The Zoning Veto Texas Took Away: HB 24, One Year In

Seven of eleven San Antonio council members voted to approve Vista Park, an OCI Development apartment project pitched as the city's first subsidized housing with free onsite pre-K, in September 2024. The rezoning failed anyway. Seven is a clear majority of an eleven-member council. It is not nine.

Neighboring property owners had filed a protest petition against the rezoning, the city verified it, and the approval threshold stopped being a majority. Mayor Ron Nirenberg, asked about the rule afterward: "I certainly would support the elimination of the supermajority rule. As it has been applied, [it] is an artifact of an era of exclusionary land use and redlining."

That arithmetic changed on September 1, 2025. HB 24 raised the ownership share needed to file a protest against a housing rezoning from 20 percent to 60 percent, and dropped the override from three-fourths of the council to a simple majority.

A year later there's a real before-and-after. In August 2026, twenty-nine Travis Heights property owners filed a petition against a 64-unit income-restricted building and it didn't clear the new bar. Council approved the rezoning unanimously.

The part most coverage skipped is the part practitioners have to model. The new threshold is not a residential-versus-commercial switch. It's a two-part test, and a rezoning has to pass both halves to get the easier bar.

It has to allow more residential development than the existing zoning does, and it can't add commercial or industrial use beyond ground-floor space capped at 35 percent of the overall development. Fail either half and the rezoning runs on 20 percent and three-fourths, exactly as it would have in 2024. Entitlement risk on a Texas rezoning now depends on what the tract is being rezoned into, down to the floor plan.

What a valid petition actually is

Until September 2025 the mechanism lived in Texas Local Government Code § 211.006. Owners of 20 percent of the land area within 200 feet of the tract proposed for rezoning could file a written protest before the council voted. The city verified the signatures against ownership records. If the petition was valid, the ordinance could only pass by a three-fourths vote of all council members.

Austin codifies the same thing at City Code § 25-2-284, "Protest of Proposed Zoning Change." Staff calls it petition rights. Everyone else calls it the valid petition.

Three-fourths of Austin's eleven-member council is 8.25, which rounds up to nine. Four council members, under a valid petition, could stop a rezoning that seven of their colleagues supported.

San Antonio's council is also eleven. Same math, same wall.

The wall didn't have to be hit to work. In 2020, a developer partnering with Austin Habitat for Humanity proposed 33 homes in Montopolis, seventeen of them reserved for income-qualified buyers, on land proposed for SF-6. Neighbors filed a petition.

Four council members signaled they wouldn't supply the ninth vote, and the applicant withdrew rather than take a losing vote. The project didn't lose. It never got to try.

Salim Furth of the Mercatus Center told Governing how the rule worked before anyone filed anything: the petition "became an implicit threat." That is the version that never shows up in council minutes. A neighborhood association mentions petition rights at a community meeting, the applicant reprograms, and no petition is ever filed.

Twenty-one states have protest-petition statutes. A Mercatus policy brief by Furth and Kelcie McKinley reports that a 2006 University of North Carolina survey found petitions filed against roughly 8 percent of the rezonings studied, cutting approval odds by 5 to 25 percentage points. Texas used the tool more heavily than any other state in the set, Austin above all.

The largest thing the petition ever stopped in Texas wasn't a project. In December 2019, nineteen Austin property owners sued the city over whether they could file protest petitions against the citywide Land Development Code rewrite, the first attempt to replace Austin's 1984 code. The city's position was that a wholesale rewrite didn't trigger individual protest rights.

The owners won at trial and again on appeal in March 2022, in City of Austin v. Acuña, No. 14-20-00356-CV. The rewrite never came back for a third reading.

What HB 24 changed, and what it moved

Gov. Abbott signed HB 24 on June 20, 2025. The bill took effect September 1, 2025, which means the version of the rule most practitioners still describe from memory has been dead for a year.

The citation moved too. HB 24 repealed § 211.006(d) and (f) outright, the subsections carrying the 20 percent trigger and the three-fourths override. It rebuilt the whole mechanism in a new section, § 211.0061.

The old numbers didn't disappear. They became the default track under § 211.0061(b)(1)–(2) and (d)(1), and a second, harder-to-reach track opened alongside them. Anyone citing § 211.006(d) in a memo written after September 2025 is citing a repealed subsection.

The second track is where the two numbers moved. A protest against a qualifying rezoning needs 60 percent of the land area in the 200-foot ring rather than 20. If it clears that bar, the council can still approve by simple majority.

What makes a rezoning qualify is § 211.0061(b)(3), and it's conjunctive. The change has to have "the effect of allowing more residential development than the existing zoning regulation or district boundary," and it must not have "the effect of allowing additional commercial or industrial uses unless the additional use is limited to the first floor of any residential development and does not exceed 35 percent of the overall development." Both conditions, or neither track.

One path to a valid petition didn't move at all. Owners of 20 percent of the land inside the tract under proposed change can still force a three-fourths vote under § 211.0061(b)(1), whether the rezoning adds housing or not. Protesters rarely own the land being rezoned, so the ring is still where the fight happens, but the 20-to-60 story is about the ring, not every route to a valid petition.

Both changes matter, and the trigger matters more. Raising it from 20 to 60 percent doesn't weaken the veto; it means most petitions never become valid at all.

Rep. Angelia Orr, the bill's author, put the rationale on the record in committee: the existing supermajority requirements "have historically blocked needed housing projects and worsen[ed] the housing shortages and affordability issues we have," and the new process "shifts decisionmaking back to elected officials and away from small opposition groups."

The opposition made the mirror-image argument. Barbara McArthur, one of the named plaintiffs in the Austin code-rewrite suit, testified against HB 24 at its March 2025 hearing: the bill "changes state law to allow cities to disregard residents," and expecting people to track zoning cases through newspaper notices is, in her word, tough.

