Do you regard this Austin duplex with respect, or disgust? I’d probably paint it a nice avocado green. Image: Whitworth Homes
The transformative land use changes passed by Austin City Council last week didn’t come out of nowhere, although the possibility of their adoption felt like wild fantasy only a few short years ago. The speed of Austin’s changing local attitude towards density and zoning reform makes a bit more sense in the face of rising housing costs — by 2020, even relatively high earners started experiencing the effects of our local shortage, and that includes city employees and members of the local media. In a city where roughly 55 percent of residents are renters, the lack of convincing explanations for questions like “Why is it illegal to build apartments in so many places in Austin” led plenty of people to care about boring old land use politics for the first time. As our esteemed colleague Dan Keshet points out in the tweet thread below, the recent success of local pro-housing policies also took more than a little bit of luck:
1. Austin’s charter reform moving elections to November of even years made an enormous difference. Pro-development voters are lower propensity. December runoffs are way less pro-development than November generals.
— Dan Keshet (@DanKeshet) May 20, 2024
The “Big Three” in the package of reforms approved last week start with the HOME Initiative’s headline-grabbing reduction of the city’s minimum lot size from a whopping 5,750 square feet down to a more urban 1,800 square feet per single-family home, allowing higher-density neighborhoods closer to something like the small-lot homes in Mueller and providing many existing homeowners with the ability to build additional units on their land. The second, more subtle change is the adjustment of the city’s residential compatibility rules, which previously limited the height of apartments and other buildings located within 540 feet of single-family properties — as others have pointed out, that’s the length of 1.5 football fields, an absurdly restrictive “force field” compared with the regulations of peer cities, and estimated by city staff to suppress approximately 64,000 homes. The new citywide regulations will reduce the compatibility zone to a much more reasonable 75 feet.
Austin’s Single-Family Zoning Reform Heads for Public Hearing
The third change established the city’s new ETOD zoning district, or “equitable transit-oriented development,” designed to incentivize residential density and affordable housing within a half-mile of Project Connect’s planned rail stations. The program, not unlike the city’s old vertical mixed-use zoning incentives, would allow non-single-family properties inside the bonus area to build mixed-use multifamily projects rising up to 120 feet, assuming developers provide 12 percent of the residential units at rates affordable to earners making 50 percent of the median family income, or 15 percent of units at 60 percent MFI. Spend some time digging into this draft map of parcels where city staff recommend applying the ETOD overlay and you’ll see its massive growth potential in regions like North University, tracts in the central neighborhoods facing North Lamar Boulevard, downtown’s “Lawyer District,” and more:
Image: City of Austin Planning Department
Even as people who intentionally try to keep up with this stuff, it’s hard to wrap our heads around the potential of these changes. But which one is the most important? According to our super-secret sources inside and out of the city, the really transformative policy tweak is the adjustment of compatibility regulations citywide — the development potential of HOME’s minimum lot size changes is somewhat limited by a 45 percent impervious cover maximum, and ETOD zoning feels precarious as Project Connect faces serious legal challenges. They’re all going to help in the long run, but the immediate housing yield of projects formerly limited in height by even a distant proximity to single-family homes is a much more simple and direct benefit.
Trying to figure out which policy change will have the most immediate effect underlines the real lesson of the city’s housing situation, which many urban advocates understandably don’t want to dwell on too much in the face of the city’s genuinely unprecedented push for land use reform. The hard truth is that the damage from years of inaction is already done. For many Austinites facing housing scarcity, the density and affordability unlocked by these changes will arrive years too late to save them from displacement. Ironically enough, the relentless drive to keep Austin unchanged for so many years has already transformed the face of the city by preventing so many good people from making their lives here. Even these latest reforms could be reversed, as the city’s old guard files lawsuit after lawsuit in the hopes of pulling up the ladder one last time. But no matter how hard the do-nothing crowd fights to bring back the 1980s, it’s obvious something’s changed here in Austin — the notion of building more homes on less land doesn’t freak people out quite so much these days.
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