Harris County homeownership falls, housing affordability worries grow
Harris County lost 19,000 owner-occupied households as insurance bills jumped 17%, deepening fears that longtime residents are being priced out of ownership.
Homeownership slipped again in Harris County as insurance bills climbed, rents stayed high and more households found the monthly math harder to make work. Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research said the county lost about 19,000 owner-occupied households, a 1.9% decline, while Houston lost about 7,750 Black-homeowner households, a 5.4% drop.
The decline was the largest in Harris County since 2010 and the sharpest recorded by the institute since it began annual tracking in 2005. Kinder researcher Stephen Averill Sherman said the losses were larger than the worst declines during the Great Recession, a sign that the region’s housing squeeze is being driven by deeper structural pressures rather than one bad year.
The strain is showing up on both sides of the market. More than half of renters are cost-burdened, at 52.6% in Houston and 51.2% in Harris County, meaning housing takes up too much of the household budget. Nearly one-quarter of homeowners are also cost-burdened, including 24.4% in Harris County and 23.9% in Houston. Kinder’s abstract says the region is facing an escalating affordability crisis driven by stagnant wages, persistent inflation and rising housing costs, and that many families are being forced to choose between housing and basic needs like food or health care.
Insurance is making ownership even more expensive. Homeowners’ premiums rose 17% in Harris County in one year to $2,303 and 13% in Houston to $2,166. The report also says roughly 1 in 4 housing units in Houston sit in a floodplain under preliminary FEMA maps, a reminder that long-term risk is feeding the cost of staying in place.
The pressure is not easing through new construction alone. Harris County added more than 30,000 multifamily units, outpacing single-family construction, and most of the new building was in the suburbs or exurbs. Kinder warned that cheaper homes farther from jobs, grocery stores and transit can erase some of the savings once transportation costs are added in. Eviction filings remained elevated in 2024, averaging 1 filing per 10 households countywide and more than 1 per 5 rental households in some areas beyond Beltway 8.
The broader trend has been building for years. Kinder’s 2024 report said median home sales prices in 2023 reached $315,000 in Harris County and $335,000 in Houston, while the affordability gap since 2018 had grown 275% in Harris County and 54% in Houston. It also found home prices rose 43% from 2018 to 2023 while household purchasing power rose just 1.2%, a gap that continues to push first-time buyers and longtime residents toward permanent renting.
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