4 Things Other States Could Learn From Texas

By Alex Buscemi, Editorial Manager at Builders | 5 min read

Many states in the country are wrestling with the same handful of problems: how to keep housing and life affordable, how to keep the lights on, how to grow good jobs, and how to scale infrastructure to accommodate a booming population. In these areas, Texas has proved that when we come together, we create policies that the rest of America may want to consider. 

1. A lighter regulatory touch

Texas levies no state personal income tax and pairs that with relatively streamlined permitting and business rules. The result is one of the lowest overall tax burdens in the nation, which keeps drawing companies and new residents chasing a cheaper cost of living.

The honest caveat: light regulation comes with a bill attached. Texas funds itself partly through some of the highest property taxes in the country, so the "no income tax" headline isn't the whole story. And minimal oversight has real downsides: the catastrophic 2021 failure of the state's go-it-alone power grid showed what happens when critical systems run with too little accountability. Freedom to build works best with guardrails.

2. Renewable energy leadership

Here's the one that surprises people. The state synonymous with oil also happens to be the runaway national leader in renewable energy. In 2024, Texas generated 169,442 gigawatt-hours from wind and solar — nearly double California's total — and in 2025 it passed even California on utility-scale solar, too.

How? Texas built thousands of miles of transmission lines, opened up land, and let wind and solar compete on price. And they won. The lesson for other states: you don't have to agree on climate politics to agree that cheap, homegrown power is good business.

3. Aggressive economic development

Texas has been the No. 1 exporting state since 2002, shipping $450 billion in goods in 2025 — more than double the next-highest state — and boasts the second-largest economy of any state, bigger than the entire country of Brazil. A big driver is the Governor's Office model, which uses tools like the Texas Enterprise Fund to aggressively recruit corporate headquarters and manufacturing expansions with performance-based, "deal-closing" grants.

Though these incentives draw fair criticism. Skeptics across the spectrum reasonably call public grants to private companies a form of corporate welfare. Worth copying with stronger oversight built in.

4. Scaling infrastructure to match growth

Texas keeps housing relatively affordable for one unglamorous reason: when more people show up, more homes get built. It leads the nation in housing permits by a mile (roughly 248,000 in 2025, more than double the next-closest state) in part because single-family permits clear faster in most Texas jurisdictions than anywhere else. In 2025, lawmakers doubled down with seven bipartisan bills that loosened zoning, cut parking mandates, and made it easier to turn empty offices into apartments.

The roads got the same aggressive treatment. Texas built the nation's largest highway system and leaned on public-private partnerships to add capacity fast.

Even with all that construction, Texas home prices still rose 39 percent from 2020 to 2025 and the state remains short an estimated 320,000 homes. Traffic in the big metros is brutal, some toll-road partnerships have drawn complaints over cost and transparency, and many critics argue that investing in public transit, like light rail, would relieve congestion far more effectively than another lane of asphalt. Building fast and building wisely have to go together.

Texas is hardly perfect. And we could learn plenty from California, New York, and everywhere in between. But the point is bigger than any one state. Every place in this country has something worth teaching and something worth learning, and the only truly losing move is deciding the other side has nothing to offer. When neighbors start solving problems together, there's almost no limit to what they can build.

Alex Buscemi can be reached at abuscemi@buildersmovement.org

Photo by Raivis Razgals on Unsplash