I'm a little surprised that you framed this as something like a correction, because to me it feels like an elaboration. We agree that supply matters in Austin (and everywhere!). And, as you know, I'm a staunch advocate for getting rid of the regulatory barriers to housing. But I wanted to point out that demand played a role for several reasons:
(1) As you said: "One thing that consistently confuses the Austin narrative is that the City of Austin passed major supply-side reforms beginning in 2023 ... These reforms were rightly celebrated, but because they coincided with the decline in rents and prices, some have mistakenly credited them, instead of the pre-pandemic reforms, with that correction."
I think this "mistaken credit" from advocacy-aligned people is generating a lot of the "it's just the business cycle" pushback from industry-aligned people. Both the business cycle and earlier reform contributed, and people are talking past each other.
(2) One thing I've run into with "normie" friends and family back in Austin, they tend to think the story is *only* demand, *only* the business cycle, and that zoning and permitting reform makes no difference because "it's Texas, the housing will get built somewhere." I think it's true that Texas would have built the housing somewhere even if Austin didn't. But that argument pisses me off, because, to me, it actually matters that people are able to live closer to where they want to live! I want to celebrate the people who now get to live 5 minutes from their job instead of 50 minutes from their job.
Where I think you and I are seeing things differently is found in your conclusion. You said:
"What set Austin apart was supply. Austin answered the demand shock in the suburbs through a Texas sprawl free-for-y’all, and in the city through pre-pandemic rules that allowed apartments to pencil out. Together, that produced an unusually rapid supply response, particularly in multifamily housing, and ultimately gave Austin renters far more relief than renters in the other boomtowns."
I fully agree with the thesis that the Austin metro has a more elastic housing market than most of the country, but I strongly doubt that Austin's housing market is meaningfully more elastic than the other Texas metro areas, and I think *the other Texas metros* are a much more important comparison because they're much more similar.
What set Austin apart from Houston or Dallas was *demand.* During COVID, Austin had the highest relative population growth at about 5.3%, versus DFW at 3.6% and Houston at 2.8%[1]. All the Texas cities built a lot of housing in response to the surge in demand, and both Houston and Dallas built substantially more units than Austin (they're bigger cities). But the relative intensity of the surge was highest in Austin, so the intensity of the correction matched.
To put this observation another way: if, in some alternate universe, the pandemic + tech booms in Texas were concentrated in Houston instead of Austin, I'd predict the supply response to have been *even stronger,* and correspondingly, the correction after the shock to have been *even sharper.*
Well, Texas is good at building, and we all agree that building makes things better, so who cares?
To me the question is, what is our actual long-term goal?
You pointed out:
"Nevertheless, the Austin-area home-value-to-income ratio was nearly 23% higher in 2024 than in 2019. But in Raleigh and Tampa the ratio was nearly 28% higher, and in Charlotte more than 32%."
If, after a correction strong enough to have captured the whole country's attention, home value to income ratio is still 23% higher over five years, I don't think we can argue that we've won. And in your conclusion you affirmed "the work is not done."
If we agree the work is not done, then I hope we agree that people should not reduce Austin (or, really, Texas) to a simplistic story of "all it takes to fix things," as that undermines the longer-term goal.
And I want us to have more ambitious goals!
Why stop at zoning reform? Why stop at "the price/wage ratio is bad but at least it's stopped getting worse?" Why not work toward an America where housing is broadly attainable to everyone in every city? Where people could spend *less than* 30% of their income on housing. Where housing is a ladder that goes all the way down, that everyone can climb. Where housing markets are stable, but we're not in danger of a financial crisis if they fluctuate.
Let's understand the wins, and let's celebrate them, but let's not declare victory prematurely.
I'm sorry my previous post spent weeks "living rent-free" in your head! Thanks for the writeup, I'm glad to get to explore this more with you.
Thank you. No need to apologize! Like Austin, my head has so much excess capacity that it can hold many rent-free thoughts. ;-)
If I’ve “framed this as something like a correction,” I think that’s because we do view what happened differently, or at least have a different interpretation of what the data is telling us. Which is more than fine and why we do the discourse.
