A Theory of a City

On the thing that breaks our brains

Last week, I reflected on Dallas as the city that is allergic to answering the question “what is this all for?” A city where the only purpose of Dallas, according to Dallas, is more Dallas. It was weird and long and abstract and I quoted a lot of dead guys.

This week, I am going to attempt to answer that very same question. What is this all for? What’s the point of living in a city? What should we build here, if not toll roads and arts districts? Along the way, this will mean quoting at least one more dead guy, and at points, will become a full-throated defense of real estate developers.

If that sounds like a contradiction to last week, I understand. I hope I can show you how it is not.

Dallas’s Booster Myth is about building grand things for the sake of control or love of self. Our current housing crisis (we will discuss whether we should call it that) is about our having failed in building ordinary things for ordinary people. The strip mall down the street, the vacant lot next to my house, the new apartments someone proposed at a commercial intersection, there are thousands of projects out there smaller than a new toll road from which ordinary people would stand to benefit.

There is a reason we need to talk about building ordinary things. Housing has gotten more expensive, relative to people’s incomes. In 1965, the median U.S. home cost $21,500 while the median family earned $6,900, a ratio of roughly 3.1x income. As of 2025, the median home costs $416,900, which is now 5.0x the median household income of $83,150.

Those are the national figures. In Dallas, the pattern is even more stark. Over the same time period, according to Census data, the ratio has gone from 2.0x to 4.4x. The cost of housing in Dallas relative to incomes went up 120%, meaning it more than doubled, while nationwide it went up 60%.

The ratios are abstract. Here is the same fact at work in the life of a family. Last year, the average age at which mothers had their first child was twenty-eight. The median age of the first-time homebuyer last year was forty.

There is a reason homes are getting harder to afford here. We are not building enough of them. This is often hard to see, as when we tear down one house, the thing we build most often in its place is a larger and more expensive house. The reason for that is simple enough. The only thing you could build in that spot, on a majority of Dallas’s land, is another single-family home, one expensive enough to justify the demolition of another.

That policy, zoning, is a choice. As with all choices, it comes with tradeoffs. However, I submit those tradeoffs are going to be increasingly more expensive for all of us to live with as we ask a declining or stagnant population to foot the bill of running this place. The prescriptions or the sacrifices that we will propose instead when we could have just built housing will start to get sillier, more expensive, or more painful the longer we wait.

Further, it is a choice that is starting to defy the very purpose of living in a city at all.

The Third Rail

There are three reasons I am willing to grab this third rail with both hands and stand up for zoning changes (about as popular as root canals) and real estate developers (about as trusted as used car salesmen).

First, real estate, in all its forms, has an odd habit of breaking our brains. It leads us to say and do things we would never say or do about any other industry. There are good enough reasons for this, given it is a basic human need, but it’s also fair to mention that per Census data, 40 percent of Dallasites are real estate investors via their homes, who directly benefit from housing values when they go up.

Second, we have a genuine problem in this city with the cost of housing. We have a hard time talking honestly about it, given the weird politics in which housing lives. Everyone “wants” affordable housing¹, but no one wants their house to be worth less. We are going to keep having the wrong conversations until we are honest about this.

The third reason I will stand up for real estate developers, and perhaps the most important one as I decide on the right mix of anonymity and honesty with my readers — I am one. At least, I work for one. (I suppose working at a farm makes you a farmer. But, working at a hospital does not make you a doctor. In this instance, I think the former rule fits. We’ll go with it, I am a real estate developer.)

My goal in writing this blog was to help advance an honest discussion about policy and politics that affect Dallas. Honesty here includes being open and transparent about my own intentions or biases. I want to say up front that it is more than fair to think I have a dog in this fight. It is also a topic, in my humble opinion, that I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about. Expertise is a two-edged sword.

The Thing That Breaks Our Brains

Starbucks, according to the quarterly SEC filings, has an operating margin in North America of about 22%. Southwest Airlines, conveniently for our example, has also averaged around 22%. D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in America for 24 consecutive years: 20 to 22%, depending on the quarter. These are their profit margins before interest, taxes, or depreciation. It is the cleanest measure of what they sold you, less the cost of the things they had to assemble to sell it to you.

Nobody organizes a town hall against Starbucks for earning a 22 percent margin on coffee. Nobody calls Southwest greedy for turning fuel and labor into a seat they sell for twenty two cents more than it cost them. We understand, in those cases, that a business takes inputs, transforms them, and sells the output at a markup. It is not in-and-of-itself evidence of exploitation. It is commerce. We participate in it all day without distress.

Then we get to real estate and something happens. Housing is different. It is not a latte or a flight to Phoenix. We all have to live somewhere. It is what Maslow’s pyramid would call a “physiological need.” That puts it on a list that includes air, food, and water. There is something, for lack of a better word, icky, about someone making money on housing.

Someone, unless that person is us.