She is the through-line on this story. Same person, one end of the timeline to the other.

Rowen Vale

A little under an acre in Travis Heights, one block off South Congress. The South Austin Christian Church property, redeveloped by O-SDA into 64 apartments, all of them income-restricted. More than half sit at or below 50 percent of area median income, roughly $67,200 for a family of four.

Two buildings, the taller one four stories after the developer cut it down from an earlier proposal. An onsite preschool for 25 to 40 children.

Twenty-nine neighboring property owners filed a protest petition. The objections were the standard set: scale, parking, traffic, and height out of character with the surrounding single-family blocks.

Anita Tschurr of the South River City Citizens Neighborhood Association: "You can imagine what that's going to look like out of somebody's backyard."

Filed in August 2025 instead of August 2026, that petition would have put the project at nine votes. A residential redevelopment with no commercial component clears both halves of § 211.0061(b)(3) without anyone having to think about it. The twenty-nine owners needed 60 percent of the land in the 200-foot ring.

They didn't hold it. There was no supermajority to reach because there was no valid petition.

Council approved it unanimously. Robin Stallings, the church's treasurer, credited HB 24 for the outcome and predicted the neighbors would come around and find the block "turned into a little bit better place."

Council Member Zohaib Qadri framed it as an access question, saying residents "should be able to" have "the same Austin experiences" regardless of income. Qadri also noted the current council would probably have approved the project either way.

Qadri's caveat is the honest read. One case is not a trend, and a council that wants to approve something will find nine votes when it has to. What HB 24 removed is the scenario where it can't.

Counting the ring, not the heads

Twenty-nine owners is a lot of people at a podium and tells you almost nothing about whether a petition is valid. The number that decides a protest is land area.

Run it as arithmetic. Draw the 200-foot ring around the tract. Pull ownership and area for every parcel that touches it from the appraisal district roll. Sum the area by owner.

That total is the denominator. The signatures have to cover 60 percent of it if the rezoning clears both halves of the qualifying test, 20 percent if it doesn't.

Twenty-nine small single-family lots in a dense older neighborhood can sit under 30 percent of a ring that also holds a church parcel, a commercial strip, and a couple of apartment properties. Thirty townhouse owners on the same ring might not reach 20 percent. One institutional neighbor holding a 45 percent frontage parcel can put a non-qualifying rezoning past the 20 percent threshold alone.

That last case is the one to check first, and it's the one a headcount misses entirely.

Then the vote math, which now runs two ways. A valid petition against a qualifying rezoning in Austin takes the approval requirement to six of eleven. A valid petition against anything else takes it to nine of eleven. Vista Park's 7-4 passes under the first rule and fails under the second, which is exactly what happened to it.

Both numbers belong in the entitlement risk memo before the application goes in. The difference between them is three council votes, and three council votes is usually the whole fight.

The 35 percent line

Cities have already written the split into their own ordinances. Richardson, in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, brought its council a routine zoning-code conformance update in April 2026 carrying both numbers: 60 percent for residential, 20 percent for everything else.

That's the shape of the law statewide now, not an Austin-and-San-Antonio story. It's also the shorthand, and the shorthand is where the second condition gets lost.

Mixed use is where that condition bites, and it bites on a number anyone can check against a site plan. Ground-floor retail under apartments keeps a rezoning on the 60 percent track as long as the added commercial use stays on the first floor and at or under 35 percent of the overall development.

Push it to 40 percent, or put any of it on the second floor, and the rezoning falls out of § 211.0061(b)(3) and back onto 20 percent and three-fourths. Not the commercial portion of it. The whole rezoning, housing included.

That makes the vote count an output of the program. The thing worth pinning down early is the denominator: the statute caps the added use at 35 percent "of the overall development" without saying how the city measures it.

Get that answer from the reviewing jurisdiction before the program hardens. A project that pencils at 30 percent ground-floor commercial at concept and drifts to 38 percent by filing has moved itself from six votes to nine, and nobody in the room has to notice for it to happen.

Before the petition arrives

Phasing carries the same exposure, at least as a matter of mechanics. Split one rezoning into a housing tract and a commercial tract and the result is two separate 200-foot rings, two ownership denominators, and two thresholds. Sometimes that lowers total risk. Sometimes it hands the protest-organizing neighbors a smaller ring on the commercial piece, where 20 percent is easy to assemble, and the commercial piece is the one carrying the pro forma.

HB 24 sits inside the same pattern as SB 840's by-right multifamily conversions: the state removing a discretionary chokepoint from cities rather than telling them what to zone. It also sits at one specific layer of the stack. Protest petitions attach to the base-district rezoning, not to the overlays, easements, and recorded instruments that constrain the site afterward, and clearing a rezoning by simple majority does nothing to the site plan review timeline waiting on the other side of it.

Protest risk used to be a question about where a project was. A dense, organized, well-lawyered 200-foot ring meant a hard rezoning, and that was most of the analysis. It's now also a question about what the project is becoming, and the same parcel can produce two different answers depending on the floor plan.

Ownership and parcel area inside the ring come off the appraisal roll in an afternoon. Whether the rezoning adds residential development comes off the proposed district. The commercial share comes off the program, and it's the only one of the three still moving after the concept is drawn, which is exactly why it's the one worth checking twice. A developer sizing units, an engineer running feasibility, an architect programming ground-floor retail, and municipal staff logging an application at intake are all reading the same three numbers before anyone files anything.

Vista Park's seven votes were real. So was the ninth vote it needed and never got. HB 24 didn't erase that math. It changed who has to run it, and when.