Bettencourt Names West to Lead Probe of Cities Skirting Texas Housing Laws

One year after three state housing laws took effect, senators heard that the laws are producing homes and that some North Texas cities have written ordinances to blunt them. On Sept. 2 the chairman of the Senate Committee on Local Government answered by putting a Senate colleague in charge of an inquiry into those cities.

“If Frisco did that and they’re trying to wire the whole city around, sorry, that gets special attention from local government committee,” said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R–Houston, after naming Sen. Royce West, D–Dallas, to lead the review with Sen. Phil King, R–Weatherford, and Bryan Hughes, R–Mineola. “I’m going to put all my legal talent on one one operation.”

The hearing, the second the committee held in two days, took invited testimony on the implementation of Senate Bill 15, which caps minimum lot sizes in large cities; Senate Bill 840, which allows apartments by right on commercial land; Senate Bill 2477, on office-to-residential conversions; and Senate Bill 2038 of 2023, which lets landowners petition out of a city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction. Because this was an interim hearing, the committee took no votes. The Texas Dispatch previewed the hearing and reported in July that the House Land and Resource Management Committee heard cities had complied with SB 840 while witnesses described the resulting ordinances as a checklist built to kill housing.

Britta Wallace, general counsel of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, said her group “documented approximately 9,200 homes proposed or approved that were directly or indirectly supported by SB 840,” including about 1,700 homes in 16 developments across nine cities using the law directly. An American Enterprise Institute review found roughly 3,500 small-lot approvals in four cities under SB 15, she said.

Then she described the response. Cities have layered Olympic-size pools, height minimums of 6 to 15 stories and public-art fees onto SB 840 projects, she said, with Grand Prairie charging $4 per habitable square foot for its art fund. “Many of the ordinances were passed like August 28th, the day before the bill went into effect, or two days before the bill went into effect,” she said. “If a city responds to a housing affordability law by inventing a new list of expensive mandates, that is not implementation, it is resistance.”

Bettencourt cut to the point. “Okay, so this logically is a barrier to development,” he said. “Just call it what it is.”

King said he and West both represent Arlington. “That really disappoints me because the legislature has done so much to help Arlington, particularly with regard to its entertainment district,” he said. He asked whether SB 15 should reach beyond its population thresholds “to where it applies to more counties and maybe all counties in all cities in Texas.” Wallace said the law covers only 19 cities and “it certainly makes sense to expand it.”

Hughes recalled that SB 840 was written to exclude industrial zoning and asked whether cities had used that carve-out. “In Frisco, either right before September 1st or right after Frisco allowed in every commercial zoning district, they allowed by a conditional use permit heavy industrial use,” Wallace answered. “What I suspect they may be doing is trying to carve out the entire city from SB 840.”

West said he would go to the cities himself. “I represent the city of Arlington in part, and also I represent Grand Prairie. I need to have a conversation with them,” he said, and proposed “a special meeting where it can be virtual so we don’t have to come down to Austin and seek their justification for doing it.” Bettencourt replied: “I just did, you’re the chair of it.” West: “I’m a Democrat, though.” The chair said the hearing would be virtual “next week.” The Senate parliamentarian later reclassified the panel as a workgroup because a subcommittee cannot meet virtually.

JD Hale of the Texas Association of Builders said Texas ranks 43rd in homeownership and home prices are up 51 percent since 2020. He asked senators to let trade associations sue cities on members’ behalf, because a builder who sues alone “will never do business in that city or county ever again because they’re blacklisted.” Ben Crockett of the Texas Public Policy Foundation said SB 840’s cause of action “is only for violations of that chapter, not these different amenity requirements,” and proposed writing a Nollan-Dolan nexus test into Chapter 218 of the Local Government Code.

Sen. Molly Cook, D–Houston, pressed the other side of affordability. “A big part of housing affordability” is “preventing evictions,” she said, and Harris County’s two justices of the peace per precinct has “led to landlords being able to pick the more favorable judge.” She asked the Texas Apartment Association to back random case assignment. Mike Rust, the association’s president, said tax relief “that stops at the homestead leaves out the more than 7 million Texans who rent.” Bettencourt told Cook that if homeowner associations “are becoming predatory and they’re evicting people. Okay, then go ahead and get a bill and we’ll hear it.”

Shannon Halbrook of Every Texan said deregulation adds supply near 80 percent of area median income, not deeply affordable housing, and “the solution isn’t to, to provide more tax breaks for established homeowners.”

Trey Lary, an attorney with Allen Boone Humphries Robinson, called SB 2038 “the Sleeper Affordability Act.” “I would argue it’s done more to contribute to housing affordability than any single piece of legislation, Mr. Chairman,” he said. Austin released about 170 properties near a Texas Military Department armory and later tried to reclassify the site as a federal base, he said; a federal district court granted the landowners a preliminary injunction last month. Cook asked who reviews drainage when land leaves a city’s jurisdiction “if there’s like, flooding downstream.”

The signals for January were explicit: a workgroup report on cities resisting SB 840, association standing to sue, a broader SB 15 and an invitation for an HOA eviction bill. The 90th Legislature convenes in January 2027.