THERE IS NO VISION!

H.O.M.E. 1.  H.O.M.E. 2.  ETODs. 

What are they?  Why are they happening? 

And why are people so upset about it?

Together these are the City Council and Planning Commission's extreme re-write of the City's Land Development Code (LDC).  The initiatives are multi-pronged and all aimed at radically increasing the residential density of Austin's neighborhoods. 

The Community Not Commodity website (https://communitynotcommodity.com) provides excellent overviews of these new land use revisions with accompanying maps, graphics, resources, and thoughtful analyses.  See also our sidebars for details.

The H.O.M.E. initiatives apply to any single-family zoned property anywhere in the city, and ETODs, which are even more permissive, cover any area within a half mile of any planned rail stop or rapid transit stop.

 The potential disruption of residential neighborhoods should be clear to anyone.  12-story towers within 50 or 75 feet of your back yard.  Clusters of a half dozen units on the standard lot next door.  Just consider the impact this permitted development would have to your home or up and down your street and how it would affect your quality of life and the investment you have made in it. 

H.O.M.E. is a cluster bomb for Austin's neighborhoods.  It carpets the entire city with bomblets that can go off anywhere, at any time, without notice.  They may lie there unexploded for awhile, but they remain armed indefinitely.  Council's selling it as a "gentle" transition is a lie.  For the homeowner whose next door neighbor's house gets bulldozed for for half dozen new towering units, or the one with a ten-story tower being built 75 feet away, the result will not not gentle.  It will be abrupt and violent.

But to hear Council, the Planning Commission, and H.O.M.E. advocates talk, they are laying the groundwork for a grand new vision of the Austin Of Our Future [AOOF).  They promise it will:

• bring more affordable housing for the economically disadvantaged

• create more “missing-middle” [income] affordable housing

• allow fiscally stressed homeowners to remain in their homes by adding income-producing units

• discourage proliferation of McMansions

• enable mass transit

• bring environmental benefit through more efficient use of resources

Are the goals of the Austin of Our Future vision worth the cost and disruption?  Are they even realizable?

What do scholars say?

H.O.M.E. advocates trot out market fundamentalist publications claiming “Less unnecesary [sic] restrictions = increased supply = lower costs for EVERYONE”.

But Dr. Richard Heyman, formerly of UT's Geography Department, points out that the spate of such publications arrived in the late 2010's and is only recently being countered by new research by urban studies scholars and planners coming to different conclusions.  Their evidence refutes the "simplistic" free market logic, "especially in high-demand, high-growth cities like Austin," and contends "too much is being promised to policy-makers about the supposed potential benefits of housing market de-regulation."

Heyman's research concludes that the H.O.M.E. initiative is based on faulty assumptions and research not supported by evidence and not applicable to Austin.  He claims, "The increase in land and housing prices in Austin in recent years are the results of fundamental dynamics of urban land markets, long known in the literature, and not due to zoning or other 'constraints' on supply."  High prices are a result of market forces, not a distortion of them," a position essentially re-stated by the City of Austin staff affordability report.

Furthermore, Heyman writes, "The HOME Initiative is unlikely to achieve its goals of increasing affordability in Austin and will likely lead to higher property values throughout the city, as well as continued gentrification and displacement in lower-income neighborhoods, home to many of Austin’s residents of color."

So who is correct?

Let's look at the AOOF vision point by point.  How do development code changes measure up to Council's stated goals?

AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED?

In the City staff's own words, "The proposed changes do not directly impact the city’s affordable housing incentive programs. As a result, they have a neutral impact to income-restricted affordable housing."

Incentives aside, the City staff recognizes H.O.M.E. will introduce new displacement pressure that will weigh most heavily on the poorest.  Their report (here) says the proposed changes may damage economically vulnerable homeowners and renters and create incentives for landlords to redevelop occupied single-family units.  "Market driven solutions to the housing crisis will likely reproduce the same dynamics that play out today, wherein parties with more resources may take advantage of the new regulatory landscape, while those with the fewest resources experience an increase in precarity."

MISSING MIDDLE [INCOME] AFFORDABLE HOUSING?

City staff has told Council the proposed amendments may result more of the same residential construction rather than helping create "smaller, more diverse housing types for middle-income households."

So simply offering permits allowing more missing middle housing is unlikely to change the dynamic that has led to its lack.  After all, almost the entire city has for decades been zoned to allow more residential density than exists, by far.  But instead, what has been built is what people want, what they are willing to pay for and invest in.  Further expanding the rules is unlikely to deliver the middle-income housing that is lacking.  It will not change people's desires.

The most affordable housing is that which already exists.  Recent experience amply demonstrates that all those new condos and apartments tip the affordability scale in the wrong direction.  New H.O.M.E.s will do the same.

