Texas home insurance premiums rose 30% in five years.
Incomes rose 3%.
That comes from an analysis by Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, working with Texas 2036, published on August 10. The average Texas homeowner now pays $2,983 a year.
Go back further and the spread widens. Since 2009, premiums are up 74%. Median household income is up 11%.
Here is the number that should stop every housing conversation in this state.
Roughly 7 million Texas households, close to two thirds of the state, cannot afford the median priced home in their own county once insurance is counted as part of the cost of owning it.
Texas has spent a decade telling the country it is the best place in America to build a life. The growth data still supports that. Population, jobs, business formation, all of it real.
Insurance is now the line item that decides whether the promise holds.
An uninsured owner who loses a roof does not file a claim. They absorb it, or they leave it. Deferred repairs become larger repairs. Larger repairs become the thing nobody can pay for, and eventually somebody else inherits.
I represent owners after the loss. The pattern I see most often started years earlier, with a policy someone could not afford to keep or never had reason to read.
Read yours before you need it to do anything.