What Austin’s Pro-Housing Wins Can Teach Us

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

In 2017, Austin City Council set out to rewrite the local housing code and bring the city’s housing supply up to demand. The proposed reform, called CodeNEXT, was supposed to be an ambitious and complete overhaul that would reduce minimum lot sizes, ease parking requirements, and extend permissions for accessory dwelling units. But the proposal’s detractors were well-funded and legally adept: They peppered misinformation around town, took the bill to court, and played on Austin’s long history of halting progress in the name of environmentalism.

By 2018 CodeNEXT had effectively died in court, and the effort to rewrite Austin’s housing code died with it. Two years later, COVID came to town and hundreds of thousands of new residents followed suit. Austin was officially a boom town, with housing demand far outpacing supply.

By 2022, the median home price in Austin was $503,000, an eye-watering 79 percent increase from 2017. East Austin, a historically Black and Hispanic part of town, gentrified almost overnight. As prices soared and the city became the country’s hottest housing market, the 2022 local elections in Austin became a reckoning on affordability.

That election was a resounding victory for pro-housing advocates. New candidates like Zo Qadri and Chito Vela ascended to city council after running campaigns centered on progressive housing policies. Voters also approved a bond paying for more affordable housing with just over 70 percent approval.

Suddenly, the Austin City Council became intensely pro-housing. Shortly after, Council Member Leslie Pool championed a multiphase round of code amendments called Home Options for Mobility and Equity (HOME) that carried over many of the same policies included in CodeNEXT, but in a piecemeal fashion.

HOME is the linchpin of Austin’s transforming housing market. Phase one of HOME allowed builders to construct three units per lot in single family–zoned areas without seeking discretionary approval. Phase two shrank the minimum lot size by 68 percent and allowed denser housing around transit stations through a special zoning overlay. Other reforms included ending parking minimums and easing restrictions for small developments.

Headlines about the Austin housing market today have changed their tune entirely compared to just a few years ago. Austin built the most single-family units and the third most multifamily units of any metro area in 2022. Rent prices dropped 6.3 percent from 2023 to 2024 after a 5.1 percent decrease from 2022 to 2023. Of the top 150 metro areas in the country, Austin had the slowest rent growth in the first quarter of 2025.

“Headlines about the Austin housing market today have changed their tune entirely compared to just a few years ago.”

Many cities all over the country are feeling the housing shortage crunch, but struggle to pass similar reforms. Why has Austin’s zoning reform succeeded while others have failed?

Austin city officials say they saw a grassroots and locally rooted shift in thinking about housing over the last few years. Attitudes changed thanks to advocates from local organizations like Aura, Rethink35, and others knocking on doors, visiting city hall, and endorsing campaigns. One of these advocates, Ryan Puzycki, serves on the zoning commission and writes about urbanism in Austin on his Substack City of Yes. From his perspective as a public servant and activist, there is nothing special about Austin that other cities can’t replicate elsewhere.

“I don’t think Austin has an exceptional civic culture, we just have a squeaky wheel activist group like ourselves [AURA] and a public feeling that things weren’t going right,” says Puzycki.

The public feeling that things “aren’t going right” is relatable nationwide, with 76 percent of Americans agreeing that the cost of housing is a problem in a 2024 survey.

Throw a stone toward any of the desirable cities in America and you’ll hit one with housing affordability challenges. Boston City Council recently hosted the Austin City Council to exchange ideas on housing reform. A few months later, the Commission on Unlocking Housing Production in Boston recommended dropping minimum lot sizes and repealing parking minimums, both key principles from Austin’s HOME initiative.

There is a long history of shared policy in America, and Austin took some of their key reforms from cities like Minneapolis and Houston. For every municipality that finds success in zoning reform, it makes the next city more likely to adopt the same policies.

A feature of Austin’s success that other cities could learn from is in the way reforms were structured. The widely successful HOME initiative was similar to CodeNEXT, but more ambitious. In the five years that separated these initiatives, advocates sharpened up and home prices skyrocketed, but the policy approach changed as well.

“We had this big attempt to rewrite the whole code and it got tied up in court, and there was a lot of misinformation and it failed,” says David Fouts from Farm&City, an urbanism advocacy group. “But what succeeded was just doing things one policy at a time. One sensible policy at a time.”

CodeNEXT was a bundle of reforms packaged together. Its bloat was its vulnerability. Conversely, the piecemeal HOME initiative tackles one issue at a time. HOME is soaring while CodeNEXT never got off the runway.

The hidden principle behind Austin’s policy reform is patience, both in building successful coalitions and in seeing the transformative effects of policy change.

“The hidden principle behind Austin’s policy reform is patience, both in building coalitions and in seeing the transformative effects of policy change.”

“The HOME bill will not transform the market overnight. It’s for the next boom, the next generation, so that they don’t go through the same thing we did in COVID,” says Puzycki.

Homebuilding in the U.S. has not kept up with our increasing population. Building permit data, a leading indicator for home production, shows there is no end in sight for the nationwide housing crisis. Austin’s new zoning code offers a template for how cities can begin to undo decades of exclusionary zoning and housing scarcity—one sensible policy at a time.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.