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8 hours ago
- Business
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Starter Homes Live in Texas, Die in Arizona
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's stories include: A win for starter homes in Texas… …and a defeat for them in Arizona A new constitutional challenge to affordable housing fees in Denver A veto of a rent-recommendation algorithm ban in Colorado After suffering a near-death experience last week, Texas' Senate Bill 15, a.k.a. the Texas Starter Homes Act, has passed the Legislature and now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk. The bill would prevent larger cities in larger counties from requiring that homes sit on lots larger than 3,000 square feet in new subdivisions of at least five acres. Proponents argue the bill will enable the construction of more inherently affordable owner-occupied housing in cities that currently require much larger minimum lot sizes. "Texas is the first state to take seriously the idea that a basic starter home, without any subsidy, is usually affordable to people making average or below average incomes, [and] should be available throughout the state," says Salim Furth, a researcher at George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Minimum lot size bills have been one of the more controversial and less successful YIMBY reforms in state legislatures. Texas' bill is one of the first to make it over the finish line. The initial version of S.B. 15 would have capped minimum lot sizes at 1,400 square feet, which mirrors unzoned Houston's minimum lot sizes. That version passed the Senate back in March but was watered down in negotiations between the House and Senate during last-minute considerations of the bill. The legislation survived an effort by Texas House Democrats to effectively gut the legislation. Rep. Ramon Romero Jr. (D–Fort Worth) briefly succeeded in amending the bill to only require that cities create a starter home zoning district with the smaller minimum lot sizes. The amendment would not have required cities to actually apply this new zoning district to existing land or to new subdivisions. This would have effectively made S.B. 15 a voluntary paperwork exercise. Romero, who also briefly managed to kill S.B. 15 via a procedural move in the House earlier in May, has criticized the idea that allowing smaller homes on smaller lots would yield more affordable homes. "It's already been proven that just because you have smaller (homes) does not immediately equate to more affordable (homes)," he said to The Texas Tribune last month. (One study of minimum lot size reductions in Houston, Texas, facilitated an "unprecedented" increase in the rates of infill housing construction in single-family neighborhoods.) That gutting amendment was stripped out of the bill in last-minute negotiations between the House and the Senate, meaning that S.B. 15 will have some teeth, provided that Abbott signs it into law. While the bill does not apply to existing residential areas, Furth says it will provide developers a lot more flexibility when constructing new subdivisions, where most new housing in Texas is being built. "Most single-family home production in Texas is done in non-residential or extremely large lots. A normal Texas subdivision is going to be five-plus acres, and maybe 100 acres," he tells Reason. "This will allow [builders] to include small homes in that mix and make sure there's a variety of price points and variety of styles." Meanwhile, in Arizona, a near-identical Starter Home Act is effectively dead in the Legislature. Similar to Texas' S.B. 15, Arizona's S.B. 1229 initially would have prevented cities from requiring homes in new five-acre-plus subdivisions to sit on lots of 1,500 square feet or more. It also would have prohibited cities from dictating home designs and aesthetic features. As in Texas, the bill was amended to raise its minimum lot size cap to 3,000 square feet. That helped get the legislation out of the Senate on a 16–13 vote, with Republicans and Democrats on each side of the vote. Two House committees also approved the bill in March and early April. But it then stalled over what proponents say was persistent opposition from the Arizona League of Cities and Towns and Gov. Katie Hobbs' office. Hobbs vetoed a very similar starter homes bill last year, citing concerns that that bill didn't explicitly carve out areas near military bases or explicitly include fire safety standards. The governor's concerns were incorporated into S.B. 1229. Yet the League, a taxpayer-funded association that lobbies on behalf of local governments, still opposed the measure's limits on local land use regulation. The League had pushed for amendments to S.B. 1229 that would have dramatically limited its scope by imposing price and income limits on new starter homes and requiring that buyers live in the homes for 15 years. These demands were a nonstarter with proponents of S.B. 1229, and negotiations on a compromise measure broke down earlier this spring. "Our last meeting was about an hour and a half in the governor's office. I could tell [the governor's staff] were not going to come over to our side at all. They were literally letting the League [of Cities and Towns] run the table," Sen. Shawna Bolick (R–Phoenix) tells Reason. With the threat of Hobbs' veto hanging over S.B. 1229, the bill was never brought up for a floor vote. Despite the failure of the starter homes bill, Arizona did pass a handful of other housing reforms. That includes House Bill 2928, which expands last year's statewide legalization of accessory dwelling units in cities to unincorporated county land as well. The state also passed a bill allowing for third-party plan reviews of single-family projects. A homebuilder in Denver is