Texas Forced Suburbs to Allow More Apartments. The Suburbs Found Workarounds.
A shopping mall in North Dallas shows what happens when a state removes a local veto and the local government finds another one.
Joshua Fechter, reporting for The Texas Tribune on July 27, documented what’s happening at Pepper Square, an aging North Dallas shopping center where storefronts sit empty and a defunct Harry Potter exhibit’s signage still hangs from a former Stein Mart. The property’s owner wants to convert it into roughly 1,000 apartments. A group of homeowners spent years fighting that plan, forcing a City Council member out of office and suing after the council approved it anyway. Then the Texas Legislature passed a law that made their lawsuit irrelevant.
That law, Senate Bill 840, took effect in September 2025 and allows owners of offices, shopping centers, and warehouses in the state’s 19 largest cities to redevelop those properties into apartments without local council approval. According to a tally from a bipartisan coalition — Texans for Reasonable Solutions, the American Enterprise Institute, and Texas Appleseed — the law has enabled at least 8,400 apartments statewide since taking effect, roughly one in five multifamily units permitted in Texas over that period. A separate Tribune analysis of Texas A&M building-permit data found that while multifamily permits fell 10 percent statewide amid a broader apartment glut and higher construction costs, permits rose specifically in the 19 cities where SB 840 relaxed zoning.
The law worked exactly as designed in the places it applies. That’s the part state lawmakers wanted proven, and it’s proven. What’s happening now in the suburbs around Dallas is the part they didn’t fully anticipate: cities that lost the ability to say no outright have started saying yes on terms designed to make the yes meaningless in practice. Irving now requires new apartment buildings to reach eight floors unless the council grants an exception, effectively pricing out smaller, more feasible projects. Grand Prairie requires an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Irving separately mandates a dedicated remote-work space, a dog park, and a gym. None of these requirements existed before SB 840 passed. All of them arrived after.
State Rep. Gary Gates, the Houston-area Republican who shepherded the housing bills and now chairs the House Land and Resource Management Committee, called the pattern exactly what it looks like: an attempt to thwart the law’s intent without violating its text. He’s already signaling he’ll push legislation next session to close the loophole, telling the Tribune the state can find a way to stop cities from using “these kinds of tactics.” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows have both told lawmakers to study the issue further before the Legislature reconvenes in January, which suggests this fight is headed for a second round rather than a resolution.
The underlying tension here isn’t really about apartments. It’s about what a state legislature can actually force a local government to do once it’s decided that local control is itself the obstacle to a stated policy goal. Removing zoning discretion was supposed to end this argument. Instead it moved the argument into building codes, minimum floor counts, and amenity mandates, which are a different kind of authority than zoning but accomplish much the same practical result: raising the cost and complexity of a project until it stops making financial sense to build.
Not every city has responded the same way, which is its own useful data point. Arlington, Plano, and McKinney have all advanced new SB 840 projects despite adopting some additional requirements, according to city representatives. Grand Prairie has approved none. Frisco didn’t respond to a request for comment at all. Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio have largely embraced the law outright, with Dallas economic development officials framing housing scarcity in the suburbs as a competitive liability for those communities rather than a protective measure. Linda McMahon, head of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, put it bluntly: cities that limit housing availability will find their own economies stagnating as a result.
Even in cities without organized political resistance, the law runs into quieter limits. In El Paso, SB 840 opened up roughly a third of the city’s total land area to redevelopment, but 36 percent of those parcels carry private deed restrictions that prohibit apartments regardless of what state law allows. Projects that clear the deed-restriction hurdle still need local exceptions for things like minimum parking requirements, which gives residents another avenue to organize opposition even where the city itself isn’t fighting the law.
The version of this fight playing out in Irving and Grand Prairie previews what happens in a second legislative session, whenever Gates brings his fix forward. If lawmakers close the code-and-amenity loophole the way they closed the zoning-approval loophole, cities that want to keep density out will need to find a third lever, because the political will behind that resistance hasn’t gone anywhere just because two of its previous tools did. Pepper Square got built anyway. The next fight will decide whether that becomes the exception or the rule.
