Every Dallas City Council member agrees that an affordable housing crisis exists in North Texas, but there are differences of opinion on how to best solve the problem.
Case in point: A mid-December meeting of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee about reducing the minimum lot size to provide for greater residential density was later characterized as an attack on single-family neighborhoods.
Spectators and interested residents don’t usually attend or provide public comment at committee briefings, but HHS Chair Jesse Moreno allowed several speakers to address the panel for one minute each. All the comments at the top of the meeting were against minimum lot size reduction. At the end of the briefing, following a staff presentation and hours of banter among elected officials, those who support minimum lot size reduction got to speak.
Adding to the weird vibe was that Councilman Chad West, the author of a five-signature memorandum requesting the briefing, wasn’t there. The meeting was held days before Christmas, and West had a pre-planned family vacation, so the mayor and Chairman Moreno knew West wasn’t going to be there when the meeting was scheduled.
Also not in attendance were three of the four other council members who signed the memo: Jaime Resendez, Paula Blackmon, and Jaynie Schultz. That left the only other memo signator, Adam Bazaldua, to fight for the proposal — which wasn’t really a proposal, just a conversation, officials repeatedly emphasized.
Some city officials say that reducing minimum lot sizes is “just one tool in the toolbox,” and could be applied in certain areas where there is no development, thus not threatening the character of single-family neighborhoods by adding duplexes and triplexes. Other City Council members said during the Dec. 19 HHS meeting that they don’t think their constituents are going to go for it at all.
But if Dallas does not make a way for greater density, which provides more, smaller, potentially affordable homes, then what will pull Dallas out of its unaffordable housing crisis?
Unaffordable Housing
A Dec. 1 memorandum issued by Assistant City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry outlined the following findings from a 2023 Dallas Market Value Analysis, a document last updated in 2018:
• The characteristics of the clusters/market types have changed greatly since the 2018 Dallas MVA. Home sale prices have increased, with the most increases in the clusters/market types with the lowest sale prices in 2018.
• Areas that moved up in the market type categories from 2018 to 2023 were in West Dallas and Cedar Crest, and there were no neighborhoods in decline.
• The ratio of home sale prices to incomes grew at each price point in the city making Dallas less affordable for purchasing a home.
• There are fewer areas in Dallas that are affordable for most Dallas household homebuyers making the median income of about $58,200 (American Community Survey 2017-2021).
• The lack of affordability affects Dallas’ Hispanic and Black households more than other racial and ethnic groups due to the incomes of each group.
• Displacement pressure has increased in most of the areas around Downtown Dallas, especially in West Dallas, South Dallas, and Deep Ellum.
Various Dallas departments, including Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization and Planning and Urban Design, use the MVA to inform their work, Al-Ghafry said.
“The MVA is a tool for neighborhood revitalization and investment that guides interventions not only to where there is a need for them, but also to places where public investment can stimulate private market activity and capitalize on larger revitalization efforts,” Al-Ghafry said.
Nationwide Housing Unaffordability
ATTOM Data Solutions, a curator of land, property, and real estate data, released a Dec. 21 report that showed “median-priced single-family homes and condos remain less affordable in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to historical averages in 99 percent of counties around the nation with enough data to analyze.”
Historical and current affordability are worse than they were a year ago and far weaker than in 2021, according to the report.
Home prices are growing faster than wages in half of the 580 U.S. counties studied by ATTOM, including Dallas County and Harris County, Texas.
Annual wages of more than $75,000 are needed to pay for major costs on the median-priced homes purchased during the fourth quarter of 2023 in 332, or 57.2 percent, of the 580 markets in the report. By contrast, just 11 percent of the counties reviewed have average annual wages that high, the report states.
Looked at another way, the $86,404 income needed to afford a median-priced home in the U.S. is 20.5 percent more than the latest average national wage.
The 20 highest annual wages required to afford typical homes are all on the east or west coasts, led by San Mateo County, Calif., outside San Francisco, at $392,418.
The lowest annual wage required to afford a median-priced home in the fourth quarter of 2023 is in Cambria County, Pa., east of Pittsburgh, at $19,978.
