"It’s hard to find a more American place than Texas, and nowhere says Texas more than Dallas. Dallas was one of the most popular soap operas in 1980s America, the Dallas Cowboys are known as “America’s Team,” and the city is home to a whole slew of American business titans, including American Airlines, AT&T, and Texas Instruments. Alongside its culture and prosperity, however, what long made Dallas feel like the epitome of Americana is that it was also a place where homeownership stayed attainable — even after the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2011, the median home price in DFW was $149,900, and the income of the median DFW household was roughly double the income required to qualify for a mortgage to buy a median-priced house. That’s good enough on its own, but the median ratios actually understate how affordable the DFW metroplex was in the early 2010s. If we dig into the data, we find that lots of houses were selling at the far low end of the price distribution between 2010 and 2015 — with around one-in-five homes going for less than $99,000 in the first few years of the decade, and anywhere between 5% and 15% going for less than $69,000.3 Dallas was truly a place where the American dream of homeownership was alive and well — a place where families that worked hard, lived frugally, and played by the rules could buy a house to call their own within their means.
That’s no longer true. As of 2024, the median DFW home price hovered at a little over $440,000, a nearly three-fold jump from its 2011 level. Now, the income of the median DFW household is barely enough to qualify for a loan to buy a median-priced house in the Metroplex, even for people who can make a 25% down payment, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-big-homebuilders
Let the birthrate hit the floor 
