By james art 
From the Texas Tribune:
Dallas – As the main urban areas of Texas are struggling with seamlessly free services, state legislators can facilitate the transformation of an empty office and commercial space into housing.
State Senator Bill Brian Hughes, a Republican in Minineola, would effectively allow the owners of property fighting into the largest cities in the country to transform this space into residences. The bill will prohibit cities and counties from demanding the owners of marking of office buildings and shopping property such as shopping malls and strip centers to go through a process of review if they want to add apartments or condominium.
The idea is among the list of proposals that state legislators draw to remove the barriers to the construction of housing and to stimulate housing opportunities to place a recess in the deep shortage of housing in Texas – a key engine at high prices and rentals of the state.
“It’s just a matter of looking at the housing staff that is also available to the growing demand, and the consideration of any option to expand these capabilities,” Hughes said in an interview. “The Lord does not make a new land.”
Few places in Texas have remained untouched by the growing housing expenditures of the state. More than half of the tenants of the country are “moistened by costs”, which means that they spend more than 30% of their income to maintain a roof over their heads, according to a recent analysis of the Joint Housing Center at Harvard University. Housing prices have outstripped income.
Hughes’s bill is part of a set of proposals that state legislators are considering allowing more homes to be built. Many of these proposals strive for the rules for the zoning of cities that limit what kinds of homes can be built and where. A growing set of research shows that allocating these rules can help cities add more homes and contain housing costs.
[Texas has a housing affordability crisis. Here’s how state lawmakers may tackle it in 2025.]
Some local employees are restless about the perspective of state legislators to cancel the rules for zoning the city by a blanket. In Austin’s suburbs in Georgetown, employees weigh the changes to the city’s development code to allow residential units for accessories and reduce the requirements for the size of the lot, said Mayor Josh Schroeder. These types of solutions, he said, must remain locally.
“Let’s do this at this macro level, which does not take into account the differences between Georgetown, Austin and Littlefield is not the way to deal with the use of the ground,” Schroeder said.
The rise of remote work against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic has grown in office vacancies in the main metropolitan regions of Texas. Employees in the largest cities in Texas have returned to the office at a higher rate than their peers in other major cities in the United States, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks office employment. However, the percentages of vacancies for office space in the main urban areas of the state remain above the levels before the pandemic.
As the offices stood up and the costs of housing erupted, home advocates, office landlords and politicians have increasingly watched conversions from office to housing to deal with many problems. Adding residences would help to break into the shortage of housing in the nation, they said. The renovation of lagging offices in residences would also retain these properties financially viable by transferring weaning and continuing to generate revenue from ownership tax for local authorities and school districts.
However, this is not a silver bullet. These conversions make up a small percentage of the country’s home construction. The office transformations to the residents have led to nearly 28,000 new residential units across the country since 2016, according to CBRE Group, real estate commercial services and an investment company. Of these, about 2400 are in Texas. Another 2,800 units are underway or in the work in Texas, out of about 38,000 across the country.
The transformation of offices into residences can often be complicated, according to developers and real estate experts. On the one hand, not every office building makes sense to be transformed into housing due to factors such as gloomy condominium plans and plumbing.
Zoning rules can also prevent office conversions to a Barrier Hughes is trying to cope.
The largest cities in Texas are inclined to automatically allow office buildings in the city center, where office vacancies are perhaps the most visible, to become apartments, according to an analysis of the Texas Tribune of the City Zoning Codes. Hughes’ proposal will unlock the same benefit to owners of office buildings outside the city center.
If it becomes a law, the owners of other types of buildings – including shopping buildings, shopping centers and warehouses – who want to reconstruct their space into apartments or condominium, will no longer have to go through the resonance process.
This process can be expensive and lengthy, saying that home and developers defenders – which leads to higher costs for the possible tenant if the builders do not deter they move forward with projects in the first place.
“When there is more expenses, it will eventually have to transfer to the resident,” said Jamie Jolie, who heads the real estate council based in Dallas real estate trading group.
The legislation will only apply in the counts with more than 420,000 inhabitants – 13 of the 254 district of the state – and municipalities within those counties that have more than 60,000 inhabitants.