If you own a home in a single-family residential area anywhere in Texas, state lawmakers are coming for your property rights. They are poised — with vast majority of voters unaware of the plan they have cooked up — to pass bills that could severely alter the protections that single-family neighborhoods have long depended on.
Among a slew of anti-neighborhood, anti-local control bills flooding the Texas Legislature, what’s known as the ADU bill has already sailed through the Senate. If passed by the House, millions of homeowners will lose their rights with no notice of the kind that normally occurs in any zoning case that changes base land use.
I am one of the co-founders of the grassroots TxNeighborhood Coalition that aims to protect neighborhoods. This bill is a bad step that further commercializes housing, potentially pitting the average home buyer against real estate investment groups that could take advantage of this law to purchase homes with the intention of adding a second dwelling unit on the property and creating multiple rental units. The result could be disastrous for traditional neighborhoods.