I'm going to take a wild guess, are you in the suburban Houston area? I've got friends and family there and they've mentioned the same thing. I thought they might be exaggerating but I keep hearing it from different sources. I never hear the same thing about DFW or Austin.
A major reason for living in the HTX suburbs is to make the cost of the home so irrelevant that you don't worry much about the surrounding market conditions. If you are 100% WFH tech employee and your employer isn't a raging asshole, this is tantamount to turning on economic cheat codes.
When a home is so cheap to start with, you can start saving for the next step much sooner. Even if I lost half the value in this home, I would be fine. I'd be pissed, but it wouldn't dramatically alter the strategic path I have planned on.
The problem isn't losing half the value of your property. The problem is that after 20 years, moving on isn't as easy as it sounds. More importantly, selling at any price is way more difficult that it sounds. If you don't GTFO early enough, the muni has lost a ton of revenue without right-sizing so the remaining owners on are on the hook for huge property taxes just to service the debt (further suppressing demand at literally any price).
And there are all sorts of reasons you might not GTFO in time. Just two more years until the first kid is done with HS. And now just two more years for the next kid; still seems unfair to move them. And so on. And then just 2 more years until you've saved up enough for that dream place in the mountains. And then it's too late.
So you are stuck with this albatross that you literally cannot sell. Property values, even at $1, are totally hypothetical. There is no buy side of the market. At all. Enjoy your property taxes, or figuring out how to abandon the property.
It's the suburban muni equivalent of a condo unit that is attractively priced but won't ever move because a contingent of geriatric owners have managed to run up $2k/mo HOA fees by unwittingly turning the condo association into an assisted living facility (but not making it far enough to actually be an assisted living facility).