How will McKinney seek to solve its affordable housing problem?

As demand to live in Collin County increases, affordable housing efforts are struggling to keep up.

Half a dozen years ago, Nick Walsh remembers residents lining up at a McKinney City Council meeting to express staunch opposition to an apartment building intended to provide an affordable place for the city’s growing workforce to live.

“By one vote, we made it through City Council after over an hour of debate and testimony,” said Walsh, vice president of development at The NRP Group, a multifamily affordable housing development firm. The project received more than 100 letters of opposition.

When it came to affordable housing, Walsh said “there just wasn't this understanding at the time.”

At McKinney’s first affordable housing summit Monday, he said it’s clear the attitude has changed. Around 300 attendees gathered in Collin County to discuss how to improve affordable housing in the fast-growing area where housing is in high demand.

Like cities across North Texas, McKinney has struggled to meet that demand, especially for residents who earn below the median annual household income of around $124,000. Leaders emphasized Monday the need to collaborate with policymakers, innovators, developers and employers to help neighbors welcome growth sustainably and equitably.

“If we want to have a thriving community,” Walsh said, “it needs to be a community that everyone can be a part of.”

Rhonda Hutchison, a mortgage broker owner, attended the summit and said she’s glad the city has expanded its view on affordable housing since she moved to McKinney in 2014.

“Now they're seeing it as a widespread economic condition, instead of just a small minority … that prior, they didn't feel like they belonged here,” she said. “They're seeing [that] it's not just a small problem.”

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A crisis in affordable housing

Affordable housing is housing on which a resident is spending no more than 30% of their income. In McKinney, that means a household spending more than $3,106 per month on housing is considered cost-burdened, according to Margaret Li, the housing and community development director for the city of McKinney.

Li said for households earning less than six figures, which is about 40% of the city’s population, average rents and mortgages are unaffordable in McKinney. There was also a significant increase in the number of cost-burdened households between 2015 and 2023, she said.

“This limits their ability to afford other essentials like health care and education,” Li said. “Many of our essential workers in retail, food or health services cannot afford to rent in McKinney.”

McKinney Front Porch, an initiative of the McKinney Community Development Corporation, convened hundreds of leaders across private and public sectors Monday who “have an important role to play” in tackling the affordable housing issue, Li said.

Cullum Clark, an economist and director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative, told attendees housing will determine the county’s growth, shape its communities and powerfully influence its future.

“Here in North Texas, affordability has been … hands down our most important competitive advantage,” he said. “But our edge relative to a lot of the places we compete with has been shrinking.”

For Collin County to sustain projected  growth, “a lot of things need to occur that aren't yet planned for,” he said, including significant changes in the housing environment.

Stubborn roadblocks

Funding, acquiring land, community support and bureaucratic red tape can pose challenges to providing affordable housing, developers, officials and community leaders said Monday.

For Kim Parker, executive director of development at property investment company Palladium USA International, funding is the biggest problem. While McKinney has supported projects and incentives, “that’s just not enough,” Parker said.

When employers consider coming to the city, Parker said they should consider how to build the housing infrastructure to be successful.

Kathryn McGill of Halyard Philanthropy Advisors said sourcing the land for a project can sometimes be the toughest part, and takes “digging and collaboration and a lot of advocacy.”

James Craig, president of Craig International, said the No. 1 need to support affordable housing projects is a supportive and educated community that doesn't have a “not in my backyard mentality.”

Walsh, of The NRP Group, said religious institutions are helping counter that mentality with a “Yes in God’s Backyard” mindset that promotes affordable housing development.

Navigating levels of approval and regulation can be complicated and costly, Walsh said.

“Whenever possible, if we can align the interest of our local and our state level and our federal level, if we can remove that red tape, we can actually have better outcomes for everyone,” he said in a panel discussion Monday.

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