In Grand Prairie, Texas, you can turn a dead strip mall into apartments. State law says so. The city has a condition: first build an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Since that law took effect, Dallas has new projects. Fort Worth has new projects. Arlington, Plano, and McKinney are moving. Grand Prairie has built zero units. Not one.
That is not an accident. It is the point.
What this actually costs
You are not asking for a subsidy. You are not asking the government to hand you a house. You want a stable place to live—something you can plan a life around without spending every dollar just to keep the rain off.
When cities invent new barriers after the state removes the old ones, the cost does not land on the planning department. It lands on renters, on young families, on the forty-year-old making the most money he has ever made who still cannot buy the house his parents bought on one income.
One-third of Gen Z still lives with their parents into their late twenties. First-time buyers keep getting older. Rents keep rising faster than paychecks. That is the downstream cost of treating housing as a privilege the city gets to ration.
What Texas actually fixed
Last year Texas took a real piece of zoning power away from city hall and handed it back to the people who own the land.
Senate Bill 15 stopped big cities from forcing every new home onto an enormous lot. Five, six, seven thousand square feet of dirt under every single house—whether anyone wanted it or not—was just another way of saying starter homes are illegal.
Senate Bill 840 went further. Own a dying strip mall, an empty office park, or a warehouse nobody has touched? You can redevelop it for housing under clear limits. No rezoning. No hearing. No eighteen months of begging a planning commission while the loan clock runs.
Most housing reforms make permission easier to get. This one deleted the permission step. A key distinction to remember.
The numbers so far
Since September, SB 840 has put more than 8,400 apartments in motion—roughly one out of every five multifamily units permitted statewide.
Apartment permits fell across Texas in the areas the law does not cover. They rose in the nineteen cities it does.
Another 2,800 homes are moving forward under the lot-size reform in places like Dallas, Plano, and El Paso.
That is what happens when property owners are allowed to respond to demand without asking first.
How cities answered
The cities lost some power. They did not surrender. They got creative.
A few examples:
• Irving decided any apartment built under the new law must be eight stories. Most buildings that actually pencil in that market are three or four. Then came the amenity menu: gym, dog park, remote-work space, and a mandatory choice between a yoga room, a bike station, or a place to wash your dog.
• Arlington raised height minimums on major corridors, expanded amenity requirements, and required EV chargers on fifteen percent of parking spots.
• Frisco used the cleanest workaround. The law does not reach districts that allow heavy industry. So Frisco wrote heavy industry into every commercial district—copying the definition straight from the bill. Now those corridors are “industrial” on paper, and the housing law does not apply.
Will Frisco ever approve a smelter next to the Whole Foods? Never. Council votes on every project. The answer is always no. The industrial designation exists for one reason: to make apartments illegal again.
• Grand Prairie required the Olympic-sized pool. When pressed at the Capitol as to whether someone could build a smaller one they said or no pool at all, the mayor pro tem called it a “reasonable variance”—an easy one the council would probably grant. The state had just removed the need for special permission. The city built a new permission process on top of the old one so they had a reason to say no to new development.
This is what protecting power looks like. The permission system does not disappear when a state law deletes one step. It invents the next step.
“Not just the number of rooftops”
At the hearing, Grand Prairie’s mayor pro tem put the philosophy in plain language: growth should be measured by the quality of life it creates, “not just the number of rooftops.”
Rooftops. He means houses. Homes people can actually live in. He says the word the way you’d say throughput—like a roof is a unit of production instead of the place a family sleeps.
In this usage, quality of life means whatever the city decides you need. A pool. A dog wash. A yoga room. The city pays for none of it. All of it lands on your rent.
You want to know why people are getting more populist and more resentful of the institutions that claim to serve them? Moments like this. Abstracting people’s core need for shelter into a question of rooftops and “quality of life” as if someone who only has $250 after rent has a quality of life he need not be concerned about.
The man who would not name the city
At the same hearing, a homebuilder told the committee that cities are defying the new state law. Then he refused to say which ones. On the record. For his own protection.
He has to go back Monday and pull permits from those same people.
That is what “local control” often means in practice— the power to hold hostage a man who just wants to build homes while the city flouts the law the state just passed.
Local control is not the same as property rights
I believe in local control. I’m from Montana. Give me a county commissioner over a federal agency every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
But we are not talking about the balance of powers between levels of government. We are talking about property rights.
But if you want to talk about local control, let’s: the smallest unit of government in America is a man and a woman deciding what to do with the ground they own and the family they are raising on it. Everything above that is borrowed. A city gets its authority from the state. The state gets its powers from the people.
Authority flows up out of the household. It does not rain down from a mayor pro tem.
When a council overrides the property owner, the larger unit of government is overruling the smallest one and calling it “local.”
A better answer than endless lawsuits
Texas anticipated some of this. Both laws let a property owner sue a city that will not comply—and when the owner wins, the city pays the lawyers. That is a real legal weapon. Almost no one has used it yet.
But the current approach is a trap. You pass a bill. A city guts it. You sue. You win. You pass another bill. They invent the next obstacle. Forever. One ordinance at a time. A thousand cuts, and you have to bandage every single one. The creativity of localities that want to keep their power is limited only by their imagination.
There is a better answer. It is called the Private Property Restoration Act.
It does one thing. It says your property rights should be treated the way your free speech rights are.
Right now, if a city wants to restrict what you say, the government walks into court carrying the burden. It has to prove the restriction is necessary and narrowly tailored. If it cannot, it loses.
If a city wants to restrict what you build, you carry the burden. The city wins if a judge can imagine any halfway rational reason for the rule. Traffic. Neighborhood character. Quality of life. Not enough pool. Whatever.
The Private Property Restoration Act flips that. Same standard as the First Amendment. The city justifies itself, or the rule dies.
Run the Olympic-sized pool through that test and it does not survive the afternoon. Neither does the eight-story minimum, the mandatory dog-washing station, or the fake heavy-industrial zone written solely to block apartments.
A thousand cuts, answered with a thousand lawsuits—and the city paying for the privilege of losing them. That is a fight you can actually win.
The model bill is sitting on a shelf right now, waiting for states to pick it up. The more people who know it exists, the harder it gets to ignore.
Send this to someone
Send it to someone in Texas. Send it to someone in your own state who is about to watch the same pattern play out.
The people blocking your house are already in the rooms where the rules get written. They never miss a meeting.
Somebody has to show up on the other side.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
We can unblock it
