After seeing its population grow by 97,000 between July 2020 and 2021, the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex is now home to nearly 8 million people, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And it’s getting increasingly harder to adequately and affordably house the growing population. The problem isn’t new, just exacerbated, and it’s hardly unique to DFW. But when a market experiences the rate of population growth that the metroplex has over the last decade, the question of how much housing inventory exists that’s financially feasible for the average resident to rent or own gets thrust under the microscope. Of course, there’s a major difference between housing that’s affordable and affordable housing. The former is something of an arbitrary concept, whereas the latter carries a precise legal and regulatory definition. But the socioeconomic issue embodied within the two is largely the same. General Barriers A recent report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition ranked Texas — once heralded as the land of infinite land — as the sixth-worst state in terms of availability of rental housing for low-income households. This finding runs counter to Texas’ longstanding reputation as a state with an affordable cost of living, but …