To your point (1), I agree people are probably talking past each other on this. That’s why I wanted to write a piece that dove into both the supply side and the demand side. They should be considered together!
But it was also important to me to understand what the demand data is actually showing. Looking at migration and income data at the metro level, we see a more complicated story than if we only focus on the city or county for one year.
On point (2), as an urbanist, I would have much preferred if Austin had built attached rowhomes in the urban core than cookiecutter homes 45-60 minutes outside of it. But that's shifting the goalposts: the question in the broader supply/demand debate is not “Did Austin build good urbanism?” It's “What explains Austin's home price and rent decline?” (And no boomtown avoided sprawl.)
The goal of this essay was to answer that narrower question.
The comparison to other Texas cities is useful. If what happened in Austin is simply the “intensity of the correction match[ing],” we would expect to see Dallas’s rent increase also correcting in line with its boom. Multifamily rents in Dallas and Austin both peaked in August 2022, at which point they were up 28.4% in Austin and 26.0% in Dallas, but they are now down 16% in Austin and only 6% in Dallas from those peaks. Rents in Dallas are ~18% higher than they were in February 2020, and only ~8% higher in Austin.
Although Austin had twice the growth in households as Dallas (~30% vs ~14%), it had more than twice the multifamily supply response: from 2020 to 2024, Austin was authorizing multifamily permits at an average annual rate of 8.8 per 1,000 residents; Dallas averaged only 3.2. Austin is still authorizing more permits on a per capita basis than Dallas so far in 2026, despite the oversupply.
Houston had a smaller boom than Dallas or Austin. Its multifamily rents went up only 13% and have stayed essentially flat—no correction at all. From 2020 to 2024, it only authorized an average of 2 multifamily units per 1,000 residents a year. Meanwhile, its single-family home prices went up 38% and are now down only 5% from their peak.
Houston responded the least and didn't correct, Dallas responded moderately and corrected modestly, Austin responded the most and corrected the most.
As I wrote in the essay, neither I nor any of my colleagues locally are declaring victory, prematurely or otherwise. Austin is still too expensive for single-family homes, and land use constraints still push people into the exurbs. Local advocates continue to push to make it easier to build infill at greater density within the urban core, as well as to make it more mixed-use, more walkable, and more connected. For my part, I have spilt much proverbial ink on this blog arguing for better urbanism within Austin, as well as for better cities at large.
But Austin’s rent declines are meaningful to actual renters, and in inflation-adjusted terms they represent real gains. Why can’t we call that a win—and then get back to work?
I look forward to carrying on the conversation online and in person, especially next week in Berkeley!
I think any demand-side explanation also has to contend with the fact that Austin’s job growth from January 2020 to now (24.1%) is still unrivaled by any other metro in the country. Growth has moderated, yes, but the Austin MSA was still #1 for non-farm payroll job growth in 2025 (2%, next fastest was 1.5%) according to the BLS.
It is difficult to explain outlier rent decline, outlier job growth, and outlier multi-family supply growth all occurring in the same place at the same time without concluding the basic YIMBY narrative is essentially correct.
At least one reason for missing middle comes from a lack of builders and bankers who specialize in servicing that demand. With City of Austin's proximity to the suburban sprawl/greenfield capacity to support more middle-builders/bankers, how did those middle builders/bankers stretch across the city/suburban boundaries throughout the 2019-2024 interval of this analysis?
Are there any metrics within the set of comparative cities in this analysis that are bounded by no adjacent sprawl areas or greenfield? Atlanta (in the last graph but none of the previous graphs) is losing it's previous adjacent sprawl areas as its fill-in radiates out from city center and non-car-commute options don't keep up.
Will you please create a new graph for the last graph (the one that includes NYC and LA), but for the same cities as all of the other graphs in this article? Changing the field for the last graph prevents thinking through implications of sprawl/greenfield?
