This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Shelter in a Federal Storm: State and Local Housing Solutions for a Time of Federal Hostility
Top Takeaways
Big tent coalitions are backing packages of housing-related zoning and regulatory reforms in many states, including states where passage of major housing legislation in the past has been rare, such as in Montana and Texas.
Many affordable housing developers and advocates see these reforms as making their own work easier, even though, on their own, they are insufficient to address housing affordability.
Some advocates fear a focus on supply-oriented reforms will make it harder to secure funding for the subsidies needed to build affordable housing, but others say this could make it easier, by helping more legislators identify housing as one of their causes.
Housing had never been a priority in the Texas state legislature. That is, until 2025, when seven housing bills were passed. All the bills were housing supply reforms, focused on strategies to make it easier and cheaper to build a wider variety of homes in more places. (This is often described as a YIMBY, or “yes, in my back yard” orientation.) None of them had a specific focus on lower-income households, nor did they include any funding, but they did have strong backing from both political parties—including one each among the “priority bills” of the lieutenant governor and house speaker.
Texas is not alone. Henry Honorof, director of the coordinating team for the Welcoming Neighbors Network (WNN), says he knows of similar legislative efforts in 25 states this year, with 10 passing significant zoning or permitting reforms and 13 still with live bills moving forward as of the end of April. Many of these ideas also found their way into the federal housing bills passed by Congress this spring.
WNN was founded, says Honorof, by 10 state and local organizations that started comparing notes following an earlier round of housing supply policy victories from 2019 to 2021. They “all stumbled upon the same successful model,” he writes in an email, “one that centers the importance of strange bedfellow coalitions and building trusting relationships across the spectrum of people who care about housing. We created WNN to be a place to replicate and adapt each other’s successes, avoid one another’s mistakes, and stay at the cutting edge of the movement.” Honorof says WNN currently has 63 members across 34 states.
For people who have long worked in affordable housing but are used to being in the political wilderness, the new field of play is full of both risks and opportunities.
What Do These Packages Look Like?
Each state prioritizes a different selection of reforms and has different political dynamics behind the coalition that emerges to support them.
Some of the most talked-about housing measures that passed in Texas in 2025 were:
- Senate Bill 840, which allows housing construction as of right in areas zoned for commercial use.
- House Bill 24, which defangs the “valid petition process,” also known as the “tyrant’s veto.” Previously, if 20 percent of surrounding landowners objected to a rezoning, the city council had to hold a vote requiring a three-quarters supermajority for it to go forward. Now both thresholds have changed to 60 percent of neighbors and a simple majority to move forward.
- Senate Bill 15, which reduces allowable minimum lot sizes in new developments.
Other measures included making office-to-residential conversions easier, expanding where manufactured homes can be placed, removing a code requirement for a second stairway in small multifamily buildings, and reducing limits on unrelated people living together in college towns.
The bills were selected to have wide-ranging appeal in the Texas context. Focusing on commercial zones and office conversions, as well as limiting smaller lot-size requirements to new subdivisions, all undermined concerns about changing existing neighborhoods, without limiting impact in the sprawling state. The coalition also took a flexible approach to its bills, accepting feedback from members (such as adding an industrial buffer zone to SB 840) and legislators alike (the minimum lot size grew over the course of the session to make the measures passable), says Nicole Nosek of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which coordinated the coalition championing many of these bills.
In 2023, Montana legalized accessory dwelling units (ADUs), duplexes, and housing in commercial zones statewide, and reformed permitting rules. This sweeping change was dubbed the “Montana Miracle” at the time, and the state followed up in 2025 with additional measures, including a reduction in parking requirements.
Brittany Palmer, executive director of Front Step Community Land Trust in Missoula, Montana, organizes with YIMBY groups around these reforms. Missoula released its zoning code overhaul in response to statewide changes in early 2026, and Palmer says Front Step has started reviewing its potential projects in light of the new code; the first thing her organization noticed was that the number of units they can build on one of their sites had doubled.
Virginia, especially in its Washington, D.C., suburbs, has a very different housing environment than that of Texas and Montana, yet housing supply advocates are eyeing many of the same strategies there. In 2026, Virginia passed five zoning and regulatory housing bills—including bills addressing parking reform, ADUs, and affordable housing on congregation land. Two of the top priorities of the YIMBY-oriented Commonwealth Housing Coalition, however—a bill similar to Texas’s SB 840 that would have allowed housing in commercial zones, along with a bill to establish new housing targets—did not pass.
