Opinion | Why Texas Is Winning the Housing War

You’ve done some reporting on Austin. That’s been a kind of hell of a story over the past year or two. What have we seen there? Well, we’ve seen, essentially, is that Austin built an enormous number of homes in the 2010s and early 2020s, and average rents have gone down, down, down over the last 18 to 24 months. Austin is like the canonical story here, but the story that I find more impressive in a way is Dallas, Texas. Dallas, Texas, between 2019 and the early 2020s added a population equivalent to the size of urban Boston. Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the Dallas metro. And if Dallas were like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the average price of a home in Dallas, Texas, right now would be around $3 billion. – But that’s not what happened. – Three billion? Yeah no. I’m just joking. It would be so absurdly high. You wouldn’t — you’d have to calculate it in Bitcoin. But what happened instead is that housing prices in Dallas have actually declined over the last three and a half years. Dallas built so much that construction increased per capita throughout this period. Dallas builds more housing today than any other metro in the country. That is a triumph of allowing the housing market to work. And that’s because housing is not a special kind of good. It’s a good that, like so many other goods, is responsive to supply and demand. Given a steady level of demand, if you restrict supply, prices go up. If you add supply, prices stabilize. And if you add enough supply, prices can actually go down. That’s why you have, in so many places where people want to live, prices going through the roof, because we’ve simply made it too hard to build. It is really, really important to me that whatever explanation that people have for this phenomenon, some people say it’s about billionaires or corporate interests. I say, look to Texas. Texas has billionaires, Texas has corporate interests. But Texas also has an entirely different set of rules and customs and permitting regulation that simply makes it easier for supply to respond to demand. And as a result, we have outcomes in Texas that are better than the rent freeze that Mamdani has promised New York and other left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states. We have something better than a rent freeze. We have rents going down because we’ve made it easier to build.