Whitmire must build on Turner’s housing success

As 2023 came to a close, outgoing Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was confronting a hard truth. The mayor’s ambitious goal — so ambitious one housing advocate said the figure seemed to be pulled from thin air — had been to build 3,000 new singlefamily homes. In his eight years in office, that didn’t get done.

A Chronicle investigation found that, as of November 2023, just 916 homes had been completed, with vague promises to complete the rest “at some point” in 2024.

Turner, though, fared much better at adding affordable apartments to the city: He appears to have met, and maybe exceeded his goal of adding 7,000 multifamily units (basically, apartments). As of November, the Chronicle found, the city had added 6,911 with another 1,700 expected in the first few months of 2024.

That relative success is something that Turner’s successor, new Mayor John Whitmire, can build on.

What did that success look like on the ground? Joy Horak-Brown is president and CEO of New Hope Housing, a nonprofit organization committed to providing affordable housing with services that help stabilize households struggling to get by. During the Turner administration, Horak-Brown enjoyed some of her most productive years, with New Hope adding some 752 new apartments. The organization also expanded its mission from providing single-person units to help people stay off or get off the streets, to full-fledged, multibedroom developments for families, complete with libraries, Food Bank-stocked markets and community partnerships.

Houston has long trumpeted its plentiful and affordable housing and comparatively, the city still seems to be faring well when it comes to supply. In recent years, overall new housing has actually grown at a faster rate than our population. And the city has seen healthy rental housing growth as well. Between 2016 and 2020, Houston added some 19,570 rental structures, according to the most recent housing assessment from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

But though more housing stock should contribute to lower overall costs, many households are still feeling the strain of rising rents. Average monthly rents in Houston outpaced median household income gains in recent years. And much of the city’s rental housing stock is three, four, even five decades old, with the oldest units tending to cluster in poorer parts of town.

To make Houston a more stable and livable place, we must make sure families can actually afford the new housing, and that our older apartments are habitable too. Turner focused on targeting homelessness, but advocates urge a more balanced approach to affordable housing — an approach that can stabilize working families and fix up poorly maintained complexes.

In his first inaugural address in 2016, Turner emphasized the need for affordable housing.

“Too many of our young people are moving outside of Houston because they cannot find homes they can afford,” he said then. Four years later, he was more direct, calling on developers, financial institutions and the business community to lend their resources to the cause of affordable housing and fighting neighborhood inequity.

By that point, the city had suffered several disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which damaged or destroyed numerous Houston homes. The city’s housing department estimated that 209,422 of the city’s 501,721 homes sustained some sort of damage in the storm, roughly half of which were rental units.The affordable market was hit hard. A quarter of the Houston Housing Authority’s stock was damaged or destroyed in the storm. The pandemic, which would throw countless renters into crisis, was just around the corner. Turner’s lofty 2,000 single-family housing goal for his tenure — which would later grow by 1,000 in 2023 — seemed to face ever steeper odds.

The city’s hand in creating affordable housing may seem limited. It has a relatively small housing department, and much of its muscle comes from administering federal funds and either green-lighting — or standing in the way of — affordable developments that take advantage of state-administered tax credits. Still, the city plays a crucial role and when things go wrong, as they seemed to in the recent collapse of a $60 million mixed-income housing program funded by disaster dollars or when Turner effectively killed the affordable Fountain View project in 2016, they can have huge consequences.

Horak-Brown sometimes counts cars when she’s driving: Every fourth one, she figures, is a renter struggling to pay for their home.

All of this offers a chance for the next mayor to improve.

Turner’s housing record is mixed and includes the still-under-investigated fallout after former housing director Tom McCasland called out alleged mismanagement of housing dollars. But the next administration must build on the successes.

In his first day on the job Tuesday, Whitmire was busy with an inauguration, City Council meeting, resident meet and greet at City Hall and a party for city workers at George R. Brown. There are plenty of highpriority needs vying for his attention.

Whitmire has promised to complete a comprehensive housing plan for the city. Doubling down on multifamily housing while reinvigorating the housing department — and empowering its knowledgeable staffers to do their jobs without micro-managing — must be high on the list.

Outgoing mayor’s record is mixed, but we can learn from its bright spots