We have all heard some version of the idea that housing is a great long-term investment, a path to long-term financial stability, or a major generator of wealth. These are all just abstract ways to think about selling your house for more than you paid for it (or paid to build it.) This is also what real estate developers do. The “ickiness” puts onto others a standard to which we do not equally hold ourselves.

The downside of this system, of constantly increasing home values, is that it is a zero-sum game. Homes were good investments because they were scarce. That fact was exactly as good for one group of people as it was bad for another. The house that you sell for more than you paid for it is a house that someone had to buy for more than they could have bought it for 10 or 20 years ago. It is no longer costing them 2.0x or 3.0x their income, it is now 4.0x or 5.5x their income. It is a home that the homeowner living it may not even be able to afford again today, and in a neighborhood their adult children could not afford to move into either.

How This Plays Out

Everybody wants affordable housing. No one wants their house to be worth less. These two facts are in constant and perpetual tension with one another. Our conversations about housing are not going to be honest until we admit that anything that appears to affect the value of homes is going to be a tough sell.

That seems to include, building more of them.

A developer files for a zoning case in Dallas. It may involve apartments. Five stories, maybe fewer. The neighbors show up at a town hall or a community meeting. They raise traffic, parking, height, shadows, or storm drainage, generally in good faith, as issues.

Less charitably, some of these changes, traffic for one, simply come with the territory of living in a city of a million people. I told you I would offer a theory of a city. Here is the simplest one I know: a city is how ordinary people afford a life none of us could buy alone. A city multiplies our access to civilization. It does not itself create a good life, but in the words of Aristotle: “exists for the sake of the good life.”² (I promised you: more dead guys.)

Living in the city means, guarantees even, you will interact with and be influenced by the people and the buildings around you. Schools, hospitals, arts and sports you would never have if you lived alone. The whole point of living close to other people is living close to other people. Maybe, not always for the better. But that is the bargain and it has been that way since Athens or Babylon. The good outweighs the bad. If not, we could have all moved to Oklahoma years ago.

Back at the zoning hearing, after the concerns about traffic or parking, someone approaches the microphone and finally says the word: greedy. The developer is greedy. Greed is bad. We learned this in Sunday school. The moral claim shuts down the conversation before it starts. The whole project is illegitimate because someone intends to profit from it.

For those of you who have avoided the “Greedy Developer” discourse

We spend twenty-three hours a day participating in markets where profits are the ordinary course of getting a cup of coffee brewed or a flight taking off. We spend the twenty-fourth hour at a zoning hearing pretending profit is the reason to never build anything again.

There is a real tension here, and it isn't anyone's fault individually. Most of us own our homes chiefly because we want to live in them, but also in part because we hope they will grow in value. When something new is proposed down the street, it is genuinely challenging to separate what we think about the project from what we worry it might do to the largest asset most of us will ever own. That's not a character flaw. It is an incentive of the system that has been set up, and it is why these conversations are so hard to have honestly.

However, when we protest new development, some of what we are asking for is simply to not be burdened with the cost of living in a city. We want the benefits of their ever-appreciating home values near the hospitals and the jobs, without the chance that anything else nearby could ever mess it up. Further, it is the same double-standard at play again, developers are greedy for selling homes for more than it cost to build, but it’s fine when I do it.

Here is the other problem with the greedy argument. I don't think the people saying it actually believe it. I do not think an organized bloc of Dallas homeowners recently became Marxists and now believe the state should seize the means of housing production. If the same building were proposed by a nonprofit, most of the same people would still show up to oppose it. The claim isn't really about profit at all.

What’s In a Name?

A word you hear often about the shortage of homes that the average person can afford, is “crisis.” This term is not without its detractors. This point came up this month during a housing hearing at Dallas City Council. Councilwoman Cara ‘14-1’ Mendelsohn asked, "So, if we've added all of these units and we have vacancy and we're not adding population, why do you think we're calling it a housing crisis?"

There is not a housing crisis in the way that, during COVID, there was a ventilator crisis. Housing is not physically absent. Homes exist. D.R. Horton built 85,000 of them nationwide last year. Further, vacant units exist. The crisis is not that housing has disappeared. The issue is just that it costs too much.

Still, let’s take vacant apartments and a flat population as good faith objections. To be fair, they both certainly seem like the kind of evidence you’d look for to determine the existence of a crisis.

Food on the shelves at Tom Thumb does not tell you anything about what percent of people in Dallas will have a hard time paying for groceries this month. A vacant one-bedroom listed online for even an “affordable rent” of $1,000 a month is a data point about supply. It doesn’t tell you anything about demand. At most, it proves that nobody who can pay $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom needed that specific unit yet this week.

You could only conclude the existence of that vacant apartment means there isn’t a problem with affordability if your standard is that there should be zero. That is not what the “crisis” has ever contended. There can be shortages and issues with affordability long before the shelves are empty. Have you bought gas recently?

