By now, we’ve all heard the success story of the Texas housing market, but the typical narrative is missing a key piece of information.The Lone Star State’s population grew by 1.5 million between 2020 and 2024, thanks largely to huge influx during the pandemic. That rate of growth would usually send home prices through the roof, but Texas was able to add new housing so fast that the household income necessary to buy a typical home rose by only 25.8% over those years, less than any other state. Texas builders rose to the challenge so effectively that prices are actually dropping now, even in boomtowns like Austin.
This drop in home and rent prices has led to a slowdown in construction, which conventional wisdom predicts will help rebalance supply and demand and bring prices back up over the next few years.
What’s often missing from the conversation, however, is why Texas experienced such rapid population growth during the early 2020s. Commonly cited reasons include the rise of remote work, low taxes, a better climate, and the lack of strict China-virus lockdowns.
Fewer reporters and researchers mention the role of illegal immigration in driving the influx of new Texas residents. According to a Pew study, Texas’ illegal immigrant population held steady at around 1.6 million throughout Trump’s entire first term. Then, thanks to Biden’s open borders, it shot up to over 2 million by 2023.
With the illegal immigration issue in mind, the state’s and city’s accomplishments in housing construction look even more impressive. They weren’t just keeping pace with a mass exodus from blue states. They were also building new homes fast enough to keep up with the skyrocketing demand.
Meanwhile, instead of taking responsibility for driving up housing costs with his failure to enforce immigration law (and his reckless inflationary spending), Biden sent the Justice Department after rental pricing software companies, claiming that their algorithms were making rent unaffordable. A handful of radical Democrat state attorneys general signed onto the Biden DOJ suit. These AI tools only analyze the local market and tell landlords what it will bear. Sometimes, that means raising rents, but under current conditions in Texas, those same algorithms would recommend lowering them.
Housing costs in Texas might keep dropping for the foreseeable future. The rate of Americans fleeing to Texas may have stabilized for now, but the second Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy (and the self-deportations it incentivizes) already have the U.S. on track for its first year of net negative international migration in 50 years, legal and illegal combined.
This means that even though the construction slowdown is decreasing new housing supply, an ongoing decline in the illegal immigrant population could cause demand to keep falling. And as long as supply exceeds demand, the status quo will hold steady: a buyer’s market, more bargaining power for renters, and lower housing costs for American families the whole state of Texas.Practicing good ol’ fashioned free enterprise and enforcing the law can lead to great outcomes for our people. Please make a vote for it!
Chris Salcedo, a proud Texan, hosts The Chris Salcedo Show on Newsmax and the show of the same name on AM 700 KSEV in Houston. He is also the president of the Conservative Hispanic Society.