Hi Cynthesis! Thanks for the comment. I agree with you that the dearth of missing middle is at least in part a result of the lack of a financing/construction ecosystem, but the ecosystem that built this type of housing once upon a time likely withered after the City’s downzoning in 1984. The City’s own data shows that what was built in Austin over the past 40 years has largely been detached single-family homes and large multifamily apartments. Before 1984, about 6% of Austin’s housing stock fell into the Missing Middle category. After 1984, less than 1% of homes built were in that category, and today the Missing Middle represents just 3% of homes. I wrote about that here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/when-single-family-isnt-family-friendly
The financing question will become more relevant if the city succeeds in passing these new zoning categories and then mapping them. Anecdotally, I know some developers are pursuing more “missing middle”-inspired greenfield projects in the suburbs, but I can’t speak to the quality of those directly.
On the comparison metros: I tried to select a diverse set of boomtown metros differing in size and geography without overloading the analysis or making it impossible to read the charts (not sure I succeeded there!). But none of the 11 are meaningfully land-constrained. Denver has mountains to the west, and Salt Lake is in a narrow valley, but each has room to grow. So, having room to sprawl was a common feature of all the metros included. I didn’t include Miami in the dataset, but sprawl is constrained by the Everglades and the Ocean.
Regarding the last chart, that’s based on the RealPage analysis and ranking of the Top 10 metros/cities for multifamily permitting (https://www.realpage.com/analytics/metro-permits-august-2026/). The other boomtown metros aren’t shown because they didn’t make RealPage’s cut. That chart isn't about sprawl or greenfield, though. I included it simply to show Austin is still a top-10 national market for multifamily permitting, even after its bust. I think a comparative sprawl analysis will have to be saved for a separate piece!
Thank you for the reply and especially the link to historical loss of missing middle in Austin area. I guess I'll have to bump to paid to get the scoop there.
Nonetheless, wrt Missing Middle, a lot of places with the greatest populations don't have near enough greenfield/excellent non-car commute options. Those high population areas have the advantages of proximity networking that make them so valuable to dynamic economic drivers. With a population greater than 40 whole states, the most populous chunk of SoCal (LA, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties) and North-, East-, South-San Francisco Bay plus SF proper and the Peninsula, the comparative sprawl analysis is the largest part of the crux if not _the_ crux of the Missing Middle puzzle. I look forward to that analysis in an upcoming newsletter from you.
Another article by Andrew Burleson, "Large Redevelopment Projects Are Not The Answer", outlines a way to grow 10,000 homes in a predominately single family home zip code using Missing Middle options such as those in use in the Portland, OR area. With that in mind, I was listening to a developer with a taller than current code project that was allowed by recent state legislation describe their "pencil out" at a planning commission meeting. Their market research identifies 8000+ older, empty nesters in the immediate city area with large paper gains on a single-family purchase made in the 70s and 80s who would be the target clientele for the ~150 residences going for $5000+ monthly amenity fees plus rent. At the price those 70s/80s purchased homes would go for, only the biggest FAR re-build for the highest price would "pencil out". Those empty nesters don't want to move because there are no homes in the area without stairs and their friends/churches/history are in the city they choose to live in the 70s and 80s. There isn't a Missing Middle housing option (no stairs, 2/2 or 2/1.5 Bd/Ba) for these existing owners of land that could become the more dense Missing Middle for more households.
Any thoughts or awareness of cities that have tried to address that aspect of the Missing Middle?
My essay didn’t make a values argument about whether the type of housing Austin built was ideal and was intended to be descriptive of what actually happened. That said, I agree with Andrew (and genuinely appreciate his work) that sprawl isn't optimal from a livability standpoint; it solves for a limited kind of family-friendly housing affordability and not much else. I think of myself as an urbanist first and a YIMBY second, so while we need to address the housing shortage however we can right now, I'd love to see high-opportunity cities and suburbs build more thoughtfully. Austin is trying to make that possible in our code.
I agree with your characterization of those opportunity cities; it’s the flip-side of this essay, right? Geography and land use constraints fueled the out-migration that fed the pandemic boomtowns in the first place. The whole country would look different if San Francisco and New York had responded to the household formation boom with anything like Austin's intensity. Those cities should look to good models for addressing this, and they have the least excuse not to since they're still largely not building at the scale their own shortages require. As long as that continues, supply-constrained cities will keep exporting people to supply-elastic ones, and in Texas, that elastic response has mostly taken the form of suburban sprawl, because it's the path of least resistance.
