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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Texans are worried about how much of their income they're spending on housing, according to a poll by nonpartisan, nonprofit leadership organization The Texas Lyceum.
Nearly half of residents (48 percent) of the Lone Star State surveyed by the organization for their annual poll said that their family economic situation has worsened over the past year, with nearly two-thirds (63 percent) mentioning that they're spending too much on housing.
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The increase over the past four years, which includes the pandemic-era housing boom and the ensuing price correction, has been steady and consistent. In 2020, 44 percent of Texans told The Texas Lyceum they were spending too much on housing; in 2022, the share of residents who said the same was 50 percent; in 2023, it rose to 55 percent.
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"The scope of economic distress in Texas is both widespread and historically troubling," Joshua Blank, Ph.D, the research director of The Texas Lyceum, said in a statement. "While inflation has increased the cost of nearly everything, the steady increase in housing costs has clearly put a major strain on most Texas households."
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The Texas Lyceum conducted the poll by telephone among a sample population of 1,200 Texans between April 12 and 21. The overall margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.83 percentage points, with a larger margin of error for sub-samples.
Newsweek contacted The Texas Lyceum for comment by email on Thursday morning.
As of April, the median sale price of a home in Texas was $352,400, up 1.4 percent from a year earlier, according to Redfin. While Texas has been building more homes than most of the rest of the country in the past few years, significantly increasing its inventory, demand still outpaces supply—a factor that's kept prices high.
According to Redfin data, 16 percent of homes in the Texas market were sold above list price in April, down 3.4 percent from a year earlier. Only 33 percent of homes had price drops, up from 25 percent in April 2023.
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The burden of housing seems to be weighing on homeowners and renters, though renters are the worst impacted. Some 57 percent of homeowners said they're spending too much of their income on housing, while the share of renters who said the same was a staggering 73 percent.
The median rent for all bedroom and property types in Texas, according to Zillow, is currently $1,950—8 percent lower than the national median.
The negative outlook that Texans have on their financial situations has turned into pessimism about the future for their families. Some 37 percent of residents polled by the Texas Lyceum said they expect their children to be worse off economically compared to themselves.
Some 63 percent of Texans said the country is on the wrong track, largely unchanged from the poll results obtained in 2020. Some 14 percent of residents raised inflation as one of the most important issues facing the country, while 13 percent mentioned the economy.
At the state level, the concerns topping the list of the most important problems facing Texas were immigration (15 percent) and border security (14 percent), followed by inflation (9 percent) and the economy (8 percent).
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