Michigan also has a package of more than a dozen housing process reform bills in committee at the state level, backed by a similarly broad coalition. As with Texas’s 2025 package, these include a measure to rein in how easily abutting property owners can derail development. Similar to the Texan strategy, the package is tailored to minimize massive changes to how communities look, which might spark blowback. Otherwise, it draws a different mix from the YIMBY menu, including allowing duplexes and ADUs by right, advancing consistent permitting standards and timelines throughout the state, and reducing parking and setback minimums.
What Brings Affordable Housers to the Table?
The coalition that supported the Texas measures had 50 members and was coordinated by Texans for Reasonable Solutions, the brainchild of Nicole Nosek, a recent transplant from California who brought tech money and a strong belief that overregulation is the primary cause of high housing costs. (Nosek’s group officially championed SB 840, HB 24, SB 15, and SB 2477, the office conversion measure.) Members ranged from staunch progressive housing organizations with bona fides in supporting fair housing, tenants rights, and the housing needs of the lowest-income, such as Texas Appleseed, all the way to libertarian think tanks and property rights fundamentalists such as Americans for Prosperity Reform. Texans for Housing, the state’s YIMBY advocacy group, sits somewhere in the middle of that range, and environmental groups wanting to fight housing sprawl also participated. The other states’ coalitions have similar diversity.
It’s not a stretch to see why libertarian or property-rights groups that eschew all regulation would join these coalitions and sign on to housing bills that reduce regulatory burdens, even if they do not directly hold housing affordability as a value. But what brings the traditional affordable housing sector and/or housing justice groups to the table?
First, they aren’t all there. The Texas Association of Community Development Corporations (TACDC) mostly watched from the sidelines, feeling that the bills were tangential to their bread-and-butter work. “It actually doesn’t provide any long-term affordable housing. … It’s just putting more density on the ground,” says TACDC Executive Director Matt Hull, though he notes, “I don’t have a problem with that.”
Texas Housers, a membership network focused on fair housing and the housing needs of low-income households, stayed neutral on the Texas package because its members’ stances were varied. “Our main message throughout session,” says Ben Martin, deputy director of Texas Housers, “was that we need, at a minimum, a yes-and approach.” The group decided to focus on pushing for improvements to the bills that take into consideration the needs of and potential consequences for low-income folks, including noting the health and environmental justice dangers of building housing near heavy industry and advocating for an industrial buffer zone in the commercial by-right bill.
But reforms in these packages have strong appeal to many affordable housing advocates, often stemming from frustration with the process of getting affordable housing approved or built, or from seeing their limited funding spread across higher and higher income groups who were once well served by the housing market with smaller homes that are now much harder to get built.
“We are being asked to subsidize higher and higher incomes,” says Palmer, “and at some point, for me, it doesn’t make sense.” She sees regulatory reforms as creating an environment in which it’s possible to develop smaller, “attainable” housing for moderate- and middle-income people, so that subsidy can be preserved for those who need it.
Jessica Sarriot, co-executive director at Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement (VOICE), a congregation-based community organizing group that has been working on housing justice issues since the foreclosure crisis, says the group added housing supply measures—including allowing housing on congregation land, reducing lot sizes, and allowing townhomes in more places—to its agenda because many of its long-term community leaders felt like they were “winning a bunch of battles and losing the war” when it came to housing. VOICE members have fought for affordable housing developments that have failed due to various forms of red tape or permitting issues, says Sarriot, and this “has led to our wanting to … [take] on the fact that it’s basically illegal to build anything other than a large, single-family home.”
Jessica AcMoody, policy director of the Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM), says most of their affordable housing developer members support the package. “Anything that can increase building supply and make development easier, they see as a good thing,” she says. “Our organization has also been looking at it from the history of zoning and the racial equity issues around zoning.”
Joel Arnold, policy director of Abundant Housing Michigan, the statewide YIMBY coalition advancing the Michigan housing legislation package, and planning and advocacy manager at the affordable housing developer Communities First in Flint, Michigan, says the first development Communities First worked on is a good example of why change is needed. The project turned an abandoned school into 24 units of affordable senior housing. “Under the city’s then–zoning ordinance,” he says, “we had to put in 33 or 34 parking spaces. Now, mind you, this is an affordable senior development. Almost nobody drives. We have … three total tenants out of 24 apartments that drive. And yet we have a mandated 33-space parking lot that is all land that could have been more housing and just wasn’t allowed to be.”