Again, our rising housing costs are an issue with who can afford to live here, not whether anyone can. All housing is affordable to someone. We have not done a good enough job to keep that slice of the pie of people who could call Dallas home growing, or even just keep it as wide as when we got here.

Second, Dallas’s population has been roughly flat for a decade (the city proper.) The 2020 Census found the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, meanwhile, added about 1.2 million people over the same period. If you are skeptical that housing scarcity is the story, this is the fact you reach for. Why does Dallas need more homes if nobody new is coming?

Think about that harder again for a second. The supposed evidence that we do not need more housing, is that for ten straight years, 1.2 million people, two Southwest Boeing 737s per day every day for 3,650 days, moved to North Texas, and not a single one of them wanted to live in Dallas. Could that, perhaps, have been because we had not built them a place to live?

Population is not an input. It is an output.

When Dallas did not build the homes a young family could afford, that young family did not stop existing. They are going to live somewhere. That is why D.R. Horton builds in Prosper and Anna and Howe and Van Alstyne, and in towns you have not heard of or been to, and why the people who buy those homes tell people they live in “Dallas” when they travel. The land in those towns is cheap enough to make the numbers work. The land inside Dallas, closer to the jobs and hospitals and schools and arts and sports that make this place worth living in, is more expensive because proximity to those things is valuable. We have zoned most of it in a way that prevents more of the kinds of housing that would bring the per-unit cost down.

The second piece of this, and it is the one that contributes to the greedy developer narrative, is the housing Dallas has actually been building, instead of more. Walk through North Dallas or North Oak Cliff or Lakewood and you will find the pattern. A 1950s ranch house on a 10,000 square foot lot gets torn down. In its place goes up a 4,500-square-foot “modern farmhouse.” Asking price: $1.8 million. Maybe more. (Probably more.)

One house came down. One house went up. The city's permit numbers show we built a house. The household that moved in makes three or four times what the last one did. The family that would have lived there a generation ago is now in Celina.

That is not supply keeping up with demand. That is one-for-one replacement, a filtering out, of a median family with a top-decile family, block by block across our city. At a neighborhood level, we call this gentrification. However, there is almost no neighborhood in Dallas in which we are not seeing this effect. We are slowly filtering out the generation of people who could afford the last Dallas with the people who can afford the new one.

That is why our population is flat. Dallas could have absorbed a lot more of the 1.2 million people that moved to the Metroplex over the last decade. We probably did, to some degree. We just also priced out exactly that many more.

Change is Coming

Dallas did not get more expensive by accident. We wrote the rules. We showed up at the hearings to defend the rules. The city we have is the city we asked for.

The Dallas Development Code, which includes zoning, is being rewritten for the first time since the mid-1980s. The draft is expected to go before City Council in 2027. Depending on where it ends up, it may recommend allowing accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and triplexes in more districts where currently only single family homes are permitted. In some neighborhoods, it may allow dividing lots to allow two homes where one used to be. The rewrite would also likely create transit-oriented development zones around DART stations and along existing commercial corridors.

The new houses, the density, will not be the point. Building things is not an end unto itself. That is what the Boosters got wrong. That is what urbanism in some of its modern forms gets wrong. I am proposing an urbanism that is 2,400 years old and simply asks, “does this place help people pursue a good life?”

Townhall meetings for the zoning changes have already started. A vote is coming, though it is well over a year out. People will have opinions. They will claim Dallas is ending single-family zoning. That we are voting to turn our beloved city into… Houston.

They will claim they must preserve their neighborhood. I fear a neighborhood that cannot house the children of the people who already live in it is not preserving anything worth preserving.

I gave you a theory of a city. It is not a complicated one. Our lives are all better for living closer to one another. The proximity is a feature, not a bug. Whatever your version of the “good life” is, I cannot pick it for you, but it is made easier by living near other people that are striving for their version of it also.

Millions of people moved to Dallas and their lives were, or are, better for it. We did not build that. We inherited it. It is not ours to do with as we please. It is neither ours to pull up the ladder behind us, nor deny the next million the same. This was a city ordinary people could live in.

We are not going to leave the next generation a city they can afford to live in. That is not a line. I believe it.

Dallas’s zoning code is going to change. It is going to be okay. Things probably are not going to change as much as you think. Someone in Dallas already lives next to a building taller or denser than the one you are worried about. Their home values probably went up because of it.

Everybody wants affordable housing. Nobody wants their house to be worth less. Next time you go to the zoning hearing, just be honest about the latter. We inherited a city ordinary people could afford to build good lives in. The only question is whether we’ll lock the gate behind us.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

Photo by Slava Keyzman on Unsplash

1. This is not just vibes. The 2024 City of Dallas Community survey found that “access to affordable, quality housing” was the single most important community characteristic residents wanted the city to address.

2. Aristotle’s Politics, Book III, the full quote is: “the polis [city] comes into being for the sake of life, but exists for the sake of the good life.”