Mounting criticism is raining down on Dallas-area suburbs for flouting Texas's new housing laws meant to increase housing density and affordability.

The theme: "Don't California Our Texas."

What started as a political message a decade ago, as Californians moved to Texas, is now being spun into a message to counter the "not-in-my-backyard" pushback to housing reform.

Jay Parsons, a national multifamily economist based in Texas, sparked debate this week after highlighting how suburbs are actively undermining the law's intent.

You see bumper stickers saying, 'Don't California my Texas,' and yet that's exactly what some Texas cities are starting to do," Parsons wrote on social media. "They're adopting anti-multifamily policies that will inevitably backfire on housing affordability."

And former Ventura, CA, mayor William Fulton, who knows a thing or two about what happened in the Golden State, weighed in with an opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle.

In order not to fall into the California trap, Texas must find ways to restrain its political extremism and deal with emerging NIMBY concerns," Fulton, now director of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, wrote.

California of Yore

Texas, along with Florida, has been a top destination for domestic migration.

Fulton noted that Texas is experiencing a population boom similar to the one California went through from the end of the Great Depression to the Great Recession. However, in the 1970s, NIMBYism began to flourish in California, he said.

For housing, at least, that meant growing regulations stifled development, made new housing more costly to build, and created a severe housing affordability problem that the state is now trying to correct.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and pro-housing lawmakers have embraced advancing reforms that include streamlining environmental reviews and enabling higher-density development near transit.

The "abundance" movement, based on a book of the same name by authors Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, calls for an explicit rejection of the NIMBYism that hollowed out California's housing production over decades.

Fulton fears that Texas is headed down a similar political path, albeit from a different ideological angle.

Meanwhile, home prices are going up faster than incomes, meaning housing is gradually becoming less affordable, especially for service workers," he wrote. "And the state is sprawling like crazy in order to keep up with housing demand, which is creating California-like traffic conditions that the Texas Department of Transportation is not likely to be able to build its way out of."

The Texas Solution

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a series of housing bills into law to address an estimated shortage of 320,000 homes across the state.

One of those bills, Senate Bill 840, allows multifamily housing "by right" in commercial zones, granting developers streamlined approval for mixed-use or apartment projects across large cities and suburbs. Another lowered minimum lot sizes.

However, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex swiftly became ground zero for the pushback. Several Dallas suburbs have approved ordinances that apartment developers claim introduce design and amenity requirements, making new projects too costly to build. Frisco added a twist by rezoning commercial parcels for "heavy industrial" use — effectively exploiting exemptions to block housing development.

The resistance mirrors Florida's recent experience, where lawmakers have had to repeatedly tighten the Live Local Act after local governments crafted similar "poison-pill" ordinances to undermine the state's housing preemption laws.

Analysts now warn that Texas's reforms face the same fate unless the legislature reconvenes or courts step in to enforce their intent.

Such local defiance comes as Texas remains the nation's top destination for domestic migration in search of cheaper housing and jobs. But as these newcomers arrive, Texas cities have shown a willingness to adopt the very exclusionary practices they hoped to escape.

Texas now finds itself at an ideological crossroads. If its suburbs continue erecting procedural barricades to multifamily housing, they may end up replicating the scarcity that fueled California's affordability crisis.

These cities may think they're preserving local control—but they're really preserving high costs," Parsons wrote.