Capital costs. People by and large are loathe to spend hugely upon invisible home improvements. One way to address this is to exclude from Texas property taxes

Capital costs. People by and large are loathe to spend hugely upon invisible home improvements. One way to address this is to exclude from Texas property taxes the entire square footage of the insulating envelope of any building with 4"+ insulated envelope thickness, and locally recycle polystyrene into Styrofoam insulating blocks sold back to the public at cost to keep them out of the landfills. My personal preference is foamed glass made with a blowing agent that is cradle-to-grave net neutral on CO2 release and acidification, but that hasn't been invented yet so I'm still researching a way to manufacture foamed glass that can capture and entrain 100% of the released CO2 in the production line. Offer further property tax incentives for blower door-confirmed tests of airtightness, in a graduated scale for more property tax discount for more airtightness, calibrated against state-projected tax giveaways to energy companies so every X00,000 homes that get the discount is covered by avoided tax giveaways in the same amount as the discount gave away. The savings come from the property tax giveaway is one that returns dividends for ~30 years, whereas most corporate tax giveaways are ~10-15 years. Passive house to Net Zero is possible with a 15-20% increase in cost (or equivalent reduction in scope), with a concomitant 70-95% reduction in energy costs. But there are no incentives to construct that way. If property taxes were structured so such houses get increasingly more tax discounts the more years they sit (back-loaded discount) and return energy dividends and keep passing efficiency tests every 3 years such that over a 30-year span the house reaches net 80% property tax savings, with a phase out and grandfathering as the number of Texas residential properties under the program reach 50%, it would drastically alter the demand for such houses.