Houston Becomes The Latest City To Join SB 4 Lawsuit

Our daily roundup of Texas headlines.

By Becky FogelJune 22, 2017 12:16 pm

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

The Houston City Council voted Wednesday to join the lawsuit against the state of Texas over the constitutionality of Senate Bill 4.

Austin, Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio already decided to sue the state over the law that bans so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says it was time for their city to join them: “Houstonians are expecting us to stand up and protect their interest, not to defer to somebody else.”

Ultimately, the vote was 10 to 6.

City council members and the mayor were responding to concerns from Houston-area law enforcement, including Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.

Gonzalez says he’s worried about a provision that would let police ask people about their immigration status during routine stops.

“If a deputy encounters someone or has established some probable cause for some type of investigation, it opens the door where they could begin questioning immigration status, and to me that’s a concern because it could just grow fear in the community,” Gonzalez says.

Supporters of SB4, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, accuse so-called sanctuary jurisdictions of obstructing cooperation between federal and local officials on immigration enforcement.




Housing prices in major metropolitan areas across the U.S. have steadily rose for over a year.

But a new report finds that nine major markets are actually seeing a drop in prices.

Almost half of those are in Texas, reports KETR’s Scott Morgan.

While housing prices continue to grow in most markets around the country, Texas is home to four major metro markets that are regressing.

A new report by GOBankingRates identifies nine U.S. markets in which median listing prices are below where they were a year earlier.

Round Rock and Houston are on that list. These two cities saw their median listings drop by about $5,000 each between April 2016 and April 2017.

McAllen and Sugar Land are also on the list, featuring markets that saw $15,000 and $16,000 drops, respectively, in median listing prices over the same period.

Sugar Land topped the list of markets losing steam. The Houston-area metro has seen median prices drop more than $45,000 over the past two years.




Since 2010, Texas has seen larger numeric growth in its Hispanic population than any other state in the country.

That even includes California, which still has the largest Hispanic population in the U.S.

That’s according to data the U.S. Census Bureau released today.

Between 2010 and 2016, Texas, itself, has also gained three times as many Hispanic residents as it has white residents.

During that same period, the state’s population increased by 2.7 million people.

Hispanic Texans account for more than half of that growth.

White Texans still make up the largest demographic group in the state at 43 percent.

But according to census data released last year, 68 percent of Texans aged 19 and younger are people of color.