Experts Join Realtor.com at SXSW To Share Solutions on Boosting Housing Supply

Realtor.com® brought housing issues to the forefront at this year’s South by Southwest festival, by hosting a number of panels featuring industry leaders, policy experts, and government officials to share their thoughts on the housing crisis.

The showcase series of events, titled Let America Build, focused on ideas and solutions for expanding home construction and boosting supply, in order to alleviate the housing shortage.

It follows a new report from the Realtor.com economic research team revealing that the nation has a shortfall of nearly 4 million housing units, a gap that will take more than seven years to fill at the current construction pace. 

In wide-ranging panel discussions on Saturday and Monday, the invited experts shared their thoughts on how to empower homebuilders, improve zoning and permitting rules, and make strides in solving the housing crisis.

Here’s what the experts said at the Realtor.com panel discussions at SXSW in Austin, TX:

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson: “People want to be here. People want to move here. They want to stay here. If we don’t have the housing supply, they will go elsewhere, or they won’t come here in the first place, because they know they’re not going to be able to stay.”

“We want generational equity. We want generational fairness, and we want people. We want to be a complete city. We want everyone and anyone to be able to stay here and bring their unique flavor to this town.”

Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale: “High home prices, high rental prices, a shortage of homes on the market for sale means that people decide not to strike out on their own, so they continue to live with their parents, or they take on roommates instead of going out on their own.”

“This is not a new problem, but it is one that I think it’s important that we update and have a really, really current take on how big the problem is.”

Mary K. Cunningham, senior vice president of research management and program development at the Urban Institute: “We make it too hard to build. Across the country, in communities, it is too hard to build, it takes too long, it costs too much, it is hard to build different types of housing.”

“We need a comprehensive national housing strategy that really lays out what is the plan for addressing this big gap.”

“We are at the cutting edge of a lot of different technologies. I mean, I think manufactured housing, prefabricated housing, all of that has come a really long way, and we need to think about what it takes to scale it.”

Kendall E. Bonner, vice president of industry relations and strategic partnerships at eXp Realty: “I think about assumable mortgages. It’s an underutilized opportunity to get the market moving. And then the second thing that I have been thinking about for probably about a year now is mortgage portability. Like, what if you could just port your mortgage from one house to the next? You’d see more people potentially move, which would allow, again, this unlocking of inventory.”

Sara Bronin, founder of The Zoning Atlas and Cornell professor: “The average code in the country is 139 pages. In the Denver and Phoenix metros, the average number of pages is over 250. Boston’s code is over 3,500 pages.”

“If you think of zoning codes as a proxy, pages as a proxy for amount of regulation, I think you do see some correlations between the ability of somebody to build something efficiently and the number of pages of zoning codes.”

“Texas is somewhat unique in that as a state, we started in the Zoning Atlas logging the 1,500 jurisdictions in the state of Texas, and we’re finding that a large number of them don’t have zoning. Houston is the only large American city that doesn’t have zoning.”

Felicity Maxwell, Aura board member and Austin planning commissioner: “We should absolutely view housing as a spectrum. We have folks who are at the lower end of income, and they do need financial subsidies. … Those folks will never be supported by market rents.”

“Zoning is not just about housing. It’s never just about housing; it’s how we build and interact with our cities, and we have to be better and smarter about how we do it.”

Natasha Harper-Madison, Austin city councilmember for District 1 and chair of the Housing and Planning Committee: “Municipal policy moves glacially. It’s slow, but I also recognize it’s slow on purpose. You have to be pretty deliberate when you’re implementing policy that exists in perpetuity.”

“We have to be open to trying everything, and not be afraid to use our flood plain land for agriculture, and not be afraid to just open the doors wide open.”

“I brought an item forward for consideration. It’s agricultural-centered housing development. So think, working farm in the center of a housing development. … I call it rogue zoning. … You can have trailers. You can have manufactured homes. You can have multifamily. You can have single-family, whatever you want, just rogue zoning in this particular area, this designated area, to see how it works.”

“Affordability all comes down to people not making enough money, period. We don’t have enough subsidies. We won’t have enough subsidies. There aren’t enough subsidies.”

Joel Berner, Realtor.com senior economist: “Texas was the No. 1 state in 2024 for permitted new housing units, accounting for 15% of the total units permitted across the country despite having just 9% of the country’s population.”

“Fifty-one percent of Texans make less than $75,000 a year, but just 16% of the for-sale housing inventory is affordable to that income level.”

Jared Kuhn, vice president at 3D printing homebuilder ICON: “We can print a home a lot faster and get a home built faster than a traditional homebuilder. We can print a 2,000-square-foot home in about seven days. And then it takes some other 60 to 90 days to do the rest of the home. So we’re delivering homes in four to five months right now.”

“There’s a crisis in housing, and I’m driven by it. … There’s a lot of ways that we as people can get involved in solving the housing crisis. And when you get involved, you create hope for yourself and others. So you can’t just sit back, let that happen. You got to get involved.”

John Ho, CEO of Landsea Homes: “At the local level, there needs to be more … recognition that we need to provide housing, particularly at this entry-level segment. We have to provide more of it. So we need less regulation, we need less costly fees, to encourage us to do that, and to keep the prices more at an attainable level.”

“A lot of countries have uniform building codes, and it’s very helpful. It really reduces cost, because [in the U.S.] how I build in one city versus how I build in the next city can be very different based on that local building code or what that city planning department wants from us. And so every home is a custom home now, almost. So, yeah, go back to the architects. You’ve got to go back to your engineers. You’ve got to redesign things. That’s very costly.”

Full videos of the SXSW panels hosted by Realtor.com are available for viewing here and here.