Texas Cities Are Growing Up
SB 840 and the End of Sprawl for Y’all
Since 1950, nearly 90% of new U.S. housing has been built on previously undeveloped land. In theory, cities could have offset that outward expansion by allowing more infill development on underused or vacant land inside their boundaries, putting more homes closer to jobs, schools, and transit. But in practice, restrictive zoning blocked that from happening at scale—pushing development to the lowest-density fringes instead. The result: not enough housing inside cities, and endless sprawl beyond them.1 This has led to skyrocketing housing costs inside cities that have alienated people from centers of opportunity and community, fueling an upward mobility crisis.
Nowhere has the pattern of sprawl played out more clearly than in Texas.
That’s why a new Texas law, Senate Bill 840, matters so much. By allowing residential development in commercial zones by right, SB 840 gives cities the ability to hasten inward growth while slowing outward sprawl.
Over the past decade, cities like Austin have attracted thousands of new residents fleeing high-cost coastal metros. But instead of welcoming this growth into their urban cores, local zoning restrictions forced much of it outward. Many newcomers landed in Austin—only to find housing still unaffordable within city limits. The suburbs immediately adjacent to the city, like Cedar Park and Pflugerville, were all built up. So the newcomers went to Leander and Georgetown, and if they were priced out of there, they drove further north to Liberty Hill. Developers quickly cleared huge tracts of Hill Country land to make way for new subdivisions. Over the past four years, the population of Leander grew by 44%, Georgetown by 48%—and Liberty Hill by 223%. Metro-wide growth was 12% over the same period—compared to just 2.9% within Austin proper.
The exodus from expensive coastal cities to Texas has fueled rapid growth, but limits on housing inside Texas cities have pushed newcomers to the exurban fringe. Texas—this “big wonderful thing,” as Georgia O’Keeffe called it—has plenty of space, so outward growth is inevitable. But the scale of sprawl reflects how fiercely cities have been prevented from growing up.
Let’s be clear: when we’re talking about Texas-style sprawl, we’re not talking about suburbs per se. Texas has lots of small, historic towns with real downtowns, walkable neighborhoods, and strong civic identity that offer exactly the kind of community many families want. But that’s not what we’re building today on the fringe. Instead, we’re replicating a low-density model of sprawl with no public spaces, no transit, and no services, a pattern of growth that offers neither town squares nor shared civic life—just soulless subdivisions stitched together by six-lane arterials. It’s what I’ve called “sprawl for y’all”—and as Conor Dougherty recently chronicled in The New York Times Magazine, it’s a pattern that feels more imposed than chosen.
Why does it keep happening? Under Texas law, counties are prohibited from regulating land use in unincorporated areas. Meanwhile, city zoning codes block most forms of urban density, especially near jobs and infrastructure. The result is a system that suppresses demand for infill while inducing demand for sprawl, forcing many Texans to choose the only homeownership option they can afford: the bare minimum version of the American dream.
SB 840, which is part of a broader, bipartisan package of pro-housing reforms passed this legislative session, instead reorients the law to facilitate infill development, while a companion bill enables more compact, affordable greenfield development.2
The new law requires cities with 150,000 or more residents to allow multifamily and mixed-use residential development by right in areas already zoned for commercial, retail, office, or warehouse uses. Cities can no longer require rezonings, special approvals, or variances to build housing in these zones. They also can’t cap density below 36 units per acre, set height limits under 45 feet, or require more than one parking space per unit. And in areas where developers are converting existing commercial buildings into residential, the city can’t impose additional traffic studies, utility fees, or parking mandates if more than 65% of the project’s square footage will become housing. This means that underused strip malls, vacant shopping centers, and decaying office parks can become apartments or mixed-use communities—without the usual expensive, time-consuming gauntlet of red tape and public hearings.
SB 840 unlocks a massive amount of infill potential in cities like Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—cities that have long been boxed in by their own zoning maps. Now, those maps point to new zones of opportunity: in Texas’s biggest cities, an estimated 15-25% of land is zoned commercial, while in downtowns, those figures are even higher. Just to put those numbers in perspective: Austin occupies more than 300 square miles; if only 15% of zoned city land is now subject to SB 840, that’s around 30,000 acres where you could now build multifamily housing at a minimum density of 36 units per acre. That’s over 1 million potential homes—more than double the number of housing units currently in the city.
Talk about room to grow.
While SB 840 opens the door to more infill within cities, it isn’t acting alone. Several other bills that passed this session complement or augment its goals of increasing housing opportunity. In particular, SB 2835 legalizes small-scale apartment buildings served by a single stairway—a code obstacle that had long limited such apartments—allowing for modest, family-friendly housing sized for residential neighborhoods, while SB 2477 removes barriers to office-to-residential conversions—a huge opportunity for underutilized real estate in large Texas metros. Meanwhile, SB 15 ensures cities can’t require massive lots for single-family homes in new subdivisions, allowing for more compact, affordable suburban growth. This doesn’t eliminate sprawl—but it lets the sprawl sprawl less.
All told, this legislation isn’t just about enabling infill—it reflects a shift in how Texas thinks about building cities. It not only offers an alternative to endless sprawl, it also rejects a core assumption embedded in exclusionary zoning: that different uses—and different people—should be kept apart. Instead, it embraces and unlocks mixed-use development—the hallmark of our most beloved cities and most successful downtowns.
Back in 2023, I argued that the YIMBY movement should embrace the liberalization of commercial zones to allow housing by right, a proposal I jokingly called “Yes, And” In My Backyard (I’ll spare you an ungainly acronym). I wasn’t the first to make this case, so I won’t claim this is a clean example of the “posting-to-policy pipeline”—but it’s still striking to see that basic idea now enshrined in Texas law. Now we’ve got to make something of it.
Of course, SB 840 and its companion bills don’t force change, but they unlock the possibility of more incremental growth within cities. Neither do these laws eliminate sprawl. But they do give Texas cities an opportunity to pursue a different growth trajectory going forward. Together, these reforms offer a new vision of Texas urbanism: expansive but inclusive, ambitious but attainable. If cities embrace these new tools, instead of throwing up procedural roadblocks, they can channel growth into places where jobs, amenities, infrastructure, and communities already exist. They can offer families more choices, more walkable options, and more livable cities—something more than the bare minimum version of the American dream on offer in the exurban fringe.
Texas metros will certainly continue to grow outward—but now, cities here have the chance to offer something other than sprawl for y’all. In Texas, it’s time for cities to grow up.
These were the findings of a 2016 BuildZoom analysis, which concluded that even when cities tried to grow denser, they almost never did so enough to compensate for sprawl.