But unlike its coastal counterparts, Houston's homes are much cheaper and more abundant. Advertisement"It's really a way to limit housing construction," said Emily Hamilton, a housing researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She added that minimum lot sizes maintain "a homogenous type of housing construction with often a high floor on how expensive it has to be." The policy change has spurred the construction of almost 80,000 new homes, many of them townhouses and other kinds of small-lot single-family homes. But the massive success of Houston's minimum lot size reform is getting noticed across Texas and around the country.

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Persons: —, Emily Hamilton, Joseph Gyourko, Sean McCulloch, Hamilton, It's, it's, Nolan Gray, Freund, Brett Coomer, We're, Gray, Salim Furth Organizations: Service, Space, Business, George Mason University, California, Freund St, Houston Locations: Houston , Texas, New York City, San Francisco, Houston, walkable, Texas, Austin , Texas, Auburn , Maine, Helena , Montana, Arizona , Massachusetts, New York