INCOME-PRODUCING UNITS A “SOLUTION” FOR FISCALLY STRESSED HOMEOWNERS?

Adding units to an existing property throws the property owner into a competitive real estate market.

Setting aside the enormous headaches a homeowner will face trying to construct and rent additional units on their homestead lots, the investment must pay off to provide the promised security.

The per square foot or per unit cost of adding new construction around an existing home is greater than the cost of new construction on a scraped vacant lot.  The economics of labor force scale favor large developers over individual ones.  Site-specific considerations drive up costs.  The difficulty of efficiently scheduling or even finding an array of contractors for a small project drives up cost.  The purchase of relatively small lots of material drives up cost.  The construction time impact of all this drives up financing cost.  The seniors hoping to maintain their homes by building granny flats will find themselves competing in a world of real estate wolves that will likely keep the cost point for their success out of reach.

The granny flat argument is seductive to desperate seniors and homeowners wanting to host a live-in parent or adult offspring, but it is a fiction.

ENABLER FOR MASS TRANSIT?

Despite H.O.M.E. 1 and H.O.M.E. 2 being touted for enabling mass transit, none of their affected properties north of the river are near the Phase 1 Project Connect rail, and only a sliver of Travis Heights is affected along the southern Riverside Drive route.  Since the H.O.M.E. initiatives properties are virtually all distant from our planned rail lines, it is hard to see them as mass transit enablers. 

On the contrary.  The necessary condition for rail to succeed is to focus residential density near the rail stops.  H.O.M.E. does exactly the opposite, redirecting high-density development into neighborhoods. Since land will be less expensive in residential neighborhoods than along rail lines, the economics of construction will draw density AWAY from transit lines, not toward them.

But it's not about making transit viable.  It's about getting transit paid for.

In the Mayor's words: "These new density policies are essential for Austin to be competitive for the billions in federal funding needed to realize the voters’ vision for light rail."

With the affordability argument for H.O.M.E. now discredited and largely abandoned by its advocates, the rationale has shifted to getting federal funding for Project Connect.  The Mayor and Council believe that authorizing the re-building of our neighborhoods for density will convince Federal Transit Administration officials that rail success is a sure thing, prompting them to hand over the money to build it.

Savvy FTA officials are likely not so easily persuaded.  Federal guidelines for financing mass transit specify the qualifying served population be within 1/4 mile walk of a bus stop or 1/2 mile walk of a train stop.  Very, very few H.O.M.E. properties are within these radii.  Furthermore, the City's maps of ETOD districts delineate distance as the crow files, not walking distance, and they define corridors, rather than proximity to rail stops.  A great many of the properties indicated for ETOD inclusion are outside the walking access guidelines.

FTA authorities will recognize this.  They will also recognize that ETOD property designations are prospective, not actual.  The residential density the City proposes as justification for transit funding is a futuristic imagining based on lenient permitting guidelines rather than real or even realizable residential construction density.  They will not buy the charade, given all the better qualified projects they could fund.

So the justification that H.O.M.E. and ETODs will garner federal funding for Project Connect is a house of cards.

But let's remember the "voters' vision" is not what Project Connect is delivering.  After twice voting down smaller scale light rail proposals for spending too much for too little, the City decided to offer a big, glossy system for an apparently agreeable price, then take the money, cut that system in half, and tell us that was what we want.  It is not.  Perhaps we would want an alternative mass transit system.  Perhaps what we want is an integrated electric bus/van/on-demand system with minimal wait times that gets us from anywhere to where we want to go, without spending untold billions to serve 1-2% of the demand with rail and tearing up the urban fabric with development entitlements that were not part of the bargain.

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS?

Two of the direst environmental threats we face here are heat and flooding.  Both relate directly to impervious cover in our environment.

H.O.M.E. advocates say the City's impervious cover limits are mostly retained.  But the simple fact is that the overwhelming majority of SF-zoned, developed homes have impervious cover well under the allowed limits.  They have lawns, drought-tolerant grass, trees, gardens, plant beds, and loose greenery.

Not so for recently redeveloped lots and particularly for H.O.M.E. initiative projects.  Adding all these new units will force builders to use every scrap of impervious cover allowed.  If H.O.M.E. construction is realized, the net effect will be far more impervious cover in our urban watersheds.  We will lose much of the already inadequate protection of our creeks, rivers, and trees.

More impervious cover and more dwellings will create heat islands, which require more A/C, which requires more electricity, which consumes more non-renewables and increases power bills.  It implies greater potential for flooding that destroys homes and causes greatly increased insurance rates. (Have you checked yours lately?) It implies unfiltered, polluted groundwater, which compromises health and increases the cost of wastewater treatment, at taxpayer expense, of course.   At scale it requires retrofitting the city's drainage systems to handle the increased runoff, a huge tax/ratepayer expense that would otherwise not be necessary.  It implies kids having no place to play outdoors.