Your anecdote is poignant. I've recently written about aging in place both as a mobility problem and, separately, as a housing problem. One reason AARP supported Austin's HOME initiative (three units by right in single-family zones) was exactly this: it creates smaller homes for seniors to downsize into. It was also pitched as a redevelopment path: turn an old, oversized single-family home into three smaller ones. If our missing-middle reforms pass, some of those might end up as small apartment buildings instead. I haven't done a review of how other cities have approached this specific angle, though.
This is the clearest writeup I've seen of Austin's boom/bust. The household growth number does real work: metro households up about 30% from 2019 to 2024 while population rose only about 12%. That plus the per-capita multifamily permitting vs peer boomtowns makes the "it was demand only" story hard to keep.
Your unfinished business point on missing-middle is where the live permit record gets interesting. In District 1, labeled two-family permits went from 230 last year to 6 this year. Citywide duplex permits fell from 316 to 112, while District 1 single-family permits rose from 268 to 367, and some of those "single-family" filings are actually two- or three-unit buildings reclassified under HOME. https://transparent.city/c/austin/stories/e3rnrC6n
So the correction you describe may be real at the big multifamily end, while the small-scale supply that creates cheaper units is either disappearing or getting hidden in the coding. Curious whether you read District 1 as the canary, or as a HOME accounting artifact.
Thanks, Adam! On District 1, the chart you shared appears to start in October 2024 (though the story says it goes back to 2016), so it shows only a few months of zero to two permits a month before the large spike in March 2025, which tapers off to a couple a month by July. About 200 of those permits came from a single duplex condo development off East Braker Lane, which Google Maps identifies as Foxtail by Banyan.
Excluding that development, citywide duplex permits were flat from 2025 to 2026, and District 1 is back in its usual range of a handful a year. So I don't think there's a real duplex decline to explain. As you suggest, "single-family" permits with two or three units did rise after HOME, which is consistent with HOME projects being filed that way.
Thanks for sharing, Ryan! Great writeup.
I'm a little surprised that you framed this as something like a correction, because to me it feels like an elaboration. We agree that supply matters in Austin (and everywhere!). And, as you know, I'm a staunch advocate for getting rid of the regulatory barriers to housing. But I wanted to point out that demand played a role for several reasons:
(1) As you said: "One thing that consistently confuses the Austin narrative is that the City of Austin passed major supply-side reforms beginning in 2023 ... These reforms were rightly celebrated, but because they coincided with the decline in rents and prices, some have mistakenly credited them, instead of the pre-pandemic reforms, with that correction."
I think this "mistaken credit" from advocacy-aligned people is generating a lot of the "it's just the business cycle" pushback from industry-aligned people. Both the business cycle and earlier reform contributed, and people are talking past each other.
(2) One thing I've run into with "normie" friends and family back in Austin, they tend to think the story is *only* demand, *only* the business cycle, and that zoning and permitting reform makes no difference because "it's Texas, the housing will get built somewhere." I think it's true that Texas would have built the housing somewhere even if Austin didn't. But that argument pisses me off, because, to me, it actually matters that people are able to live closer to where they want to live! I want to celebrate the people who now get to live 5 minutes from their job instead of 50 minutes from their job.
Where I think you and I are seeing things differently is found in your conclusion. You said:
"What set Austin apart was supply. Austin answered the demand shock in the suburbs through a Texas sprawl free-for-y’all, and in the city through pre-pandemic rules that allowed apartments to pencil out. Together, that produced an unusually rapid supply response, particularly in multifamily housing, and ultimately gave Austin renters far more relief than renters in the other boomtowns."
I fully agree with the thesis that the Austin metro has a more elastic housing market than most of the country, but I strongly doubt that Austin's housing market is meaningfully more elastic than the other Texas metro areas, and I think *the other Texas metros* are a much more important comparison because they're much more similar.
What set Austin apart from Houston or Dallas was *demand.* During COVID, Austin had the highest relative population growth at about 5.3%, versus DFW at 3.6% and Houston at 2.8%[1]. All the Texas cities built a lot of housing in response to the surge in demand, and both Houston and Dallas built substantially more units than Austin (they're bigger cities). But the relative intensity of the surge was highest in Austin, so the intensity of the correction matched.