suing the city over what it says are unconstitutional affordable housing fees being slapped on two of its pending residential projects. Denver's Linkage Fee ordinance requires residential projects of 10 units or less to either set aside units to be rented or sold at below-market rates or pay per-square-foot "linkage" fees. When local builder redT Homes sought approval for two projects, a four-unit single-family home development and a two-duplex project, the city said it would need to pay linkage fees of $45,000 and $25,000 on each respective project. A string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions has established that the Fifth Amendment protects property owners from having to turn over money or property when applying for a development permit, unless there's some nexus between those exactions and the actual impact caused by the permitted project. Denver claimed when passing its linkage fee ordinance in 2016 that new development raises economic activity and, therefore, raises demand for work-force housing. redT counters that its planned homes are making housing more affordable, not less, by expanding overall housing supply. By charging it an affordable linkage fee anyway, Denver is charging it for an impact it's not having. That, it argues, violates the Fifth Amendment's protections against "unconstitutional conditions." redT Homes is suing Denver in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. "These affordable housing fees almost by definition fail" the Supreme Court's test for unconstitutional conditions, says David Deerson, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing redT Homes. "A fundamental law of economics is that an increase in supply tends to lower prices. Denver can't force developers like redT Homes to pay fees to solve problems that not only are they not creating, they're already solving," he says. A favorable federal court ruling for redT Homes could have major implications for housing development nationwide. Like Denver, hundreds of jurisdictions have adopted similar "inclusionary zoning" policies that require housing developers to include below-market-rate units in their projects or pay in-lieu affordable housing fees. And like Denver's linkage fees, a similar constitutional argument can be made that inclusionary zoning's affordable housing mandates take developers' property to mitigate an impact they're not having. Developers and property rights advocates have periodically challenged inclusionary zoning laws in court, typically with little success. In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Marin County, California's inclusionary zoning policy that the California Supreme Court had upheld. (The Pacific Legal Foundation also litigated that case.) The Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado established that fees and permit conditions imposed on whole classes of projects by legislatures must still have some connection to those projects' impacts. The Sheetz decision was a narrow one. It didn't directly deal with inclusionary zoning. But it did widen the universe of permit conditions that can be challenged as "unconstitutional conditions." Potentially, a new inclusionary zoning case with a new set of facts might pick up this Court's interest and result in a decision that puts some guardrails on affordable housing mandates and fees. On pure policy grounds, inclusionary zoning acts as a tax on development, reducing production and raising costs. Ending these policies could unlock a lot of potential new projects. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would have banned the use of rent-recommendation software. Proponents of the bill argue that this software facilitates price-fixing among landlords by sharing nonpublic data on prices and vacancies between competitors. Colorado, along with a number of other states and the U.S. Department of Justice, is currently suing rent-recommendation software provider RealPage for antitrust violations. Polis said in a veto letter, posted online by Colorado Public Radio, that while he shares concerns that this software could be used to drive up prices, the measure was overly broad. "We should not inadvertently take a tool off the table that could identify vacancies and provide consumers with meaningful data to help efficiently manage residential real estate to ensure people can access housing," said the governor in his veto letter. "This bill may have unintended consequences of creating a hostile environment for providers of rental housing and could result in further diminished supply of rental housing based on inadequate data," he wrote. The governor said he would prefer for state and federal lawsuits to play out. He said he'd be open to a future bill that made a distinction between collusive and noncollusive uses of nonpublic competitor data. Read Reason's past coverage of the RealPage controversy here. New York City's rent-stabilized housing stock is in increasing financial distress, thanks to rising operating costs and the city's suppression of rent increases. To remedy the situation, New York assembly member, and New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani is proposing to remedy the situation by freezing rents. Los Angeles Times covers the California Legislature's efforts to exclude urban infill housing from the state's notoriously burdensome environmental review process. Organized labor is cool on the effort, altruistically asking, "What's in it for us?" The biggest opponents of a public housing redevelopment project in New York City? The [wrong link here] of multimillion-dollar homes nearby. The Connecticut Legislature has passed a major housing bill that requires localities to zone for more affordable housing, increases density near transit stops, and pares back minimum parking requirements. The post Starter Homes Live in Texas, Die in Arizona appeared first on
