Texas Chamber Business News

New Poll Finds Texans Want Attainable Housing Solutions to Meet Rising Demand

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Texas Chamber Business News
February 11, 2025

New Poll Finds Texans Want Attainable Housing Solutions to Meet Rising Demand

This week, the Texas Association of Business and Chambers of Commerce Foundation (TABCCF) released the results of a new public opinion poll which found that voters in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have serious concerns about the availability and affordability of housing, and broadly support new options to ensure the rapidly growing North Texas community can meet the rising demand.

The poll, conducted by Ragnar Research Partners, surveyed likely voters in Collin, Denton, Dallas, Rockwall, Johnson and Tarrant Counties between January 5- 7. The results reveal that a supermajority of residents – 80% – agree there is a shortage of reasonably priced homes, including a plurality – 40% – who agree the shortage is a “serious problem.”

The poll also demonstrates that voters have general agreement on how Texas should address the shortage. Over 70% of voters support allowing the conversation of empty or underutilized office buildings to residential housing. 69% of voters also said they support allowing large acreage landowners to build homes for different levels of affordability. Additionally, 76% of voters surveyed agreed that it is unfair that only some property owners can change the use of their land.

State leaders have already sounded the alarm on the urgent need to address the emerging housing crisis.

Last August, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar warned that, even with the Legislature’s historic property tax relief and reductions in regulations last session, our state’s housing crisis “remains daunting” and that addressing it will be “key to our continued overall economic health.”

During his recent State of the State address, Gov. Greg Abbott made clear that the Legislature must take steps to make housing more affordable, acknowledging that “we need to make it easier to build, slash regulations and speed up permitting.”

Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has prioritized SB 15 to remove barriers to affordable housing.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News after the poll’s release, Texas Association of Business President & CEO Glenn Hamer and Texans for Reasonable Solutions Chair Nicole Nosek said Texas should learn the lessons from California’s housing affordability crisis in order to maintain the state’s superior business environment:

We know that when residents cannot find housing to fit their needs, businesses suffer because they struggle to recruit and retain the workforce they need. Skyrocketing housing costs were a major reason why states like California have hemorrhaged major corporations to states like Texas and Florida in recent years, according to a study by the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center at Stanford University. Will we learn from the housing affordability failures in states like California?

Hamer and Nosek pointed to several “commonsense” solutions to address the housing crisis proactively before it begins to impact Texas’ business climate:

  • Texas needs to affirm the fundamental right for property owners in new neighborhoods to build detached townhomes on their own land. In new neighborhoods, Texas landowners with at least five undeveloped acres should have the power to build housing that’s more accessible and meets the needs of their communities — cutting through restrictive regulations and unleashing the full potential of Texas’ housing market.

  • In the D-FW area, the TABF poll demonstrated that almost 7 out of 10 support this policy.

  • Texas should unlock the full potential of vacant office space on commercial or mixed-use property. Already in the post-pandemic era, we’ve seen more than 13 major projects converting once-dormant office spaces into new housing units. Streamlining and incentivizing these types of projects, as seen through state Sen. Bryan Hughes’ SB 840, would help significantly expand missing middle living options for Texans closer to where they work. A proven model of success can be seen within Florida’s Live Local Act, which unleashed 15,000 new residential units within a year of being enacted.

  • Roughly 71% of Texans in the D-FW area support this proposal.

To read the full results of the poll, click here.

Glenn Hamer

President and CEO - Texas Association of Business

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