The City of Dallas Needs a Homebuilding Boom to Ensure Economic Success

While the North Texas economy is booming, the core city of Dallas faces challenges bedeviling other cities: a dwindling middle class, bifurcation into neighborhoods of haves and have-nots, and an emerging home affordability problem.Dallas urgently needs to shift to a more inclusive and sustainable pattern of growth. This demands a homebuilding boom focused on middle- and lower-income families, especially in southern Dallas.Middle-income families increasingly can't afford to live in the city's thriving neighborhoods and don't want to live in its struggling ones. For lower-income families, rising housing costs are eating up people's income and putting upward mobility out of reach.These challenges are partly a side effect of the city's boom. But they're also the product of underinvestment in schools, infrastructure and modern amenities, as well as policies preventing housing supply from keeping up with demand.The median price for a single-family home in Dallas County is up 73 percent since 2007. And the median price is now, based on federal standards, 86 percent above affordable levels for median families. One-third of homeowners and more than half of renters are housing cost-burdened.  Continue reading...