State lawmakers take aim at low-income housing

Two bills filed this month in the state legislature would make it harder to develop affordable housing in Texas, imposing onerous new requirements on the projects and giving neighbors broad powers to oppose them.

Although the chances of passage are unclear — thousands of measures are filed during the four-month session and only a few become law — the bills would be consistent with many other restrictions the legislature has placed on affordable housing development. Meanwhile, helping low-income people access housing is a rising concern for Texas cities, as a flood of new residents has boosted the cost of both rental and for-sale units. 

The first bill comes from first-term Republican state Rep. Valoree Swanson, whose district in northern Harris County between Tomball and The Woodlands has put up substantial resistance to affordable housing development. Her predecessor, Debbie Riddle, said low-income housing "is not wanted" in her district, and in her campaign Swanson promised to "stop low-income government housing."

The bill amends the law regarding applications for low-income housing tax credits — the main way the federal government subsidizes affordable housing — to include a requirement that the developer "conspicuously identify the development as 'low-income government-subsidized housing'" in communications with local officials and neighborhood groups.

The bill also requires developers to notify all neighborhood groups within 5 miles of the proposed project 90 days before submitting the application, and directs the government to consider the negative opinions of those groups when evaluating proposals, but not the positive ones.

Finally, it requires an "independent study of the development's anticipated effects on local schools, area crime rates, infrastructure, governmental expenditures, population density, area property values, and the revenue of local, state, and federal governmental entities."

Higher-income communities often argue that subsidized housing will increase crime and lower property values, although studies have shown that new, well-maintained low-income housing communities do not hurt local property values and can lower crime rates. In addition, providing stable homes and giving low-income families access to good schools can help break the cycle of poverty and help the economy grow.

The Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, which has fought for low-income housing to be more evenly distributed throughout wealthier neighborhoods, called the bill "perhaps the most expansive Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) legislation ever filed."

"We are treating it seriously although we believe it is a clear violation of federal law," the group's director John Henneberger said, referring to the Fair Housing Act.

Daniel Bustamante, director of the Greater Houston Fair Housing Center, said he's concerned about widespread attacks on the availability of affordable housing. "This bill I don't think does anything but continue to create barriers."

Swanson referred questions to her staff, who did not respond to a request for comment.

The second bill, filed by Rep. Don Simmons and finance committee chairwoman Sen. Jane Nelson — both from wealthy Dallas suburbs — would prohibit localities from imposing any "ordinance, order, policy, or other measure that imposes, directly or indirectly, a fee or other charge on new construction for the purposes of offsetting the cost or rent of any unit of residential housing."

Many cities in western and northern parts of the country require or incentivize developers to include more affordable units in their market-rate projects. In recent years, others have assessed fees on new developments to help finance affordable housing projects. No city in Texas has done that so far, but the Texas Association of Builders wants to make sure they don't try, and is making the bill a high priority.

"We have concerns, as an industry that's worried about affordable housing for all, that those kinds of fees raise the cost of all development," said the association's director Scott Norman, who prefers that cities use broad-based bond measures if they want to support low-income housing. 

Although linkage fees in other cities tend to impose fees on commercial rather than other residential construction — which Simmons' measure would also prohibit — the "findings" section of the bill echoes Norman's assertion.

"Fees and exactions imposed by political subdivisions to fund subsidized housing materially increase the cost of housing construction." Instead, the bill says, the state can make housing more affordable by cutting regulations that add costs to development.

Rebecca Elliott contributed to this report.