To put this observation another way: if, in some alternate universe, the pandemic + tech booms in Texas were concentrated in Houston instead of Austin, I'd predict the supply response to have been *even stronger,* and correspondingly, the correction after the shock to have been *even sharper.*
Well, Texas is good at building, and we all agree that building makes things better, so who cares?
To me the question is, what is our actual long-term goal?
You pointed out:
"Nevertheless, the Austin-area home-value-to-income ratio was nearly 23% higher in 2024 than in 2019. But in Raleigh and Tampa the ratio was nearly 28% higher, and in Charlotte more than 32%."
If, after a correction strong enough to have captured the whole country's attention, home value to income ratio is still 23% higher over five years, I don't think we can argue that we've won. And in your conclusion you affirmed "the work is not done."
If we agree the work is not done, then I hope we agree that people should not reduce Austin (or, really, Texas) to a simplistic story of "all it takes to fix things," as that undermines the longer-term goal.
And I want us to have more ambitious goals!
Why stop at zoning reform? Why stop at "the price/wage ratio is bad but at least it's stopped getting worse?" Why not work toward an America where housing is broadly attainable to everyone in every city? Where people could spend *less than* 30% of their income on housing. Where housing is a ladder that goes all the way down, that everyone can climb. Where housing markets are stable, but we're not in danger of a financial crisis if they fluctuate.
Let's understand the wins, and let's celebrate them, but let's not declare victory prematurely.
I'm sorry my previous post spent weeks "living rent-free" in your head! Thanks for the writeup, I'm glad to get to explore this more with you.
1: https://www.austinchamber.com/blog/05-09-2023-migration
Thank you. No need to apologize! Like Austin, my head has so much excess capacity that it can hold many rent-free thoughts. ;-)
If I’ve “framed this as something like a correction,” I think that’s because we do view what happened differently, or at least have a different interpretation of what the data is telling us. Which is more than fine and why we do the discourse.
To your point (1), I agree people are probably talking past each other on this. That’s why I wanted to write a piece that dove into both the supply side and the demand side. They should be considered together!
But it was also important to me to understand what the demand data is actually showing. Looking at migration and income data at the metro level, we see a more complicated story than if we only focus on the city or county for one year.
On point (2), as an urbanist, I would have much preferred if Austin had built attached rowhomes in the urban core than cookiecutter homes 45-60 minutes outside of it. But that's shifting the goalposts: the question in the broader supply/demand debate is not “Did Austin build good urbanism?” It's “What explains Austin's home price and rent decline?” (And no boomtown avoided sprawl.)
The goal of this essay was to answer that narrower question.
The comparison to other Texas cities is useful. If what happened in Austin is simply the “intensity of the correction match[ing],” we would expect to see Dallas’s rent increase also correcting in line with its boom. Multifamily rents in Dallas and Austin both peaked in August 2022, at which point they were up 28.4% in Austin and 26.0% in Dallas, but they are now down 16% in Austin and only 6% in Dallas from those peaks. Rents in Dallas are ~18% higher than they were in February 2020, and only ~8% higher in Austin.
Although Austin had twice the growth in households as Dallas (~30% vs ~14%), it had more than twice the multifamily supply response: from 2020 to 2024, Austin was authorizing multifamily permits at an average annual rate of 8.8 per 1,000 residents; Dallas averaged only 3.2. Austin is still authorizing more permits on a per capita basis than Dallas so far in 2026, despite the oversupply.
Houston had a smaller boom than Dallas or Austin. Its multifamily rents went up only 13% and have stayed essentially flat—no correction at all. From 2020 to 2024, it only authorized an average of 2 multifamily units per 1,000 residents a year. Meanwhile, its single-family home prices went up 38% and are now down only 5% from their peak.
Houston responded the least and didn't correct, Dallas responded moderately and corrected modestly, Austin responded the most and corrected the most.
As I wrote in the essay, neither I nor any of my colleagues locally are declaring victory, prematurely or otherwise. Austin is still too expensive for single-family homes, and land use constraints still push people into the exurbs. Local advocates continue to push to make it easier to build infill at greater density within the urban core, as well as to make it more mixed-use, more walkable, and more connected. For my part, I have spilt much proverbial ink on this blog arguing for better urbanism within Austin, as well as for better cities at large.
