A century ago, families of four settled into single-family homes on large lots with back and front yards.
That’s not the case today, said Alex Horowitz with the Pew Charitable Trusts at Dallas’ second annual housing summit Friday. Developers, residents, city officials and housing experts attended the event at the University of North Texas at Dallas to address ways the city can grow without encouraging displacement — a topic that has invited community consternation and celebration, often in the same breath.
Horowitz, who served as the keynote speaker, said the average household these days is composed of two and a half residents, which means the current housing stock, dominated by detached single-family homes, is a mismatch with the population it intends to serve.
Panels during the summit targeted several questions about the future of housing in Dallas. Can single-family housing co-exist with multifamily housing? Is a new state law that offers a pathway to convert commercially zoned properties into multifamily housing by right the boon Dallas had been waiting for or is the bane of a neighborhood’s existence? How does one develop underutilized, vacant lots in a city that’s filled with them?
Political Points
And though Dallas was one of the few jurisdictions in the country to successfully add housing to its stock, the city still faces challenges.
Nationally, from 2017 to 2024, rents rose 18 percentage points faster in the lowest-income neighborhoods than in the highest-income during that time.
“That’s a big gap between high-income and low-income areas,” Horowitz said.
In Dallas, the two dominant types of constructions are apartments and single-family homes. The “missing middle” —such as townhomes, duplexes, accessory-dwelling units and homes on smaller lots — would cost less to construct and produce and could serve working professionals.
Half the renters in the country spend over a third of their income on rent, and a quarter spend over 50%. “This is not historically normal. In the past, rents consumed a much smaller share of income,” Horowitz said.
It’s bad when it comes to homeownership, too.
Horowitz said zoning restrictions and unaffordability often push high-income renters to middle-income neighborhoods. What happens next? Residents from those neighborhoods then search for housing in areas they deem affordable, and many move into low-income neighborhoods.
“Where do low-income renters go? Nowhere to go. We see displacement go up. We see homelessness go up. But most commonly, we see people absorbing steep rent increases that they really can’t afford,” Horowitz said.
Among the four largest cities in the U.S. — New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston — Houston is the only city that has been able to keep Black residents in their city. Chicago, on the other hand, lost a quarter of its Black residents between 2000 and 2021.
Houston added 33% homes to its stock, compared to the average of 14% across the other three cities. “It’s not rhetoric that avoids displacement,” Horowitz said. “It’s allowing enough homes for everybody in a market.
“We’ve got a racial wealth gap in this country. When there are too few homes, the people with the most resources win, and the people with the fewest resources lose. It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said. “There can be enough for everybody.”
Brita Andercheck, the city’s chief data officer, told council members last year that single-family parcels make up 35% of the city’s land use but only 4% of the city’s tax base. In comparison, mixed-use parcels make up 0.2% of the city’s tax base and contribute 40%.
The City Council approved plans such as ForwardDallas, a land-use guide to development across various parts of the city. It also approved parking reforms to encourage more walkable patterns in the city and removed regulatory language that not only made housing expensive, it also made it untenable. City officials are revisiting the zoning code that hasn’t changed since the ’60s and the ’80s, when automobiles drove city planning.
Take, for instance, the land around the Forest Lane DART station, said Andreea Udrea, the city’s deputy director of planning and development at a panel on local issues. There’s a push in the city to create mixed-use spaces around transit hubs, akin to the growth around Mockingbird Station.
But there’s not much DART can do to spur the development until the city changes the zoning rules that only allow parking spaces. “We never gave DART a chance,” she said.
These conversations are timely, fears of gentrification with the need for growth is a challenge every resident in the city, including city officials, will have to navigate. The pressures have contributed to a culture of distrust between city staff, neighborhoods and the development community.
Gloria Ardilla, with the Dallas Free Press and Josephine Torres Cultural and Community Center, asked the audience how many people had heard of Trinity Groves. Some raised their hands.
Ardilla said Trinity Groves was one piece of a larger, historic neighborhood called La Bajada. Amid conversations of unraveling restrictive zoning, Ardilla called for preservation and tools to let the community decide the future of the neighborhood they grew up in. “We have to be intentional about creating the change that we’re trying to create because otherwise, you can do all these plans, you can create all these policies, you can create all these opportunities, and nothing’s ever going to come the way you intended it to be.”
She didn’t quite agree with Horowitz. “He’s saying the answer is making more houses — look, that hasn’t worked always. That hasn’t worked in all these places,” she said, recalling the displacement of West Dallas residents.
Ardilla’s perspective in the marketplace has always been reflective of a separation between what makes sense from an academic and data perspective, and what is felt and experienced on the ground. Ardilla later said housing experts could all learn from each other.
“We need to meet in the middle,” she said.