Have the great Shoal Creek and Onion Creek floods, the savage wildfires, and the cost of the Waller Creek Project taught us nothing?

DISCOURAGE PROLIFERATION OF MCMANSIONS?

Again, City staff has pointed out here that the H.O.M.E. initiative fails to include size restrictions known as McMansion standards.

Nothing in the H.O.M.E. initiatives restricts the construction of McMansions.  The initiative does attempt to provide alternative construction options for speculative developers.  But the people buying McMansions are homeowners, not developers.  If this is the kind of home they want, this is the kind of home they will build.  If anything, the relaxed development code rules on setbacks and height make it easier, not harder, to wedge single-family residential monstrosities into legacy neighborhoods.

So What Is the AOOF Vision, Anyway?

If it is not affordable housing for either the poor or middle-income, if it supports neither viability nor federal funding for Project Connect rail, if it is a pipe dream of granny flats, does not deter McMansion building, and contributes to environmental degradation, what is it for?

From the looks of it, THERE IS NO VISION.

Is it just possible that Austin, having been hyped into the international spotlight as a high tech boom town, looks like fertile ground for investment banks, REITs, and multi-national development firms to plow under and rebuild?  Our 21st Century economy has certainly given them the wealth to enable that endeavor and the means to wage a public relations holy war to convince us that our entire land use history has been a mistake from which only laissez-faire, unregulated development can save us.  But their only interest in our city is to reap financial reward.

Is it possible that the big money has correctly seen that our luxury condo market is maxed out for the moment, so it is time to scrape our neighborhoods for cheaper land to re-develop?

Is it likely that our recent influx of newcomers can be convinced to overthrow the community ethos that created the Austin they wanted to move to, somehow thinking that the magic of our city could survive without its underpinnings?

If none of the stated reasons for H.O.M.E. and ETODs hold water, we should dig to determine what interests are really behind all this and decide whether those interests really align with ours.  From whom has the clamor for all this come?  Have you heard your neighbors shouting that they want a three-story complex overlooking their back yard, or to live in the shadow of a 120 foot tall building just 50 feet away?

Is the AOOF vision just to enable those with big money to make bigger money?

Who benefits?  Who pays the cost?

Even if in defiance of the evidence the initiatives lead to more compact housing, what will be the cost?

One cost will be higher taxes.

The City staff acknowledge this: "Displacement pressure from property tax may increase as well."  Increasing the housing capacity of land will let it sell for more on the market.  As these sales occur, tax appraisals on comparable, single-family lots will rise accordingly, whether they are redeveloped or not.  With that comes higher taxes.

State law would argue this increase in appraisals need not wait for market activity.  The law requires land to be appraised at "highest and best use".  Highest and best use is defined by development capacity, and Council is radically increasing that capacity by fiat.

But what about the added cost of infrastructure?  All this re-development will require re-built water and wastewater infrastructure to handle previously unforeseen capacity.  It will require previously unneeded infrastructure to generate and deliver electricity.  New parkland will be required to maintain public health.  With central city land nearly all consumed, its price will be extremely dear, the more so because the legislature demolished our parkland dedication funding stream related to new subdivisions.

The initiative to abolish on-site parking requirements means our neighborhood streets will become parking lots, congested, unattractive, and unsafe for walking.  Will we fund the thousands of miles of sidewalks missing from the core neighborhoods to replace them?  Will the cars parked in new newly allowed 15' driveways block the sidewalks?

Then there is the soft cost, the loss of trust in our government.

Austinites have forever been able to make the most important investments of their lives, homes reflecting their lifestyles and aspirations, based on the protections afforded by the Land Development Code.  We've never had to rely, like Houston does, on safety nets of deed restrictions, so we've never protected ourselves with them.  The LDC is effectively a covenant that the City has made with property owners.  By stripping the protections of the LDC, the City is leaving property owners defenseless.  It's a betrayal of the highest order, a promise that the City keeps only until we have bought in and that that the City willfully breaks once we're committed.

All these costs will be borne by us, the residents, not by the investors who are feasting on the red meat of our neighborhoods.

Add to this the broken promises of the Waller Creek Project, the Waterfront Overlay, the Project Connect bait-and-switch, the preposterously expensive $800 million IH-35 cap-and-stitch scheme to jam recreational space into a pollution-choked zone, and boondoggles like the $1.6 billion convention center expansion that diverts tourism and community amenity money to enrich multi-national hotel owners.  Why should we trust our government?

So what is to be done?  

This City Council has already made clear they are going all the way down this path, no matter what anyone says or does.  They will not consider trying it in some areas or with some part of the scheme to see how it works.  They have achieved their electoral moment and are taking no prisoners.

The only recourse is to dump as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, and try to somehow mitigate the damage they have done.