New apartments will be coming to Arlington soon, and the city and its residents won’t have as much say as they’re used to after Texas’ Senate Bill 840 goes into effect in September.
Texas needs around 320,000 more houses than it has now to meet current demand, according to housing policy and advocacy group Up for Growth.
Supporters of the law hope it will aid the state in righting the ship. Others, though, worry this is a move that remove local government’s ability to use local knowledge and community input to make the best decisions and could strip cities of their architectural identity.
The new law is aimed at addressing the high cost and lack of options for housing in the state by giving developers permission to put multifamily housing in areas designated for commercial use. The developer has to build 36 housing units per acre and must include at least one parking spot for every apartment unit.
The minimum density of 36 units per acre is higher than Arlington’s 22 while the minimum parking requirements set by the city are based on the number of bedrooms in the apartments, typically resulting in more than one spot per apartment.
SB 840 applies only to cities of more than 150,000 residents in counties with more than 300,000 residents. That accounts for 19 Texas cities, according to The Texas Tribune.
Arlington is one of those cities, joined by the likes of Fort Worth, Dallas, Plano, McKinney and other cities in and out of North Texas.
The bill isn’t perfect but it’s a step in the right direction, State Rep. Chris Turner said. Turner, who represents parts of Arlington and Grand Prairie in the legislature, said he thinks the bill is the right move whether it’s perfect or not.
“I think it is increasingly apparent to everyone that there is not enough housing available and that manifests itself in the price points in the market right now, whether you're buying a home or you're trying to rent a home, because it's simply out of reach for a lot of Texans,” Turner told KERA News in a phone interview.
But the law has some city leaders concerned about the way it will impact Arlington’s future.
Arlington City Council met behind closed doors July 7 to discuss the law and its impacts on the city. The meeting was not public because the council was receiving legal advice from the city attorney’s office.
Pros and cons
Rebecca Boxall, the council member for District 5, said there are some pros to the law, but there are a lot more cons.
“I understand why they're doing it,” Boxall told KERA. “And I think that their intentions were just to create more housing, which we need. But I think I just don't agree with the preemption aspect of it.”
That preemption aspect is what happens when a higher level of government, in this case the state, takes away the options a more local level of government - like a city - can take to make decisions on specific issues.
Under SB 840, that means Arlington and other cities that meet the law’s criteria can’t outright deny multifamily developments in commercial areas.
Arlington and other cities are still trying to unravel the full impact of the new law and determine how much room it gives them for controlling things like parking minimums, tree preservation, aesthetics and how far back a structure is from streets and sidewalks.
Boxall worries the city won’t have any control over those things, leading to unsightly “monolithic” buildings she worries could even look like Soviet-era prefabricated apartment buildings. Still, she said she’s hopeful the city’s existing structure for planning and zoning will help alleviate some of those concerns
Bowie Hogg isn’t so sure.
The representative for District 7 on the city council, Hogg told KERA News his biggest concern is ugly, poorly built apartments erected overlooking neighborhoods of single-family homes.
The law does allow for multifamily housing to be built in any commercially zoned party of the city, and Hogg worries that will allow small tracts of commercial land in or near neighborhoods to be redeveloped, like sites that once held gas stations, corner stores or restaurants.
He’s also not happy about the state overriding the city’s authority, something he said was hypocritical for a state government so guarded against federal overreach.
“Austin complains about DC taking away their control and now our legislature did the exact same thing and took away local from Arlington,” Hogg said. “The city should be very concerned about Senate Bill 840.”
Removing the city council’s control over what developments are built in which areas of the city ultimately means residents get less say, Hogg said. Until SB 840 goes into effect, he said residents can go to town halls, council meetings and talk with their council members to share their thoughts and impact the decisions that are made.
Under the new law, Hogg said it sometimes won’t matter how many residents are in favor of or opposed to a development. No matter how many speak at council meetings or email their city representatives, Arlington will be forced by law to approve new apartments.
Turner, the state representative, said he doesn’t think local control will be as heavily impacted. He’s also not as worried about developers putting up ugly apartment towers or building shoddy structures.
He believes the market will drive developers to build apartments that people actually want to live in.
“If they're going to build housing, they're going to build it to be competitive in the real estate market, so I don't think anyone's going to be trying to go build Soviet-style apartments,” Turner said. “They want to develop properties that are going to be appealing to residents and so I don't share that concern."
Impact on Texas cities
Turner, Boxall and Hogg all agree that Texas needs to do something about its housing shortage, even if they disagree with the way SB 840 is meant to help.
Hogg told KERA he was particularly unhappy that the bill was bracketed by population, leaving only 19 Texas cities with the new mandate. He questioned how much of an impact that could really have on the state’s worsening housing shortage.
“It's not targeting any smaller cities, it's not targeting any medium-sized cities, it's only going after larger cities,” Hogg said. “If you really want to fix it, then why didn't they do this across the state? They only targeted certain cities and certain groups.”
Turner agreed that law's limit to the state’s largest cities is one of its weaknesses. He doesn’t think the law should be applied to places like a small town in East Texas or the Panhandle but did want to see it more evenly distributed throughout the urban counties of Texas.
“That was an area where I had my deepest reservation because I do think ultimately, these types of policies should be applied uniformly, or near uniformly, to cities in our major urban counties," Turner told KERA.
Boxall said there are positive aspects to SB 840. In addition to promoting the redevelopment of unused property, the law has the potential to positively impact Texas’ housing shortage and could drive housing prices in the city down.
But the lack of control is important, she said. Arlington’s process for approving new developments, including apartments, involves making sure the construction meets the city’s standards for things like quality, safety, spacing and appearance.
The city also examines the impacts on traffic to ensure roads in the area can handle any increased capacity. That’s something she said it doesn’t look like the city will be able to do under the new law.
Better solutions?
Hogg said the housing shortage in Texas needs to be addressed. He just wishes the legislature had found another way that didn’t involve preempting cities on apartments.
“There were a lot of different paths they could have gone down to fix that. They could have provided more incentive to redevelop some of our old apartment complexes, tear down old,” Hogg said. “I think there's many ways you can fix housing and part of that is redevelopment. It's not developing on land that is not built for multifamily.”
Boxall said the law wouldn’t be as worrisome had it been more thought-out in the impacts it would have and the controls necessary for cities to ensure developments don’t inadvertently cause harm to the community.
Had there been more liberty for cities to dictate requirements for parking, setback, environmental standards, traffic impact and cohesive design, Boxall said it would be easier to support.
Turner says the new law isn’t the perfect solution to the problem, but that it is the right move for Texas right now. Still, he said there are other ways the legislature could have lowered housing costs and encouraged more development.
He hopes to see SB 840 and other bills like it refined and improved, along with enacting some other strategies, in the next legislative session in 2027.
He hopes to see one in particular that gives landlords the opportunity to claim new property tax exemptions, but only if those savings are passed on directly to renters. A lot of people think renters don’t pay property taxes, not realizing those taxes are passed directly on to renters through their bill each month.
Hogg and Boxall said the city is continuing to explore the options it will have when the law goes into effect in September and will communicate those options with residents and business owners in the city.
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