Arnold is particularly excited about the bills that will increase consistency across the state on how long local governments can take to review permits and when they can request additional studies on the effects of a development. “I could tell stories about us waiting six months for site plan feedback, and in those six months, costs go up 10 percent, so all of a sudden you need to go find more money,” he says, adding that builders, few of whom operate in only one municipality, want predictability above all else.
Texas Appleseed, a progressive organization in Austin that supports tenants rights, fair housing, and homelessness issues, was a full-throated supporter of the Texas package. Brennan Griffin, Appleseed’s senior deputy director, says the organization has always considered exclusionary zoning a fair housing issue. Exclusionary zoning keeps out apartments or smaller, cheaper housing, often as a proxy for creating race or class segregation without being explicit about it, and is one of the central targets of housing supply reforms. Griffin says Appleseed felt that the bills in this package would “make a positive impact on how affordable housing is able to be sited, as well as just a general positive impact on housing.”
While none of the Texas bills were directly tailored to affordable housing or nonprofit developers, the changes to the valid petition process in HB 24 address a problem nonprofit developers have long struggled with. San Antonio, for example, had a prominent affordable housing project killed by a valid petition not long before the change was passed. “Pretty much everywhere, [in] any larger cities in Texas, we’ve seen affordable housing projects killed because of [the valid petition process],” says Griffin, “or just not begun because it was hard to find a site where that protest right wouldn’t immediately kill the deal.”
Greg Anderson, director of community affairs at Austin Habitat for Humanity, is excited about the change. He recalls a time when a developer offered to share a prime piece of land with his organization, building 16 market-rate homes and giving the organization 17 lots for affordable ones. The low land cost meant Habitat wouldn’t have needed city subsidies, he says. But it would require rezoning. The project had majority support on the city council, but because a small group of adjacent property owners opposed it, a supermajority was needed; it wasn’t achieved, and the project was killed. “We got gun-shy after that,” says Anderson, avoiding projects that would need rezoning. He’s hopeful HB 24 will change that.
How Far Can These Coalitions Go?
According to Nosek and Felicity Maxwell, executive director of Texans for Housing, the success of the 2025 Texas package largely stemmed from legwork across the political spectrum, with coalition partners engaging legislators most likely to hear the message from their angle. “We looked at how would zoning reform help specific segments of the population and then talk[ed] to the groups that represent them,” says Nosek. “And we made sure that we did this very early on, so we weren’t surprising them.” After a lackluster showing in the 2023 legislative session, when their strategy had been to stay under the radar, Nosek says her coalition held 300 conversations with stakeholders before the 2025 legislative session even started. It didn’t hurt, says Maxwell, that Texas legislators and the governor were looking to Montana’s statewide rezoning law and to Florida’s Live Local Act, both passed in 2023, and didn’t want to be left behind.
These coalitions are politically powerful, but many in the affordable housing world, including supporters of the reforms in question, are worried about how housing supply is often framed as the sole solution to housing affordability. “We have been absolutely concerned that this is going to muddy the water on the need for support for lowest-income households,” says Martin.
Shane Phillip’s formulation of the three-legged stool of “supply, subsidy, and stability”—laid out in his book The Affordable City—came up repeatedly in interviews for this article. Can the coalitions forming around housing supply reforms advance the other two legs of the stool, as well as fair housing causes?
Nosek says no: “We’re laser-focused on supply.”
That might be one of the few things Martin agrees with Nosek on; he also doesn’t see a coalition this ideologically broad being the group that will successfully fight for funding and policies that serve low-income households, as long as it is heavily influenced by members and convenors who see “market deregulatory efforts as the full scope of the work.” It’s as if, he says, they’ve “picked the screwdriver out of the toolkit, and they’ve said this is the whole toolkit.”
A purely deregulatory view of what’s needed will not make a “winning housing justice coalition,” argues Martin. “The influence that they’ve had at the Texas Capitol is not automatically going to translate to continued efforts to support [the] lowest-income households. … I think that their legislators are getting enough feedback to make them feel as though they are solving housing affordability with these reforms.”
“We should take a win when we can,” argues Griffin. “In Texas, it’s not like we have a lot of legislative interest in putting a lot of funding toward deeply affordable housing.” But, he acknowledges, what passed is “not everything we want, and we need to make sure that we tell legislators that.”
