No zoning board or homebuilder shapes the monthly cost of a Texas mortgage the way the Federal Reserve does, and no Texan gets a vote on the Fed. On July 29 the Federal Open Market Committee held its benchmark rate at 3.50 to 3.75 percent, the fifth meeting in a row it left the rate untouched. The 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 6.63 percent in early August, near a 12-month high, according to Bankrate. That number, set in Washington, does more to fix Texas housing costs than anything decided in Austin. For most families the mortgage is the biggest check they write each month, and the rate on it is set by an institution no Texan can reach at a ballot box.
The rate is the lever. Hold it high and the payment on a median Texas home climbs with it, and a family that qualified in the spring can be priced out by the fall. Three members of the committee dissented in July and pressed for a quarter-point increase, and the next meeting, in September, could bring one. Federal decisions have already driven borrowing costs up across Texas this year. Every one of those votes was cast by an official no Texan elected, on a body Texas does not sit on.
The same central bank has already measured how federal policy fed the run-up. In a March working paper, economists at the Federal Reserve banks of Dallas and San Francisco found that the surge of unauthorized immigration from 2021 to 2024 accounted for about 30 percent of home-price growth and roughly 20 percent of rent growth in the metros that absorbed it, some 6.6 points of a 22.4 percent climb, concentrated in the largest urban markets. That 30 percent is one driver among several; record-low pandemic mortgage rates and years of under-building drove much of the rest. The Partisan reported the paper when it surfaced in July. Two of the biggest forces behind the price of a Texas home, the scale of that immigration and the interest rate, were both set in Washington. Texas voted on neither.
Texas is not a small place taking what Washington hands it. The Texas Comptroller puts the state’s output at 2.9 trillion dollars in 2025, the eighth-largest economy on earth, ahead of Italy, Russia, and Canada. Canada runs its own central bank and writes its own immigration law. Texas, the larger economy, does neither. It exports the wealth and imports the decision. A country that size, anywhere else on the map, would set its own money policy as a matter of course.
Texans have tried to plan around Washington and been overtaken by it. The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M built its 2026 forecast on the expectation that mortgage rates would fall to between 5.0 and 5.6 percent and lift the market off the mat, with the median price they projected settling near 334,000 dollars. The Fed held instead. Rates sit above 6.6 percent, and the distance between the cheaper money the forecasters penciled in and the rate Washington actually set is the difference between a payment a Texas family can carry and one it cannot. The rebound has stalled, and the family that budgeted on the forecast is paying the gap. When Texans have pushed on the other federal lever, immigration, the answer has come back the same: the power belongs to Washington, and the courts will enforce it.
The Texas Nationalist Movement has argued for twenty years that this cannot be repaired from inside the union. A state cannot outvote Washington on the border, cannot overrule the Federal Reserve on the interest rate, and cannot appeal past a central bank that answers to no Texan. The movement’s remedy is the one the housing forecasts never model, an independent Texas that holds its own money and its own immigration and answers for both to the people who live under them. Such a Texas would not wait on a committee in Washington to set what a Texas mortgage costs. It would set the terms itself, and Texans could remove whoever set them wrong.
The Dallas Fed can publish the study. The Federal Reserve can hold the rate. Neither ballot had a Texan on it. A nation with the eighth-largest economy on earth is still asking Washington what its own homes should cost, and the question will keep getting the same answer until Texas stops asking and starts deciding.
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