Once heralded as the pinnacle of affordability in the D-FW homebuyer market, Mesquite is considering a zoning and development code overhaul that would hike the minimum permitted home size by more than 30%. Housing policy experts say the change could further price people out of the city and impact Black and Hispanic residents the most.

In an April meeting of the City Council and the Planning and Zoning Commission, city staff laid out a series of proposed amendments to the zoning ordinance, such as carport and garage conversion regulations. That meeting was the beginning of a monthslong discussion that will likely result in an updated single family zoning ordinance by the fall.

One of city staff’s suggestions included upping the minimum square footage for single family homes. If the City Council passes the proposed standards, new houses will have to be at least 2,000 square feet, instead of the 1,500 square feet currently required.

The city says requiring larger homes is to make sure new development is of the highest quality.

“Our total interest is in having neighborhoods that don’t go into decline,” City Manager Cliff Keheley said.

Plus, he added, this home size is in line with some developers’ recent proposals.

Jeff Armstrong, Mesquite’s planning and development director, said the city hopes in part that increasing the average home size can bring in higher property values and, in turn, more tax revenue.

Geoffrey Moore, a local affordable housing advocate and the lead pastor at St. Stephen United Methodist Church in Mesquite, said the proposed hike in square footage won’t provide what residents need — especially during North Texas’ housing crisis.

“That strikes me as quite a jump,” Moore said. “It is contrary to many of the innovative recommendations the city has been given to address their own affordable supportive housing shortfall.”

Staff also suggested shrinking the minimum permitted home lot width from 60 square feet to 50 in order to shift standards to what developers were historically offering, Keheley said.

City council members Jennifer Vidler, Kenny Green and Tandy Boroughs say they oppose such a change: they don’t want developers to propose even smaller lots, The Mesquite News reported.

When reporters asked the three council members why they initially opposed smaller lot widths, Green said the council had no data at the time to support such a change.

Vidler said “it would be premature to comment at this time” and Boroughs did not respond to requests for comment.

As the city plans to develop open lots, Keheley said the council and city staff are focused on attracting home builders who provide amenities — like parks and green spaces — and constructing quality homes that maintain value.

“We’ve seen some of the mistakes of the past and we want to try to correct those,” Keheley said, referring to housing developments’ lack of amenities and owners’ disinvestment over time.

But housing experts say square footage doesn’t necessarily equal quality. The currently proposed zoning overhaul would bar the construction of smaller, more affordable homes.

District 1 council member Jeff Casper wrote in an email that Mesquite’s housing stock doesn’t meet all its residents’ needs.

“My general feeling is Mesquite excels at providing single family homes at a fair market value, especially when compared to other North Texas communities,” Casper said. “However, city hall must do more to create housing options for residents not in the middle class — for working families, and at the other end, options for executive-level housing.”

City council members B.W. Smith and Debbie Anderson and Mayor Daniel Alemán did not respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission will vote on a proposal for a multifamily reduced-rent housing development. It hasn’t approved such a project in nine years.

Keheley says it’s not the city’s intent to make it more expensive to live in Mesquite.

“I don’t necessarily mean that we’re trying to price anyone out,” Keheley said. “Affordability is definitely going to be part of our long-term discussions when it comes to housing, and I think that’s really just come about in the last year or two as an issue with just the way the housing boom happened.”

Mesquite’s focus on housing development comes amid local advocates’ demand for the city to improve its housing, following an outcry by residents at Hillcrest Apartments. The city sued the owners of that apartment complex, where residents say the landlord has allowed tenants to live without reliable heat, air conditioning and hot water for years.

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the state’s housing agency, has documented safety hazards and inspection violations at Hillcrest for over a decade, The News found in an open records request. The agency granted a former Hillcrest landlord $12.7 million in tax-exempt bond funds in 2006. At the time, the landlord promised to make major capital improvements to the property.

Code enforcement

Experts say that increasing new homes’ square footage alone won’t necessarily stop neighborhoods from falling into disrepair. “I’ve never seen any evidence whatsoever that mandating mansions is an effective strategy for dealing with disrepair,” says professional city planner and researcher Nolan Gray.

“The actual solution for disrepair is stricter code enforcement.”

Keheley said code enforcement isn’t enough to keep a neighborhood from declining.

“I think it has to do with where people want to live and where people want to raise their families and where people want to reinvest in their homes,” Keheley said.

Fair housing experts warn of the disparate impact a policy like a square footage hike could have on lower-income residents.

When only large homes are available to purchase, it leads to economic and racial segregation, says Paul Jargowsky, a public policy professor at Rutgers University-Camden who researches inequality.

Advocates and academics, like Jargowsky, dubbed these tactics as exclusionary zoning: they say both minimum lot and square footage requirements for homes are one of many ways that cities create and cement segregation.

Mesquite isn’t alone in deploying zoning strategies that have shaped cities. The federal government acknowledges exclusionary zoning tactics have popularized in recent decades across the U.S., and that these policies discriminate against non-white people to maintain property values.

Some exclusionary zoning tactics are legal.

