Clay Pulliam, partner in Troutman Pepper Locke’s Real Estate Practice Group, was quoted in the July 13, 2025 Newsweek article, “Texas Housing Market To Change in September: What To Know.”

“By removing these barriers for the repurposing of these vacant and underutilized properties, the legislature has opened the door to a significant opportunity for developers to meet the ever-growing housing needs in Texas,” Clay B. Pulliam, partner at Dallas-based law firm Troutman Pepper Locke, wrote in a recent report assessing the bill.

While Pulliam says that the bill does “an admirable job of addressing the bottlenecks and administrative burden of converting properties to residential uses,” he warned that the legislation might have some unintended consequences.

“Zoning ordinances are often cumbersome and sometimes antiquated, but the framework that these ordinances provide gives some degree of certainty to property owners, residents and the municipalities themselves,” he said.

“For example, no consideration has been given to the impact on public schools when these additional projects result in an influx of students. Will dispensing with the need for traffic studies or traffic mitigation measures create more congestion? Developers who have invested heavily in entitling their multifamily projects must now compete with developers who can skip that entire process. Will owners of existing multifamily or mixed-use projects be at a disadvantage to those who can now bypass barriers to entry quickly and without cost?” he asked.

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