But Austin’s rent declines are meaningful to actual renters, and in inflation-adjusted terms they represent real gains. Why can’t we call that a win—and then get back to work?
I look forward to carrying on the conversation online and in person, especially next week in Berkeley!
I think any demand-side explanation also has to contend with the fact that Austin’s job growth from January 2020 to now (24.1%) is still unrivaled by any other metro in the country. Growth has moderated, yes, but the Austin MSA was still #1 for non-farm payroll job growth in 2025 (2%, next fastest was 1.5%) according to the BLS.
It is difficult to explain outlier rent decline, outlier job growth, and outlier multi-family supply growth all occurring in the same place at the same time without concluding the basic YIMBY narrative is essentially correct.
Great data points, and I agree. Thanks, Parker!
At least one reason for missing middle comes from a lack of builders and bankers who specialize in servicing that demand. With City of Austin's proximity to the suburban sprawl/greenfield capacity to support more middle-builders/bankers, how did those middle builders/bankers stretch across the city/suburban boundaries throughout the 2019-2024 interval of this analysis?
Are there any metrics within the set of comparative cities in this analysis that are bounded by no adjacent sprawl areas or greenfield? Atlanta (in the last graph but none of the previous graphs) is losing it's previous adjacent sprawl areas as its fill-in radiates out from city center and non-car-commute options don't keep up.
Will you please create a new graph for the last graph (the one that includes NYC and LA), but for the same cities as all of the other graphs in this article? Changing the field for the last graph prevents thinking through implications of sprawl/greenfield?
Hi Cynthesis! Thanks for the comment. I agree with you that the dearth of missing middle is at least in part a result of the lack of a financing/construction ecosystem, but the ecosystem that built this type of housing once upon a time likely withered after the City’s downzoning in 1984. The City’s own data shows that what was built in Austin over the past 40 years has largely been detached single-family homes and large multifamily apartments. Before 1984, about 6% of Austin’s housing stock fell into the Missing Middle category. After 1984, less than 1% of homes built were in that category, and today the Missing Middle represents just 3% of homes. I wrote about that here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/when-single-family-isnt-family-friendly
The financing question will become more relevant if the city succeeds in passing these new zoning categories and then mapping them. Anecdotally, I know some developers are pursuing more “missing middle”-inspired greenfield projects in the suburbs, but I can’t speak to the quality of those directly.
On the comparison metros: I tried to select a diverse set of boomtown metros differing in size and geography without overloading the analysis or making it impossible to read the charts (not sure I succeeded there!). But none of the 11 are meaningfully land-constrained. Denver has mountains to the west, and Salt Lake is in a narrow valley, but each has room to grow. So, having room to sprawl was a common feature of all the metros included. I didn’t include Miami in the dataset, but sprawl is constrained by the Everglades and the Ocean.
Regarding the last chart, that’s based on the RealPage analysis and ranking of the Top 10 metros/cities for multifamily permitting (https://www.realpage.com/analytics/metro-permits-august-2026/). The other boomtown metros aren’t shown because they didn’t make RealPage’s cut. That chart isn't about sprawl or greenfield, though. I included it simply to show Austin is still a top-10 national market for multifamily permitting, even after its bust. I think a comparative sprawl analysis will have to be saved for a separate piece!
Thank you for the reply and especially the link to historical loss of missing middle in Austin area. I guess I'll have to bump to paid to get the scoop there.
Nonetheless, wrt Missing Middle, a lot of places with the greatest populations don't have near enough greenfield/excellent non-car commute options. Those high population areas have the advantages of proximity networking that make them so valuable to dynamic economic drivers. With a population greater than 40 whole states, the most populous chunk of SoCal (LA, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties) and North-, East-, South-San Francisco Bay plus SF proper and the Peninsula, the comparative sprawl analysis is the largest part of the crux if not _the_ crux of the Missing Middle puzzle. I look forward to that analysis in an upcoming newsletter from you.