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Texas Ten Commandments Bill Is the Latest Example of Forcing Religious Texts in Public Schools
Texas has become the latest state to pass a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. The bill, which is already being legally challenged and is unlikely to pass constitutional muster, is part of a recent trend of red states attempting to inject religious texts into the classroom. Senate Bill 10 requires public schools to "display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments." The poster is required to only contain the text of the Ten Commandments and must be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. Further, if a school doesn't have an acceptable poster in each classroom, the bill requires them to accept any privately donated poster. The bill was passed by the Texas state House on Saturday and overwhelmingly approved in the state Senate with a 28–3 vote on Wednesday. While S.B. 10 has not yet been enacted, Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbot said in a social media post earlier this month that he would sign the bill if it passed the Legislature. Similar bills have been recently signed into law in Louisiana and Arkansas. While Louisiana's Ten Commandments bill tried to avoid legal scrutiny by directing schools to only use private donations, not public funds, Texas' bill makes no such distinctions. The bill states that a school "may, but is not required to, purchase posters . . . using district funds." Louisiana's bill was halted in federal court last November, shedding doubt on the Texas bill's ability to survive a First Amendment challenge. The day after the bill was passed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several other groups announced that they were suing to stop the bill from becoming law. "We all have the right to decide what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice. Government officials have no business intruding on these deeply personal religious matters," reads a Thursday statement from the ACLU. "S.B. 10 will subject students to state-sponsored displays of the Ten Commandments for nearly every hour of their public education. It is religiously coercive and interferes with families' right to direct children's religious education." The post Texas Ten Commandments Bill Is the Latest Example of Forcing Religious Texts in Public Schools appeared first on
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Antirenewable bills die quietly in GOP-controlled Texas Legislature
A slate of bills targeting the Texas renewables industry are now doomed after missing a key deadline in the state House. The bills had become the focus in an intra-Republican battle over the future of Texas energy, and of GOP energy policy writ large — as well as the role of the state in administering markets. The fight in Texas echoed a similar fight in Washington, where red-state senators whose districts have benefited from billions in clean energy investment are now pushing back against a House-passed budget that seeks to eliminate Biden-era tax credits that incentivized that spending. In the Lone Star State, the fight has been an understated victory for the renewables industry. Taken together, the package of bills sought to impose strict limitations on the state's nation-leading renewables program. They were backed by far-right advocacy groups but opposed by significant factions of the state's business lobby. S.B. 819 would have strictly limited where wind and solar could be built. S.B. 388 would have required every new watt of wind or solar to be accompanied by a watt of new gas, despite the shortage of the gas turbines that would make that possible. And S.B. 715 would have required several gigawatts of existing wind and solar to purchase backup gas generation or pay a fine. While all three bills passed the state Senate over the last month, leadership in the House declined to put them on a crucial calendar in time for them to receive a vote before the session ends Monday. Polling from a pro-renewables conservative group suggests restrictions on renewables are broadly unpopular — and growing more so — even among most Texas Republicans. But the bills, two of which are updates of legislation introduced in 2023, are a sign of future political headwinds facing the state's renewables industry — particularly as a wave of new projects in the Texas exurbs, whatever their broad popularity, creates local discontent that antirenewables organizers are mobilizing around. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
6 days ago
- Business
- The Hill
Anti-renewable bills die quietly in GOP-controlled Texas legislature
A slate of bills targeting the Texas renewables industry are now doomed after missing a key deadline in the state House. The bills had become the focus in an intra-Republican battle over the future of Texas energy, and of GOP energy policy writ large — as well as the role of the state in administering markets. The fight in Texas echoed a similar fight in Washington, where red-state senators whose districts have benefited from billions in clean energy investment are now pushing back against a House budget that seeks to eliminate Biden-era tax credits that incentivized that spending. In the Lone Star State, the fight has been an understated victory for the renewables industry. Taken together, the package of bills sought to impose strict limitations on the state's nation-leading renewables program. They were backed by far-right advocacy groups but opposed by significant factions of the state's business lobby. S.B. 819 would have strictly limited where wind and solar could be built. S.B. 388 would have required every new watt of wind or solar to be accompanied by