over several months this spring to testify about the plan. More than half were homeowners opposed to allowing other housing types in their neighborhoods, most of whom bought their homes in the decades before the state’s current crisis began to kick in.

In other words, they were exactly the kind of residents local elected officials have traditionally listened to for a key reason: They’re more likely to exact vengeance in low-turnout municipal elections. Most policy decisions about what kind of housing can be built and where happen at the city level, but younger people who want more housing options are less likely to vote in local elections — and older homeowners who may oppose more housing in their neighborhoods are more likely to show up.

That’s a political reality some City Council members openly acknowledged.

“I know how I got here,” Council Member Carolyn King Arnold, who voted against the plan, said at an Aug. 6 meeting. “I know who I came to the dance with.”

For Dallas YIMBYs, that dynamic poses a significant hurdle to enacting reform.

“The most involved people are the ones who are going to oppose housing,” said Adam Lamont, a middle school teacher who leads the group Dallas Neighbors for Housing. “That small swath of the city has really, really gotten riled up and most of the city doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

Amid the backlash, ForwardDallas’ crafters scaled back some recommendations to encourage more housing types. Council members mused about ripping out any mention of housing to get the plan through — and avoid angry homeowners’ ire during the next election cycle.

Council Member Paul Ridley, who opposes allowing denser housing types in existing single-family neighborhoods, broached compromise language seeking to direct “incompatible multiplex, townhome, duplex, triplex, and apartment development” away from those neighborhoods, among other tweaks designed to ease opponents’ concerns.

“Consistently, we have heard our residents’ pleas for more housing options and also for protection of their existing neighborhoods and single-family zoning,” said Ridley, who represents East Dallas, a focal point of opposition to the plan, during a Sept. 3 meeting. “Through the input of so many stakeholders, it has become clear to me that those objectives are not incompatible.”

The City Council approved ForwardDallas with Ridley’s amendments last month — but no one seemed completely satisfied. Opponents felt the plan didn’t go far enough in enshrining the city’s commitment to single-family neighborhoods. YIMBYs weren’t thrilled about Ridley’s compromise language, though they considered the document a step in the right direction — even if it was unenforceable.

Some confusion remains. Despite Ridley’s amendments, parts of the document still encourage multifamily developments in single-family neighborhoods.

Nathaniel Barrett, a Dallas developer who helped shape the plan, said ForwardDallas will hopefully set the tone for a broader discussion on housing, but acknowledged the final document is “in conflict with itself.”

“I don’t expect any more housing to be built because of this,” he said. “That work comes elsewhere.”

Among Dallas YIMBYs, worries abound that City Hall won’t take bold action until the city’s housing crisis looks like Austin’s. Dallas rents aren’t far behind where they stand in the state’s capital. Home prices aren’t as bad in Dallas as in Austin but hover well above where they stood five years ago.

If Dallas doesn’t take more steps to address its affordability hurdles, it’s likely the Texas Legislature will do it for them, West said.

State lawmakers “love to come in and tell us what to do in Dallas,” West said. “We’re going to be handing off the decision [to them] on how to run our city because we can’t get past this gridlock.”

Who should fix the crisis?

How Texas lawmakers might address the housing crisis when they return to Austin next year isn’t clear. But the state’s top Republican officials have signaled growing unease about the issue. And polls show strong bipartisan agreement that housing costs are a problem.

Lawmakers tried to alter some city zoning rules last year but failed. Meanwhile, home prices and rents haven’t abated — and voters have become increasingly vocal about the problem, said Nicole Nosek with Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a group that pushed those proposals.

There are signs Texans are open to the proposals YIMBYs espouse. Most Texans support allowing townhouses, accessory dwelling units and small apartment buildings on any residential lot, a recent Pew Trusts poll found. Reducing cities’ minimum lot-size requirements found favor with some 45% of Texans they polled.

“It’s a clear lesson to legislators that this is something that really hits home, no pun intended,” Nosek said.

Neighborhood groups opposed to allowing different kinds of housing where they live will likely mobilize against attempts by the Legislature to alter the rules.

“It is the single largest investment for most people when they buy their home in a single-family neighborhood,” said David Schwarte, who heads the Texas Neighborhood Coalition. “How are they going to respond when they find out that the Legislature just enabled the developer to come into their neighborhood and put up five houses on a lot that was once only one home?”

How much power cities should have to decide what kinds of homes can be built and where will likely be a major dividing line. The Texas Municipal League, cities’ chief lobbying outfit, has vowed to oppose attempts to curtail cities’ authority to enact residential zoning regulations.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, came out earlier this year in favor of completely getting rid of cities’ lot-size requirements along with limits on how many homes can go on a given piece of land.

But such a far-reaching measure may not be palatable to lawmakers, said John Bonura, a TPPF policy analyst focused on housing affordability. One alternate route for state lawmakers might be to create a statewide template to loosen cities’ zoning rules and allow cities to opt in, he said. The idea would be for cities to eventually join in once they see how the reform works in other places.

“If we can’t win big, let’s at least get something through the door,” Bonura said.

For Republicans, allowing more homes means an opportunity to slash government regulations, bolster property rights and unleash the free market. For Democrats, zoning reform holds the potential to reduce racial segregation and help fight climate change.

But there are those on both sides of the aisle who are fiercely protective of single-family neighborhoods and will push back vociferously against moves they see as harming those areas.

Weighing in on cities’ residential zoning laws is awkward territory for Democratic state legislators, who have spent much of the last decade trying — and failing — to fend off Republican efforts to sap authority from the state’s bluer urban areas. At the same time, Democrats generally support affordable housing, and defending cities’ right to uphold some of those laws might work against that cause given those rules play a key role in exacerbating housing costs.

Tackling the housing crisis will likely produce strange bedfellows. The Texas Municipal League and TPPF, usually at odds over efforts to diminish cities’ rulemaking authority, agree they want lawmakers to tweak an obscure state law that effectively gives veto power to property owners to kill new housing projects near them. A group of San Antonio residents recently wielded the law to stop a proposed affordable housing development nearby — even though most city council members voted in favor of the project.

That law “makes it hard for a council to do the right thing” and add much-needed affordable housing stock, TML executive director Bennett Sandlin said.

There also appears to be some agreement on both sides that cities should make it easier to build residences in places that allow commercial development— something many of the state’s largest cities don’t allow.

The state also spends very little on housing explicitly targeted at low-income families. State Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Dallas Democrat, said he plans to introduce legislation to start a $2 billion fund to essentially pay developers to provide housing for low-income families by buying down rents in apartments on the market.

Johnson said he’s also open to legislation capping cities’ lot-size requirements and allowing homes in commercial areas — though he hopes local officials would have a say in any statewide revision to cities’ zoning restrictions.

But the state Legislature needs to do something to rein in housing costs, Johnson said.

“Texas is growing and continues to grow very, very rapidly, and companies continue to locate here,” he said. “If we don’t have affordable housing, that can’t continue.”

Texas still adds more jobs than any other state and remains an attractive place for companies to relocate. But quietly, some circles are fretting that Texas is losing its competitive advantage on housing.