Adam Greenfield in front of his bulletin board in 2021. Image: Adam Greenfield / Twitter
Growing up in Austin, the bulletin board at our neighborhood park was sort of like the early days of social media — you’d find dog-walking gigs, garage sale flyers, and considerably weirder stuff long before anyone was trying to go viral. Most people love this sort of community-minded design feature in the abstract, but the Terminator-like gaze of city code has no time for your aw-shucks sentimentality if you build a bulletin board in front of your house. Austin resident Adam Greenfield, best known recently for his organizing work with Rethink35, found this out the hard way in 2021:
In 2021, I created a community bulletin board outside my house near a street corner.
Soon, it became popular: Kids hung art, there was a Día de los Muertos alter, and it became a rest spot.
Sadly, I had to remove it: Austin Code bans such boards within 45′ of intersections. 😡 pic.twitter.com/1rGDb4TknH
— Adam Greenfield (@agreenfield319) February 15, 2024
There are reasonable objections to this kind of thing, if you think with the cold logic of a municipality instead of a person. It’s technically trash against the public right of way, it could be distracting for drivers, and allowing it might enable some sort of slippery slope where people are eventually building hot dog stands and carnival rides on the sidewalk without oversight. This is all ridiculous, of course, but you can see how it might happen when concerns of liability and blight run up against the inflexibility of a land development code drafted when Cyndi Lauper was still cranking out hits.
Easily the best location for a bulletin board is near a street corner, to maximize its exposure to passersby.
That’s why nationally and globally so many boards are near street corners. See these photos from Portland and from England, Spain, and Mexico. pic.twitter.com/JEXXcayFJT
— Adam Greenfield (@agreenfield319) February 15, 2024
We nearly suspect Greenfield of doing this on purpose, since it’s almost too perfect of an example on how outdated and inflexible local land use policies originally intended to rationally plan out the development of cities like Austin are far more likely these days to prevent good things from happening. Broadly popular urban design elements like neighborhood grocery stores, missing middle housing, and the humble community bulletin board aren’t more prolific in Austin because in our haste to ensure single-family homeowners didn’t see apartments in their neighborhoods, we ended up regulating a bunch of other things people tend to enjoy out of existence. All of this zoning helped make housing expensive, but it also made the city less fun.
The great news is, more people than ever in Austin recognize the limitations of our current code, so things don’t have to be this way much longer. Big, difficult changes like allowing more homes to be built on one lot — as expected in the pending second phase of the city’s HOME initiative — are obviously at the top of the list. But that doesn’t mean we can’t think about the smaller, easier changes, the little things that unlock little benefits like Greenfield’s bulletin board. When you add all those changes together you end up with a better place to live, and it’s easy to imagine the city legalizing something like this with a few guidelines to keep them safe. Why don’t you send an email to City Council and let them know you’d like one in your neighborhood?
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