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All Timothy Tebeau wants for Christmas is to live near his job in Taylor, where he works as a dispatcher for the Taylor Police Department. He’d also like his new apartment to come with a kitchen, which he doesn’t have in his current rental — 16 miles up the road in Bartlett.
“It’s hard to make scrambled eggs for breakfast without a real stove,” said the 2018 graduate of Taylor High School. “I’ve actually tried grilling a steak, but it didn’t go over well.”
Image credit: Richard Stone.
Tebeau and other Taylor residents are grappling with displacement as they move beyond Taylor’s city limits to find housing they can afford, enduring longer commutes to their Taylor jobs in the process.
The city, about 40 miles northeast of Austin, is on the verge of an economic and population boom, city officials predict, with much of it driven by Samsung and its $17 billion semiconductor manufacturing facility currently under construction. Samsung expects to hire 1,800 people over the next five years to run the massive computer chip fabrication plant that it’s building at the southwest edge of town. In short, Taylor is experiencing growing pains like Austin has wrestled with, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Image credit: Richard Stone.
Samsung officials have said the plant is expected to open late next year, a prediction made more likely by the recent announcement that the chip maker has struck a $16 billion deal to build AI chips for Tesla.
“We don’t have enough housing,” said Shea Glotzman, executive director of the Taylor Housing Authority. “I get multiple calls, every day, with people on the other side of the line crying, ‘What can you do for me?’ It’s not just low-income people. It’s people making $50-60,000 a year. A few years ago, $50,000 was great. Now you’ll need a second job just to make rent.”
Economic multipliers suggest that those direct Samsung factory hires will spawn three to four indirect jobs working for Samsung suppliers or in the local service industry.
Growing pains
Though Taylor population projections are all over the map they all are pointing up. Taylor’s current population is estimated at just shy of 18,000 people, according to the U.S Census Bureau, up from 16,000 in the 2020 Census.
Taylor and Hutto have been growing at a rate of 9 percent per year since 2020, according to Census figures, outstripping Round Rock’s rate of 2.5 percent. The Taylor Economic Development Corp. projects Taylor’s population will grow by more than 1,000 people over the next three years. A 2024 report to Taylor Independent School Board trustees predicted that its student body will more than double, to 7,000, by 2033. The Capitol Area Metropolitan Planning Organization foresees the city’s population topping 39,000 by 2040.
Against that backdrop, residents say housing already is hard to find.
“I’d move to Taylor in a minute if I could,” said Taylor Darst, a technician at Taylor’s new Guzman Automotive repair shop. Darst said that he and his fiancé can’t find anything in their price range. “We found more houses we could afford in Jerrell,” 28 miles away.
Darst’s co-worker, Joseph Nava, agrees. “With rent prices, bills, etc., it’s hard to find a place I can comfortably afford in Taylor,” said Nava, who lives 29 miles away in Georgetown, where he grew up. “I don’t really want to rent a house and, well, I’m 24, so I can’t afford to buy. There aren’t a lot of apartments available.”
Darst said some apartment managers in Tayor’s tight rental market set unattainable income qualifications. “One apartment complex in Taylor wanted four times the rent on a single paycheck — not my monthly earnings — but on just one paycheck! Apartment managers can be that selective.”
A needs assessment that the Greater Taylor Foundation conducted in 2023 found that the city faced a deficit of 1,200 workforce units and another 4,300 homes for extremely low-income residents. That’s a big housing deficit in a town of 18,000.
“Taylor’s housing deficit is a civic emergency,” said foundation President Dianna Phillips. “Affordable housing isn’t just a line item on a survey — it’s the number one unmet need in our city.”
“Many of our staff have expressed a desire to live where they work and having more housing options would support and strengthen our recruiting efforts,” agreed Dr. Jennifer Garcia-Ewardsen, the local school superintendent.
“As we compete with surrounding communities for talent, ensuring access to affordable housing is an important step in making Taylor an even more attractive place to live and work,” Garcia-Edwardsen said.
Developers can’t keep up
Apartments.com advertised a total of 31 Taylor apartments in late July. Just six one-bedroom units rented for less than $1,200 a month. The rest were duplexes, townhomes, garage apartments or additional dwelling units, many of them dilapidated.
Image credit: Richard Stone.
Taylor has just two apartment complexes with amenities such as a swimming pool, gym, and on-site laundry. Between them they offered just two available apartments in late July.
That apartments website suggests that the average Taylor apartment rents for around $1,300 — if you can find one. “I could rent $1,250 apartments all day long, if there were any,” local real estate broker Julie Downs said.
Zillow.com showed 53 single-family rental homes available for an average rent of $1,950. Two- or three-bedroom homes averaged $1,850 a month.
On paper, 6,000 new residential units – including 4,000 multifamily ones – are moving through Taylor’s city planning and permitting pipeline, according to online City of Taylor data. Completing all of those projects would double the city’s housing stock.
Even in the best of times, however, it’s not easy to shepherd a housing project from conception to completion.
“There are a lot of variables in building multifamily projects,” explained local commercial real estate broker Brad Robbins. “The biggest variable right now (is) construction costs and rents that are trending the wrong way. We’re probably two to three years away from being able to make any numbers work in Taylor.”
While Taylor’s housing market is tight, Robbins said that’s not the case throughout the region. Hutto has plenty of apartment inventory, he said.
Of the 6,000 units in Taylor’s development pipeline, only four multifamily projects have been approved for construction. Three of them are luxury townhomes. One adjacent to Samsung has units available. Site preparation has begun on a second project, while a third has not progressed beyond city approval.
Image credit: Wilson Capital.
“We remain very bullish on the Taylor market and believe market conditions and near-term trends are favorable for new multifamily deliveries in late 2026 or early 2027,” Taylor Wilson, president of developer Wilson Capitol, said in a statement to Austin Free Press. “We are actively pursuing financing” to start construction on a 450-unit multi-family complex on the city’s northern edge.
In the meantime, Taylor’s local civil servants, service employees, and young professionals continue to scour the surrounding area for housing.
“We think Taylor’s cool and we’re still trying to find a place close by,” said auto technician Nava. “We could stay in Georgetown but it’s … a fairly long commute. It’s hard for people who grew up here to find a place to live.”
Richard Stone is a Central Texas native reporter and editor with 35 years of award-winning experience covering local issues that matter. More at Wilcoblues.com.