“Legislators can be strange, unpredictable creatures,” writes Honorof in an email. “Our members are super careful to convey to policymakers that state zoning standards and permitting reform are necessary to achieve widespread affordability, but rarely sufficient on their own.”
Even though Michigan, unlike Texas, has a robust tradition of funding affordable housing at the state level, AcMoody is also concerned that Michigan’s supply reform push could be reframed as all that is needed to address housing affordability. “Legislators are always looking for a way to try to solve the housing crisis without putting any kind of money into it,” she says. “So there is the concern that people will be like, ‘Well, we took care of the housing. We’re good.’” And they won’t necessarily get help from Abundant Housing Michigan—it stays neutral on funding issues, says Arnold.
Martin does see these housing supply coalitions as places to recruit folks who are energetic about and interested in going further on housing advocacy. “If organizations that are really fired up about abundance reforms or YIMBY reforms also hold the value of wanting to improve low-income housing, we want them,” he says. “We want to work with them to make the fight for low-income housing just as real to them as the YIMBY fight.”
Griffin agrees. “I think it would be wise for everyone to think about how to broaden the tent and find supporters,” he says. “I do think that the goals of the YIMBY sort of organizations are not in opposition to [other affordable housing goals]. They’re not always 100 percent aligned, but they’re not in opposition.”
In fact, says Honorof, most of WNN’s members are aligned on the supply, subsidy, and stability framing. “A core tenet of WNN members’ values and strategy is that coalitions are most successful when members focused on different corners of the affordability puzzle all back each other’s priorities,” he writes. “So while our members lead on bills related to zoning and permitting, most actively support expanded funding for regulated affordable housing and symbiotic tenant protections. And that’s generally reciprocated by affordable housing providers and tenant groups.”
Unexpected Relationships
Palmer says that through the Montana Miracle organizing, she’s “built a lot of trust with folks that I share really different opinions [with] on other issues.” In Texas, some of those relationships were leveraged during the fight to stop a damaging anti-tenant bill being floated in the legislature at the same time as the supply bills. Framed as an anti-squatting bill, Senate Bill 38 would have gutted eviction protections for a significant number of people. But housing justice advocates mounted a strong fight and got the worst provisions of the bill removed or severely weakened. Maxwell says that while the coalition supporting the supply reforms didn’t oppose the bill publicly because the coalition included supporters of it, such as the Texas Apartment Association, many other members were able to use relationships formed through the coalition to push behind the scenes for amendments and keep other members at least neutral. The coalition “allowed enough relationship building that I could have some conversations with some of the more conservative organizations about SB 38,” says Griffin. “A lot of us had some productive conversations.”
Texans for Housing “absolutely felt comfortable going to [supporters of SB 38] privately” to point out not only general concerns but also how the bill would harm the coalition’s housing supply mission, says Maxwell. She told partners, “If everybody has an eviction record because you’re throwing them out of their house as soon as they have missed one payment, I can’t get them into new housing anyway, no matter what I build.”
For his part, Martin is skeptical that these conversations were all that central to the success of neutralizing SB 38, which was primarily achieved through concerted organizing among the state’s housing justice groups, though he says the housing justice groups were grateful for the effort. However, he notes, Nosek’s group, the coalition convenor, ended up listed as a supporter of the anti-tenant bill.
Additive, Not Competitive
There’s a more optimistic angle on the potential effects of supply reforms’ success on other aspects of housing advocacy. Many supporters see legislative housing supply efforts as not only compatible with traditional affordability goals, such as increasing funding and tenant protections, but also as something that could directly lead to more support for these goals.
While longtime housing advocates have struggled to get Texas to allocate money for affordable housing, Maxwell thinks that having gotten policymakers to accept housing as one of their causes might shift that dynamic. It has changed housing as a cause “from just being, ‘Oh, here come the lefties from the Democratic cities who want this money’ to, ‘OK, yeah, this fits into a bigger picture of things that I care about,’” she says. Now, “We can say, ‘Look, you helped us on this deregulatory bill. This is something we also need to do, because you want a healthy housing market that works for everyone.’”
“We didn’t do a lot for affordable housing groups specifically last session,” acknowledges Maxwell, but “we can only do so much on the deregulatory side, and some of the wins are actually going to have to be on the affordable housing side.” She adds, “I think there’s going to be an effort to really support some of their bills—their key priorities this session—from everybody.”
