Houston Mayor Halts Affordable Housing Deals

After residents in the upscale Tanglewood neighborhood of Houston resisted plans to build affordable housing there, Mayor Sylvester Turner has put a halt on similar affordable housing deals citywide “until he can examine them more closely,” writes R.A. Schuetz in the Houston Chronicle. 

The controversy centers around a 2015 state law regarding public facility corporations, “which allows local housing authorities to take properties off the tax roll if developers make some of the units affordable.” Critics say the law doesn’t clarify what “affordable” means or limit rents to a percentage of income. “[Mayor Turner] emphasized that his concern was whether developers were creating enough affordable units to warrant such a large tax break.” As Schuetz points out, “a 2020 study by the University of Texas School of Law found that, because of the law’s lack of clarity around the definition of affordability, the ‘affordable’ units it created were often market rate.” 

Meanwhile, some residents worry that removing tax revenue from new developments will harm local schools and infrastructure, even as developers “stretch the definition” of affordability and fail to benefit the lowest-income households. According to a Houston Chronicle investigation, some landlords don’t accept residents with housing vouchers. The mayor says the program will remain suspended “Until I can get a much better understanding of who’s getting what and for what.”