Frisco, McKinney, Richardson Top List of Best Housing Markets

Our daily roundup of Texas headlines.

By Becky FogelSeptember 5, 2016 1:30 pm

The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.

Housing markets are healthy nationwide, and according to a new report from the personal finance website WalletHub, that’s especially true in Texas.

Analyst Jill Gonzalez says the site looked at housing markets in 300 cities. They then compared those cities across 16 different metrics, including job growth, home affordability and foreclosure rate. She explained why the top of the rankings were choc-full of Texas cities:

“Six of the top 10 cities nationwide all happen to be in Texas – north Texas did the very best here,” Gonzales says. “Places like Frisco were number one, nearby McKinney and Richardson were two and three. Dallas and Fort Worth did very well here too. Austin, though, is number one in terms of all large cities. A lot of it has to do with a booming economy there. We’re seeing job growth up nearly 20 percent the last three years. So that really low unemployment, plus more and more people coming to the city, means more people need housing. They’re snatching it up and it happens to be affordable.”

The only Texas city in the bottom half of the rankings was Corpus Christi, which landed at 169.




It’s been cheaper to implement Texas’ campus carry than schools predicted. Some colleges and universities told lawmakers last year it could cost $15 million to prepare for people carrying concealed handguns on their campuses. But Texas schools have only spent about $960,000 to put the law into practice.

Tom Benning looked at possible reasons for the low cost in a story for the Dallas Morning News:

“The schools were given some added flexibility by the legislature at the last minute to craft their own policies, and perhaps that allowed them to analyzed the issue a bit further and reduce some costs,” Benning says. “It could just be simply that this was a bit of political gamesmanship by the universities during the legislature last year. A big fiscal note is an easy way to bring down a bill. Obviously, that was unsuccessful last year, but they at least could have raised some costs as an issue as a way to try to push back on the legislation. ”

Benning also said that the $960,000 does not account for the time administrators spent planning how to implement the law. It includes money that schools spent on new signs, gun lockers and other resources.

But most of that spending is from Texas State and Lamar Universities. Those schools hired new security officers, which cost over $500,000.




Texas universities fared well in the opening weekend of the college football season. Eleven out of the 12 Texas teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of competition, won this weekend.

The University of North Texas suffered the state’s only loss in that division. But they did so at the hands of another Texas school – Southern Methodist University.

The successful weekend was capped off Sunday night with a double-overtime thriller: The Longhorns beat the Fighting Irish, 50-47.