Austin: HOME Initiative (Phases 1 & 2)

HOME stands for Home Options for Middle-income Empowerment. It is a package of changes to Austin's land development code that lets more homes be built on lots that the city had long reserved for a single house. The goal stated by the city and its supporters was to add housing supply and make ownership more reachable for households earning around the middle of the local income range (source).

The reform arrived in two parts. The first part, adopted in December 2023, allows up to three housing units on a typical single-family lot. The second part, adopted in May 2024, cut the minimum amount of land needed to build a house. Together these two changes reversed decades of rules that, in practice, allowed only one detached house per lot across most of the city. For anyone studying how North American cities are loosening single-family zoning, Austin is one of the clearest test cases, because it changed two different levers at once and then published data on what each one produced.

HOME did not appear out of nowhere. Austin spent roughly eight years and more than ten million dollars trying to modernize its land development code before HOME, and most of that effort collapsed (source). The best-known attempt was called CodeNEXT, a full rewrite of the city's zoning rules that was scrapped in 2018 after city leaders could not agree on it (source).

The city tried again with a fresh code rewrite, but a group of homeowners led by Frances Acuña sued after the council took its second of three adoption votes in March 2020 (source). A Travis County judge, Jan Soifer, ruled that the city had violated property owners' procedural rights by not telling them they had a right to formally protest the zoning changes, and in March 2022 the Texas 14th Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, effectively killing the rewrite (source). HOME was the council's narrower, more targeted answer after the big rewrites failed: rather than rewrite the whole code, it changed a small number of specific rules.

The Austin City Council adopted Phase 1 of HOME on December 7, 2023, by a vote of 9 to 2 (source). The change allows up to three housing units, including tiny homes, on a single-family lot in the SF-1, SF-2, and SF-3 zoning districts (source). Before this, those districts generally permitted one house, sometimes with a second small unit.

Phase 1 also removed the old limit on how many unrelated adults could live together in one home (source), and it included a bonus program meant to encourage owners to keep an existing house on the lot rather than tear it down (source). The city began accepting development applications under Phase 1 on February 5, 2024 (source). The two-month gap between adoption and the first applications gave staff time to set up the permitting process. The important point is that Phase 1 raised the number of homes allowed per lot without forcing owners to divide their land into separate legal parcels.

Phase 2 followed on May 16, 2024, again by a 9 to 2 vote, with council members Mackenzie Kelly and Alison Alter opposed (source). This part attacked a different lever. Instead of changing how many homes can sit on a lot, it changed how small a lot can be. The minimum residential lot size dropped from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 square feet for a single home (source). That is a cut of roughly two-thirds.

This was a genuinely historic move. The 5,750-square-foot rule had been Austin's standard since 1946, so Phase 2 marked the first time in about 80 years that the city lowered the amount of land needed to build a single house (source). The city opened applications under the smaller-lot rules in mid-August 2024 (source). In theory, a smaller minimum lot size lets an owner split one large lot into several small parcels, each with its own house that can be sold separately, which is closer to a traditional rowhouse or cottage-court pattern.

One year in, the gap between the two phases was striking. The city's first-year review covered building activity from February 2024 through early February 2025 (source). Under Phase 1, the city approved building applications for 436 housing units in duplexes and two- or three-unit projects, plus another 148 single-family applications that were identified as infill projects (source).

Under Phase 2's small-lot rules, the response was tiny: just eight applications, made up of two requests to subdivide property and six building permits (source). In other words, almost all of the early activity came from the rule that lets owners add units to a lot they keep whole, and almost none came from the rule that lets them carve a lot into smaller saleable pieces. The review pointed to Austin's complicated process for reviewing lot subdivisions as a likely reason the smaller-lot path saw so little use (source). The lesson is that changing a number in the code is not enough on its own; the process attached to that number decides whether builders actually use it.

It is easy to find confused claims that a court struck down HOME. That is not accurate, and the distinction matters. In an order dated December 8, 2023, District Judge Jessica Mangrum voided three separate 2022 zoning ordinances, finding the city had not given property owners the written notice and protest rights that state law requires (source). Those ordinances were the Vertical Mixed Use 2 rules, the rule allowing housing in commercial zones, and the compatibility rules. This case, Acuña v. City of Austin, did not void HOME (source).

HOME's real legal setbacks came from a different direction: private deed restrictions, which are limits written into a neighborhood's property records by past owners and developers. In the leading case, four homeowners in the Elmwood Estates subdivision in South Austin fought a developer, Cliffhanger Development, that wanted to use HOME to put eight units where the neighborhood's 1953 deed restrictions allowed only two homes per lot (source). Travis County District Judge Madeleine Connor ruled for the homeowners, holding that the private deed restrictions still bound the property despite HOME (source). So the correct picture is this: HOME itself was never voided by a court; instead, courts confirmed that older private covenants can override HOME's density on the specific lots those covenants cover. As of the first-year review in November 2025, both phases of HOME remained in effect (source).

HOME has not satisfied everyone, and the early data exposes its limits. Two of the eleven council members voted against each phase (source), and opponents have raised concerns about the effect on existing neighborhoods. The first-year review itself was candid that the cost and displacement effects of the new housing were not yet clear (source). The deed-restriction lawsuits showed another limit: where neighborhoods can afford to litigate, private covenants can block HOME lot by lot, and not every neighborhood can afford that fight (source). The near-total lack of uptake on the small-lot path, eight applications against hundreds of units, is the plainest limit of all: a rule that builders find too slow or costly to use produces little housing no matter how bold it looks on paper (source).

British Columbia pulled a similar lever at almost the same time, but with an important difference in design. BC's Bill 44, the Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing legislation passed in late 2023, requires local governments in communities with more than 5,000 people to allow more homes on lots that were previously single-family or duplex (source). The unit counts depend on lot size: up to three units on lots under 280 square metres, up to four on lots of 280 square metres or more, and up to six on qualifying lots near frequent transit (source). Local governments had to update their bylaws by June 30, 2024 to comply (source).

The contrast is instructive. Both Austin and BC raised the number of homes allowed per lot, and both relied on that unit-count lever. But Austin went further by also cutting its minimum lot size in Phase 2, letting owners split land into smaller saleable parcels. BC's Bill 44, by comparison, leans on the unit-count lever and ties higher counts to lot size and transit access rather than primarily on shrinking the minimum lot. Austin's first year offers a warning for BC: the unit-count rule that lets owners add homes to a lot they keep whole produced almost all of the early housing (436 units), while the harder path of subdividing land produced almost none (8 applications) (source). For BC owners and builders weighing a small-scale multi-unit project, the takeaway is that the simplest path, adding units to an existing lot, is the one most likely to clear permitting quickly, while anything that requires subdividing land deserves a close look at local process before counting on it.