Maxwell sees this as a promising moment to make the pitch: “The state is sitting on quite a big rainy-day fund,” she notes. “It’s so big that they’re not allowed to call it a rainy-day [fund]. They have to actually spend some of the money. So we’re trying to say, ‘Why aren’t we increasing our state housing bond? Why don’t we set up something like a revolving fund that can be used for bridge financing? What are the tools that we can look [at] at the state level that … [feel] OK to libertarians and conservatives and everybody else, and [work] within the budget framework that we have?’”
Montana might prove to be a hopeful example in that regard. Before the Montana Miracle zoning package, the state allocated no state-level affordable housing funding. But in 2023 the state created a revolving loan fund for housing infrastructure, and in 2025, the Montana Housing Coalition successfully advocated for a major infusion of funds into housing through the new Growth and Opportunity Housing Trust. “One of the very positive things about the Montana Miracle, and really the leadership of the governor, is that at the very least, we didn’t have to talk about housing as a problem,” says Melissa Shannon, executive director of the Montana Housing Coalition. “We just didn’t have to go convince legislators that, ‘Hey, we have a problem with housing here,’ which was previously what we were trying to do.” Shannon also thinks that the environment muted some opposition to housing funding from many Republicans who had supported zoning reform. It “kind of disarmed them a bit. Like, they’re still voting against our funding bills, but they’re not standing up on the floor opposing them,” she says.
Michigan has long provided affordable housing subsidies, but as costs skyrocket and the state faces a $1 billion deficit, finding non-subsidy ways to reduce costs strengthens the case for affordable housing funding, says Arnold. “It makes the subsidy argument harder if, at the same time, we are not addressing the things that are driving up costs,” he says. “Coming to Lansing and being able to say, ‘Yes, subsidy is helpful, and also here are things that would make it cheaper to build and cheaper to produce housing’ … gets you a bigger, [more] bipartisan coalition.”
“You can’t have the affordability conversation and the subsidy conversation if we still have policy in place that sort of dries up and eats up the subsidies that you know could be available,” agrees Lauren Strickland, executive director of Abundant Housing Michigan.
Virginia’s 2026 legislative session was a success for both housing regulatory reform and other types of housing measures, with extensions to eviction grace periods, a measure allowing local governments the right of first refusal to preserve affordable rental units with expiring subsidies, and an inclusionary zoning enabling law all passing.
Sarriot thinks taking turns to push legislators to do something bold would be worth it. “In the year of My Lord 2026, I’m so not interested in infighting between people [who] fundamentally agree on important things,” she says. “I’m much more interested in, ‘Are we building enough power to win on something genuinely big?’ … If we do big supply things this year, and then we have to go back and do big things around funding next year … I’m OK with that.”
About the Author
Tags
Comments
2 thoughts on “Supply Reforms Put Housing on the Agenda, Even in Red States”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Lack of supply is not the main reason housing is unaffordable in the US, despite the mainstream narrative. We have more homes per capita than any time in our history, we have an aging and shrinking population which, combined with dropping immigration rates, means that a structural supply shortage was never the issue on the national level. COVID-era windfall profits re-invested into housing, combined with sustained low interests rates, led us to this crisis. Its the same reason we have a ridiculously inflated stock market. Housing “solutions” that do not seek to make housing a public good are not real solutions, just distractions. “How is the housing question to be solved then? In present-day society just as any other social question is solved: by the gradual economic adjustment of supply and demand, a solution which ever reproduces the question itself anew and therefore is no solution.”
The Texas and Montana stories suggest the pros and cons of a broad-based coalition that cuts across ideological lines. Expanding housing supply is at least a neutral objective–the jury is still out on the question of what impact it has on rents and purchase prices, because it seems like the outcomes vary in different communities. Here’s the problem I see: in a slowly gentrifying inner city neighborhood like the one I live in, incentives that speed up housing construction and offer no money to assure affordable housing, developers can only afford to build market rate and get the highest rents they can, which tilts the balance toward more gentrification. Because such impacts would generally be of interest only to affordable advocates, I would be careful about the differing motivations of my coalition partners. I learned this lesson a very long time ago, when Ohio’s legislature passed bipartisan laws to liberate non-dangerous people from state institutions. The Democrats saw it as civil rights legislation, but some Republicans were much more interested in busting the public sector union. 5 years later, where was the state money needed to follow through on increased operating funds for the community housing? Perhaps you can see parallel risks among housing advocates?