Another article by Andrew Burleson, "Large Redevelopment Projects Are Not The Answer", outlines a way to grow 10,000 homes in a predominately single family home zip code using Missing Middle options such as those in use in the Portland, OR area. With that in mind, I was listening to a developer with a taller than current code project that was allowed by recent state legislation describe their "pencil out" at a planning commission meeting. Their market research identifies 8000+ older, empty nesters in the immediate city area with large paper gains on a single-family purchase made in the 70s and 80s who would be the target clientele for the ~150 residences going for $5000+ monthly amenity fees plus rent. At the price those 70s/80s purchased homes would go for, only the biggest FAR re-build for the highest price would "pencil out". Those empty nesters don't want to move because there are no homes in the area without stairs and their friends/churches/history are in the city they choose to live in the 70s and 80s. There isn't a Missing Middle housing option (no stairs, 2/2 or 2/1.5 Bd/Ba) for these existing owners of land that could become the more dense Missing Middle for more households.
Any thoughts or awareness of cities that have tried to address that aspect of the Missing Middle?
Ha! Paid subscriptions always help, but you can find the City’s missing middle report here: https://publicinput.com/Customer/File/Full/ef53939a-ac15-4ca6-b079-12f7cecea89f
My essay didn’t make a values argument about whether the type of housing Austin built was ideal and was intended to be descriptive of what actually happened. That said, I agree with Andrew (and genuinely appreciate his work) that sprawl isn't optimal from a livability standpoint; it solves for a limited kind of family-friendly housing affordability and not much else. I think of myself as an urbanist first and a YIMBY second, so while we need to address the housing shortage however we can right now, I'd love to see high-opportunity cities and suburbs build more thoughtfully. Austin is trying to make that possible in our code.
I agree with your characterization of those opportunity cities; it’s the flip-side of this essay, right? Geography and land use constraints fueled the out-migration that fed the pandemic boomtowns in the first place. The whole country would look different if San Francisco and New York had responded to the household formation boom with anything like Austin's intensity. Those cities should look to good models for addressing this, and they have the least excuse not to since they're still largely not building at the scale their own shortages require. As long as that continues, supply-constrained cities will keep exporting people to supply-elastic ones, and in Texas, that elastic response has mostly taken the form of suburban sprawl, because it's the path of least resistance.
Your anecdote is poignant. I've recently written about aging in place both as a mobility problem and, separately, as a housing problem. One reason AARP supported Austin's HOME initiative (three units by right in single-family zones) was exactly this: it creates smaller homes for seniors to downsize into. It was also pitched as a redevelopment path: turn an old, oversized single-family home into three smaller ones. If our missing-middle reforms pass, some of those might end up as small apartment buildings instead. I haven't done a review of how other cities have approached this specific angle, though.
Great! Thanks for that link. I'll take this over to my local YIMBY slack for further development.
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion, too. Best.
This is the clearest writeup I've seen of Austin's boom/bust. The household growth number does real work: metro households up about 30% from 2019 to 2024 while population rose only about 12%. That plus the per-capita multifamily permitting vs peer boomtowns makes the "it was demand only" story hard to keep.
Your unfinished business point on missing-middle is where the live permit record gets interesting. In District 1, labeled two-family permits went from 230 last year to 6 this year. Citywide duplex permits fell from 316 to 112, while District 1 single-family permits rose from 268 to 367, and some of those "single-family" filings are actually two- or three-unit buildings reclassified under HOME. https://transparent.city/c/austin/stories/e3rnrC6n
So the correction you describe may be real at the big multifamily end, while the small-scale supply that creates cheaper units is either disappearing or getting hidden in the coding. Curious whether you read District 1 as the canary, or as a HOME accounting artifact.
Thanks, Adam! On District 1, the chart you shared appears to start in October 2024 (though the story says it goes back to 2016), so it shows only a few months of zero to two permits a month before the large spike in March 2025, which tapers off to a couple a month by July. About 200 of those permits came from a single duplex condo development off East Braker Lane, which Google Maps identifies as Foxtail by Banyan.
Excluding that development, citywide duplex permits were flat from 2025 to 2026, and District 1 is back in its usual range of a handful a year. So I don't think there's a real duplex decline to explain. As you suggest, "single-family" permits with two or three units did rise after HOME, which is consistent with HOME projects being filed that way.