Cities across Texas are finding ever more creative ways to regulate away property owners’ rights. For Texans who rent out their homes—whether through short-term platforms like Airbnb or long-term arrangements—local ordinances have created a maze of rules that bring uncertainty, high costs, and diminished freedoms.
It wasn’t always this way. For generations, Texans opened their homes to friends, travelers, and tenants. From the 1800s to the 1950s, state court records and academic articles document the widespread practice of what we now call “home-sharing.” Renting to non-relatives for the short or long term was not only accepted—it was the norm.
In fact, leasing out part or all of one’s home was once a cornerstone of American urban life. Scholars estimate that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nearly half of urban Americans had lived as “boarders,” sharing homes with what were effectively roommates. During World War II, this practice proved essential to the Texas war effort. In manufacturing hubs like Orange County, residents crammed as many as three renters into a single room. The federal government even promoted home-sharing through posters as a patriotic act, urging citizens to “share your home… the extra income will buy war bonds.”
Yet, by 1977, Texas Monthly lamented that the once-thriving practice of home-sharing was nearly extinct. What happened to the “right to rent out your home?”
In short, City planners.
Historically, residential neighborhood zoning ordinances regulated the location and structure of single-family homes —not who could live there. For example, a typical family definition from 1939 describes the zone as “any number of individuals living as a single housekeeping unit.”
Property owners were free to rent out their homes as they saw fit without interference from local governments.
That all changed in the 1960s when big city planners began targeting land users rather than the land itself. By the late 2000s, new municipal ordinances fined property owners leasing to unrelated adults, and, in the past couple of years, they’ve escalated to outright bans on short-term tenancies. Together, these rules have made renting out your home increasingly difficult—if not impossible.
Ironically, as home-sharing platforms like Airbnb, SpareRoom, and Roomster make it easier than ever to connect property owners with tenants, cities are doubling down on restrictions.
Towns like College Station, University Parks, San Marcos, and Stephenville restrict occupancy to as few as two or three unrelated adults—regardless of square footage or the number of bedrooms.
Imagine a landlord advertising: “Five-bedroom house for rent—must keep three bedrooms empty.” It sounds absurd, but it’s a reality for property owners across the state. Three veterans in San Marcos learned this firsthand when they were forced to abandon their rental home due to a 1963 ordinance restricting unrelated adults from living together. Some local governments issue hundreds of citations a year, targeting property owners for using their home.
Even worse are the invasive methods cities use to enforce these rules.
In Stephenville, the municipal webpage on unrelated occupancy boasts that “utility records may be reviewed to establish trends for water and electricity consumption.” Do four unrelated adults drink an unusual amount of tap water? Probably not. It’s just another instance of local governments’ war on homeowners and property rights.
San Marcos takes an even more intrusive approach. Their code enforcement monitors personal vehicles. According to their municipal code, the city can fine violators up to $900 if “the same three or more vehicles with registrations to persons having different surnames” are parked overnight at a house for 11 nonconsecutive days.
Should property owners wanting to rent their home put up listings asking for genealogies? In any event, Texas taxpayers do not want a government surveillance state straight out of 1984.
Short-term home-sharing faces similarly harmful regulations. In Austin or Dallas, the average homeowner renting their property as a short-term rental earns between $30,000 and $40,000 annually per Airbnb. But, these property owners are under threat and, like their long-term home-sharing cousins, subject to intense invasions of privacy. Dallas, Plano, and Lewisville have banned short-term rentals in residential areas outright. While Dallas’s ban remains tied up in court, Plano’s ordinance is in full effect.
City officials frequently justify home-sharing bans and restrictions by claiming the practice causes public nuisances like noise and trash. But the evidence is sparse.
When Austin attempted to ban short-term rentals, the Texas Court of Appeals struck down the ordinance as unconstitutional, noting that over four years, “the City did not issue a single citation to a licensed short-term rental owner or guest for violating the City’s noise, trash, or parking ordinances.”
For homeowners, home-sharing restrictions mean lost income and curtailed rights. For tenants, they translate to fewer housing options and higher prices. The losers in this equation? Everyone—except the bureaucrats enforcing the rules.
Under the guise of “protecting neighborhood character,” municipalities imposed these regulations and others, such as density and lot size requirements, forgetting that people have character, not houses. Anti-housing policies result in less housing. Unsurprisingly, Texas now has roughly 4.3 million spare bedrooms despite having a shortage of 306,000 homes.
To reverse these harmful trends and restore property rights, city councils and the state legislature must act. The solution is clear: more freedom, less government. Texans need the right to use their property as they see fit. Without intervention, the centuries-old practice of home-sharing—whether long-term or short-term—could soon vanish under a wave of bureaucratic overreach.
This isn’t just a fight for economic opportunity. It’s a fight for basic freedoms. The right to rent out one’s home is one of the oldest uses of property ownership in the state. Texans have already bought the car—it’s time to let them drive.