Does D.R. Horton Do More Harm Than Good?

Weighing the tradeoffs of America’s largest homebuilder: affordability for buyers, backlash from communities, and the long-term consequences for housing supply.

Photo via WBIR

Housing affordability is top of mind for nearly everyone in East Tennessee.

Soaring home prices—fueled by migration and years of pent-up demand—have quickly eroded consumer purchasing power even in the face of robust wage growth, leaving East Tennesseans across the income spectrum feeling squeezed.

A public opinion poll by East Tennessee Realtors underscores the scale of the concern: 67% of Knox County residents say housing affordability is a big problem. That’s the kind of crisis-level concern you expect to see in expensive coastal states like California and New York—not Tennessee.

Against this backdrop of rising cost-of-living concerns and an ongoing debate over how best to accommodate growth, few names generate as much discussion—or division—as D.R. Horton. As the largest homebuilder in the country, the company plays an outsized role in shaping the built environment of suburban America and, increasingly, East Tennessee.

As recently as 2017, D.R. Horton accounted for just 2% of new home sales in Knox County. Yet by 2024, that number surged to nearly one in three new homes—a dramatic shift in market share for a community long dominated by small, locally-owned builders.

For some, D.R. Horton is an imperfect but necessary partner in a region that desperately needs more housing at nearly every price point. For others, however, the nation’s largest home builder represents something else entirely: a symbol of unbridled sprawl and dystopian, cookie-cutter neighborhoods—the type of development that has invited fierce anti-growth backlash and fueled political battles so personal and bitter they’ve fractured neighborhoods and ended long-time friendships.

The reality, as is often the case, is frustratingly complicated. It’s a debate that can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to the moral absolutism of right or wrong—it is, at its core, a clash of priorities and values in a once-sleepy region that today has no choice but to change.

On one hand, it is impossible to deny the immense role D.R. Horton plays in delivering relatively attainable new housing, injecting hundreds of new homes into the market each year. While many developers target the luxury or move-up market, and even more so given the evolving economics of residential development, D.R. Horton is unique in that it mostly builds homes near the lower end of the price spectrum—homes that many working- and middle-class families can actually afford.

In 2024, the median sale price of a D.R. Horton-built home in Knox County was about 85% of the county’s overall median price for new homes—the difference between roughly $355,000 and $420,000—according to data from the American Enterprise Institute. Even more striking, 71% of D.R. Horton homes built in the same year were classified as entry-level, while just 22% of homes from all other builders met that threshold. At a time when the cost of housing has surged far faster than incomes, and new construction remains largely inaccessible for first-time buyers, D.R. Horton's contributions to affordability are undeniably significant.

Moreover, despite the frequent cries of “we don’t want you here” at planning meetings and across local TV airwaves, the company is meeting real demand. People are buying their homes—not just in booming metros, but in small towns and rural counties where housing options have long been limited. And for all the criticism about their one-size-fits-all approach, the steady stream of buyers and D.R. Horton’s growing market share suggest the company is filling a gap that much of the market has failed to address: delivering entry-level homes at scale, in places where few others are building them.

No amount of criticism can change one simple fact: D.R. Horton provides homes for people who need and want them—people who will treasure their home and, perhaps, even build a family there. To suggest such homes are entirely unwanted or devoid of value is to engage in a kind of willful ignorance—not just of the economic realities facing middle-class families, but of the significance that homeownership represents for millions of Americans.

In a perfect world, supplying much-needed housing would be enough. But in practice, development has become an inherently political process—shaped as much by perception and emotion as by policy and need.

D.R. Horton’s approach to development—rapid, large-scale, and often visually homogeneous—has made it a lightning rod in local politics. Through my years of work as a housing advocate, it is something I’ve experienced first-hand. In many communities, particularly those unaccustomed to the oftentimes transformational growth that any national builder brings, new D.R. Horton subdivisions have become the poster child for what residents and politicians alike refer to as “bad development.”

Their subdivisions—easily distinguishable by their uniform home designs, minimal landscaping, and sparse amenities—oftentimes replace what was once a densely forested area or an open field where fertile soil once provided an entire town’s worth of crops like corn or soybeans. To the casual observer, who isn’t much interested in long-term planning or the consequences of housing scarcity, it is a distinctly modern form of blight—soulless, monotonous, and emblematic of everything wrong with suburban growth.

It should come as no surprise, then, that such projects regularly spark intense opposition from neighboring residents and have, in some cases, spurred dramatic policy responses. In many of the rural and suburban jurisdictions in which I’ve worked, D.R. Horton developments have been the catalyst for moratoriums on new subdivisions and new land use restrictions explicitly designed to ward off large-scale development. Elected officials—emboldened both by vocal public resistance and their own animus—often go so far as to cite these neighborhoods, and even D.R. Horton by name, when justifying more restrictive land use policies.

This reactionary form of policymaking poses its own set of harms. While any particular development may raise legitimate concerns about quality or infrastructure impacts, the backlash it provokes can reverberate far beyond a single project. In communities where development capacity is suddenly and dramatically curtailed in response, the long-term consequence is a worsening housing shortage—particularly for the very households national home builders and their modest price points are intended to serve. In this way, a large builder like D.R. Horton’s presence in certain markets can undermine the cause of housing affordability it ostensibly helps to advance.

So, does D.R. Horton do more harm than good? That is an impossible question. And the answer likely depends on the lens through which one looks.

From a macro perspective, companies like D.R. Horton are undeniably helping to increase housing supply at a time when it is desperately needed. In Knox County, for example, two national builders—D.R. Horton and Clayton Homes—are responsible for almost 500 of the roughly 1,600 or so new homes built each year. But at the micro level, especially in more rural or fast-growing areas, the large-scale and visually homogeneous development style that’s common among national builders inflames opposition, triggering policy responses that devastate housing supply growth over the long run.

The problem isn’t necessarily that D.R. Horton, or companies like it, are building homes—it’s how they build, where they build, and whether they do so with any regard for local context and community perception.

If there’s a path forward, it’s not about vilifying large home builders or celebrating them uncritically. It’s about encouraging all builders—especially the largest ones—to view raising the bar on design and livability as an investment in their long-term success and continued license to build. Likewise, local leaders have an obligation to resist the temptation to overcorrect with draconian restrictions that attempt to halt the inevitable forces of growth in response to a few contentious developments.

The challenge before us is not how to stop large homebuilders, but how to harness their scale and production capacity in ways that contribute to—not compromise—growth.

After all, people need a place to live.