On September 26, the singer took to Twitter to share a petition against the rising costs of real estate in Texas, where she’s living. “My fellow Texans! Petitions can feel useless, but I guarantee local politicians are taking these seriously,” she tweeted, sharing the petition on Change.org. “Plz sign to reduce housing costs in Austin. There’s effective legislation on the table here, but we need public support. Houston is the 4th populous metro in the entire nation with a median housing price lower than all the other cities on that list,” she tweeted, sharing a screenshot of some collected data on the housing prices in the city. She continued to share some statistics on how challenging it is to afford to buy a city home or rent. And this is a trend we’ve seen happen across the country. A report from July showed that in 38 out of 50 largest cities in the U.S., renting is cheaper than buying — and rental prices are still rising. Grimes’ tweet thread concluded, “Btw for those saying housing bills don’t work, Houston is a great case study. We MUST avoid Austin becoming like SF, where the original population can’t afford to live there anymore due to the tech boom.” Grimes isn’t wrong — it is becoming very hard for people to buy a home or even rent, and there isn’t an easy, immediate fix, and experts aren’t sure when prices will begin to flatten. However, her tweets were met with some pushback, with someone saying her “opinion” on the housing market it “invalid.” And Grimes’ reply was very telling. “First of all I couldn’t afford to buy a house that fits my kids in Austin [at the moment] without help from their dad [Musk] which is INSANE cuz I’m a p[retty] successful artist. Secondly, these aren’t my opinions, I’ve just agreed to help out some actual experts/ policy makers.” Grimes later said, “I’m not worried about me, I’m worried about the citizens of Austin. I’m using myself as an example of the extreme wealth needed to live comfortably here, which wasn’t the case in the near past.”