“The fact of an increase in a city’s single-family square footage requirement standing alone doesn’t show a violation of Fair Housing laws,” civil rights attorney Mike Daniel, who has been fighting for fair housing in North Texas since 1985, wrote in an email.

But there are instances in which such practices can be grounds for a lawsuit.

If statistical analyses can show that a policy creates a discriminatory effect that disproportionately keeps certain groups out of a city or certain neighborhoods — then it could be grounds for a Fair Housing lawsuit, Daniel wrote.

Cases alleging discriminatory impact on protected classes — such as Black and Latino people — can be tough to win, Jargowsky said.

“But you then have to show that there wasn’t a real purpose served by that [policy],” he said. “It’s difficult to pursue those disparate impact claims, although they’re possible.”

‘Last legal form of discrimination’

Academics say people commonly misunderstand segregation and a lack of affordable housing as the result of market forces. Jargowsky says that’s not the case: “Zoning is not the free market. Zoning is limiting what the market is allowed to produce.”

Cities’ decision to build less housing — including apartments — is in part to blame for skyrocketing rent costs and home values.

Scholars have long said that communities of color have been victims of deeply entrenched institutional racism in housing laws through decades of redlining, exclusionary zoning and suburbs’ intentional lack of affordable housing.

Prior to the Fair Housing Act’s passage in 1968, the state-sponsored segregation against Black people existed at all levels of government in the US.

Once the Fair Housing Act passed, it became illegal to discriminate in the sale, rental and financing of housing based on a person’s race, religion, national origin, sex, disability or family status.

The North Texas suburbs are no stranger to Fair Housing litigation. Mesquite’s neighbor to the east — Sunnyvale — has been hit with legal action twice over its lack of fair housing choice, earning it the title from D Magazine as the “whitest town in North Texas.”

In 1971, Sunnyvale’s council passed an outright ban on apartments. Through the 1980s, officials consistently held their ground on a 1-acre minimum lot size for housing. With such a high barrier to entry, few Black families could afford to move to Sunnyvale.

In the eyes of the law, it doesn’t matter if Sunnyvale or any other city intends to discriminate or not — these zoning practices are exclusionary, experts say.

If such exclusion disproportionately impacts protected classes, it violates the Fair Housing Act, Daniel wrote in an email.

The Supreme Court agreed: in 2015, the court upheld a ruling that cases alleging racial discrimination in housing can also sue and win a case on the grounds of disparate impact — not just racist intent.

Jargowsky, who worked on a fair housing lawsuit against Sunnyvale nearly two decades ago, said exclusionary zoning is the last legal form of discrimination.

“You can’t legally say ‘no Blacks’ in a population, but you can make zoning so that 75 percent of the people in the U.S. can’t live in your city,” he told a Dallas Morning News reporter more than a decade ago.

That’s just as true today, he said.

Mesquite’s history of housing issues

Housing affordability for low-income people has been an issue in Mesquite for many years. Since 2015, the city has received recommendations from contractors or its own staff about how to address its impediments to fair housing; such reports are required by cities that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In 2015, the city’s own report recommended increasing affordable housing production.

In 2020, another city report echoed the same concern: “the biggest problem regarding housing in [the] City of Mesquite is Cost Burden, affordable housing for small extremely low-to low-income families is the greatest specific need,” officials wrote.

Like other suburbs, Mesquite also has a history of excluding Section 8 renters, which resulted in landmark federal legislation: In 1985, seven Black women eligible for federal low-income housing assistance sued Mesquite over its refusal to let the Dallas Housing Authority administer vouchers in the city. Their suit argued that Mesquite’s actions were a violation of civil rights laws that prohibit racial discrimination in housing.

Lawyers later included HUD, the city of Dallas and several other suburbs in the suit. The landmark case — now known as Walker vs. HUD — is credited with pushing North Texas to begin desegregating. Between 1980 and 1990 — the end of the decade when Mesquite began accepting housing vouchers — the city’s Black population increased by more than 1400%, according to an archived report from the city library.

Low-income renters of color in Mesquite still struggle to find affordable, decent and safe housing. More than three-quarters of the Mesquite Housing Division’s voucher-holders are Black, according to a 2020 city report.

Renters have raised the issue to authorities, too: HUD’s Fort Worth regional office received 37 complaints about Mesquite from 2010-2014, according to a 2015 report. The News has filed an open records request to obtain these records and more recent ones.

Since the ‘80s, Mesquite can no longer legally exclude voucher recipients. But for nearly a decade, the city has not supported developers’ bids to build reduced-rent housing. It’s been more than five years since they’ve approved apartments — despite population growth and a documented, decades-old affordable housing shortage.

If North Texas is going to provide fair access to housing for all people, Jargowsky says, the state needs to intervene.

“We need to have a regional approach to affordable housing,” Jargowsky said. “Everybody has to play along. No one city is going to be asked to do it all — and we need to reduce racial and economic segregation, which is a real stain on our history.”

Information from the Dallas Morning News archives was used in this report.

Digital archivist Jennifer Brancato contributed to this report.