a watt of new gas, despite the shortage of the gas turbines that would make that possible. And S.B. 715 would have required several gigawatts of existing wind and solar to purchase backup gas generation or pay a fine. While all three bills passed the state Senate over the last month, leadership in the House declined to put them on a crucial calendar in time for them to receive a vote before the session ends on Monday. Polling from a pro-renewables conservative group suggests that restrictions on renewables are broadly unpopular — and growing more so — even among most Texas Republicans. But the bills, two of which are updates of legislation introduced in 2023, are a sign of future political headwinds facing the state's renewables industry — particularly as a wave of new projects in the Texas exurbs, whatever their broad popularity, creates local discontent that anti-renewables organizers are mobilizing around.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ohio lawmakers introduce separate bills to regulate online gambling
Stock photo from Getty Images. Ohio Republican lawmakers in the state House and the Senate have introduced separate bills that would legalize online gambling. Ohio state Sen. Nathan Manning, R-North Ridgeville, introduced Ohio Senate Bill 197 last week and Ohio state Reps. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, and Marilyn John, R-Richland County, introduced Ohio House Bill 298 this week. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX There is overlap with the bills. Both pieces of legislation would regulate online gambling through the Ohio Casino Control Commission and internet gambling would start by March 31. Nearly all of the tax proceeds from internet gambling would go to the state's general revenue fund and 1% would go to the Problem Gambling Fund. Both bills only allow an Ohio casino or racino to be licensed as an internet gambling operator. Someone would have to be at least 21 and physically in Ohio to participate in internet gambling. The lawmakers behind these bills say Ohioans are already participating illegally in online gambling. 'It is important to highlight that online gambling is already occurring in the state of Ohio,' Manning said during his sponsor testimony last week in the Senate Select Committee on Gaming. 'It is difficult to quantify an exact number, but it is clear there is significant illegal online gambling going on in the state, as there was illegal sports betting before it was legalized.' Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia all have legalized online gambling. The 700-page bill would authorize three types of online gambling — internet gambling, iLottery, and online betting on horse racing. The bill levies a 36% tax on an operator's internet gambling receipts. There would be a $50 million initial fee and a $5 million renewal fee for Ohio casinos and racinos. Manning predicts this could generate at least $500 million per year for Ohio. S.B. 197 would move all Ohio gambling regulations under the Ohio Casino Control Commission. This would nix the State Racing Commission and the Casino Control Commission would take over their responsibilities. Ohio Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, questioned the horse racing aspect of the bill. 'I don't think the Casino Control Commissioner knows anything about how to regulate horse racing,' he said. In response, Ryan Soultz, vice president of governmental affairs for Boyd Gaming Corporation, said other states have found a way to have one regulatory body that oversees both. Trevor Hayes, vice president of government relations for Caesars Digital, supports the bill. 'Our experience shows that regulated iGaming provides a significant new source of state tax revenue, provides consumers with a strictly regulated and fair gaming option, and protects vulnerable populations,' he said this week to the Senate Select Committee on Gaming. When compared to the senate bill, H.B. 298 is smaller in scope. It would not allow online Ohio Lottery games nor would it legalize online betting on horse racing. 'This bill would authorize Ohio to take the next logical step in generating state revenue by authorizing internet gambling in the state of Ohio,' Stewart said this week to the House Finance Committee. 'It's reasonable to take the next logical step, technological step, and allow Ohioans to play these games online, as well as in person.' The bill would impose a 28% tax on internet gambling receipts, which is the same as Michigan. Stewart and John estimate this could general between $400-$800 million a year in revenue. 'There's a lot of things that we want to do in the state of Ohio that require increased revenues,' John said. 'This is one way that we can go about expanding the consumer base of players who prefer an online setting.' Democratic lawmakers raised concerns in committee that this could lead to more people under 21 participating illegally in online gambling. 'If we can bring regulations to this market, then it is my feeling that we will be able to help, hopefully, curb the underage participation,' John said. There are more than 250,000 problem gamblers in Ohio and 1 in 5 problem gamblers attempt suicide, said Ohio state Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. This data is from the 2022 Ohio Gambling Survey. 'Where is the line?' Isaacsohn asked. 'At what point do we say this isn't worth it anymore, that it's not worth the additional revenue that could fund a tax cut or a stadium or whatever else it goes towards.' John said regulating online gaming could help put measures in place to help people 'before they get to the point of making a decision that they can't return from.' Follow Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on Bluesky. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
