How H-1B Restrictions Popped Dallas’ Housing Bubble

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Sarah Holder** (0:09)
In the suburbs north of Dallas, a housing boom has started to go bust.

**Prashant Gopal** (0:14)
Some key towns that we're talking about are Prosper, Frisco and Salina, which is one of the fastest growing towns in America.

**Sarah Holder** (0:22)
Prashant Gopal covers the US housing market for Bloomberg. He says the burst of new construction kicked off during the pandemic. Remote workers were looking for affordable housing outside city centers. Corporations were relocating to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, bringing white collar jobs.
And a new population of workers had started moving to the region.

**Prashant Gopal** (0:45)
A lot of the builders I spoke with, they told me that 70 percent of their buyers were South Asian, which was actually what got me onto the story to begin with. I was sort of stunned that it would be that high.

**Sarah Holder** (1:01)
For the past decade, Dallas has been experiencing one of the fastest demographic transformations in the country, as Indian families are drawn there for the jobs, the schools, the weather, and the growing South Asian community.
Many of the newcomers are here to work in tech roles on H-1B visas, temporary visas for highly skilled workers. From 2021 to 2024, the federal government granted almost 32,000 H-1B visas to the Dallas area, more than Silicon Valley, Seattle, DC, or San Francisco. And the largest group of recipients by far is from India.

**Prashant Gopal** (1:40)
H-1Bs are kind of like a stepping stone toward the American dream, right? Once you get an H-1B, often, one of the first things you do is buy a house.

**Sarah Holder** (1:51)
One housing analyst told Prashant that in Dallas, the South Asian community became the most important first-time buyer group for builders.
But recently, the market has been changing. Mortgage rates have risen, AI is driving tech layoffs, and the Trump administration is making it harder to get H-1B visas. Now, all those new homes are getting harder to sell.

**Prashant Gopal** (2:16)
Collin County, which is sort of the heart of this northern corridor, home prices are down 9% year over year. That's a pretty big drop.

**Sarah Holder** (2:25)
Prashant traveled to the greater Dallas area to get to know the residents who have been navigating this downturn. He says many of them are grappling with job insecurity and starting to worry that the American dream they were building could be slipping away. I'm Sarah Holder and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is intensifying a housing downturn in Dallas and upending lives.
Like many stories of downturns, the one in Dallas, Texas started as a story of growth. Its regional population has increased by 63% over the last 25 years.

**Prashant Gopal** (3:11)
The economy has been booming in large part because of its great diversity of sectors.

**Sarah Holder** (3:18)
Bloomberg's Prashant Gopal.

**Prashant Gopal** (3:20)
Finance, tech, healthcare, there's so many different types of jobs there, and they've all been doing really well. There's no state income tax, which makes it really attractive. I mean, you think about the transportation, it's a key hub for airlines.
I think relative to some other places, it's affordable as well. So there are a lot of things going for Dallas.

**Sarah Holder** (3:44)
Dallas has become a national hotspot for corporate relocations. Since 2018, companies like Charles Schwab, Caterpillar, KFC and Toyota North America have all moved their headquarters to the region.

**Prashant Gopal** (3:57)
A lot of the companies that have moved in, they have a lot of IT workers, and so they need to fill those jobs. These are highly paid jobs. It's not like they're making minimum wage. I mean, many of these software developers are well over $100,000, sometimes significantly more. People have master's degrees, PhDs.

**Sarah Holder** (4:18)
To find the right talent, Dallas-based companies have been fielding applications from around the world. And one tool they've used to recruit foreign workers is the H-1B visa.

**Prashant Gopal** (4:29)
You could think of it as a foothold. You know, in America, it's a temporary... It gives you the right to work as long as an employer sponsors you. So many of the people who get H-1B visas, you know, maybe they come in to the United States on a student visa. This is sort of the typical path. And from there, they get a job, say, at a software company or some other job that requires sort of a high-skilled worker.
They'll then get sponsored for an H-1B visa. And then it may take some time, but eventually they'll apply for a green card. And at some point, maybe they'll get a citizenship.