By: Council Members Delia Garza, Sabino “Pio” Renteria, Greg Casar, and Jimmy Flannigan

Austin, Can We Talk?

It’s time for an open and honest conversation about Austin’s housing and transportation crisis. It’s also time to reject toxic rhetoric and focus on solutions. Austinites deserve better.

Let’s get real about CodeNEXT: Our current land-use code is broken, and we need to fix it. A city’s land-use code determines what can be built and where. Any comprehensive rewrite of something so important is going to be controversial.

We get it. An overhaul this massive is prone to generate anxiety, frustration, and even distrust. Every major city in the country that has gone through it can tell you. Ask Miami, Albuquerque, Denver, Seattle, or Portland: When it comes to land-use code changes, political divisions emerge.

An Honest Conversation

Truth be told: Even the most seasoned land-use expert may feel confusion when examining our current Frankenstein monster of a code, cobbled together over a period of 30 years. And fixing it requires open conversation.

However, rather than engaging in a positive manner, there are some who have instead chosen to emulate the strategies of exaggeration and distraction — so trendy in national politics today — by spreading disinformation about this process.

When the first draft of CodeNEXT was released, before the community at-large had an opportunity to digest the lengthy document, a few groups distributed materials that used harrowing images of menacing bulldozers and wrecking balls.

Hyped graphics and incendiary headlines may make waves and jaunty comment sections on social media, but ultimately, they hinder our ability to have necessary and productive conversations about the real issues that impact us all.

The misdirection is ironic: When folks blatantly attack the CodeNEXT process with vague, misleading statements, they are actually pointing out the very problems we have right now. Hyped up arguments saying that CodeNEXT will:

- Pave over everything we love around Austin

- Ramp up taxes and rents to unprecedented levels

- Fill our streets up with cars

- Increase flooding

- Destroy, demolish, or wreck our neighborhoods’ character

… are wrong. It is our current code that has exacerbated the congestion, flooding, displacement, and economic segregation issues in our city. These are exactly the problems we have an opportunity to address through CodeNEXT.

The truth is, the fear mongering is not coming from a majority of Austinites, but from a few very well-positioned and historically amplified voices — loaded with ideological rhetoric, but lacking specific, realistic policy proposals.

Facts About Growth

Let’s talk about population growth. Austin’s population is growing, and since the city’s inception, the population has doubled every 25 years. The question before us is whether or not we want our population to be increasingly segregated and sprawled, or more integrated.

Here are three interesting facts about Austin’s projected growth:

- The majority of our future growth is comprised of people of color

- Each year, about 20,000 to 30,000 kids are born across the city

- As our population boomed from 2000 to 2010, the population in many central and west Austin neighborhoods decreased. (Decreased!)

However, new housing is built primarily in the outer edges of town and beyond. Contrary to what you may have heard, the vast majority of single-family houses being demolished in our community are not being demolished because of a population increase or an increase in density. In fact, 71% of single-family houses demolished in the last few years have been replaced with just another, often larger, single-family house.

For whatever fears people may have about population growth, simply preserving single-family zoning has not, and will not, stop it. This lack of housing options pushes the growing population — our kids, our friends, our colleagues — outside of neighborhoods with access to good schools, transportation, and essential amenities and into the sprawling suburbs. Unless, of course, you have more money than the average Austinite.

People-Based Communities

Another phrase that is often used is “community character.” However, community character does not mean the same thing to all people. For some, community character means a single-family house, well-kept yard, and white picket fence. To us, community means people, not floor-to-area-ratio.

People in a community may share common cultural ties (background, places of worship, and interests); or be broadly diverse in race, ethnicity, age, and sexual-orientation. For us, community means strong ties between neighbors, the ability to take care of extended family as they age, and to accommodate young families as they grow. As your district council members, we are elected to represent a diverse community, and we are committed to improving the quality of life for people, not for buildings.

Homes Not Houses

It is concerning when talk about homes focuses only on houses. Apartments, condos, duplexes, garage apartments, mobile homes, and townhomes are homes, too. To us, a home is defined by the people living in the home, not the building type. There are all different kinds of Austin families, who need all different kinds of housing options.

Some people view family as limited to the nuclear family structure. That leaves out a lot of people striving to find community. How about those attracted to Austin for its open-heartedness, acceptance, diversity, and opportunity? For example, members of the LGBTQ+ or creative communities, or those who have immigrated from other countries; they come here to find a safe place to be themselves. And for some people, creating very close-knit social structures or families is a question of survival. Other people might see these new families and dismiss them as too many unrelated individuals together in one home.

We see families defined in much broader dimensions, as folks set up homes to keep their loved ones near. For the variety of cultures and family-structures expressed in Austin, a typical 2-bedroom/2-bathroom cannot always work for multi-generational living. In our lower-income neighborhoods, oftentimes two families will split a single apartment or four families will live in one duplex, just to make ends meet.

For decades, two forms of housing have dominated the Austin landscape: massive rental complexes and single-family structures. But these haven’t properly served the wide-ranging housing needs in our city. In fact, this has led to an increasing gap in opportunity and has pushed some people beyond our city limits — as has happened with so many from our black community being forced out of the core of Austin. If Austin is to live up to its values of being a diverse and welcoming city, we must work to provide more housing choices to meet these needs and help all our communities thrive.

Solutions

It’s not all doom and gloom! We are encouraged by concrete proposals recently made by affordable housing groups in the spirit of improving CodeNEXT. We believe that instead of marginally increasing affordable housing for low and moderate income people, we can use CodeNEXT to create the opportunity for tens of thousands more homes available to the working class. We can also continue to work outside of the Code to fully fund our existing affordable housing trust fund and pass an affordable housing bond to create deeper levels of affordability.

The Planning Commission and the Zoning & Platting Commission are considering bold amendments to our Code proposed by the community and by experts to increase housing near transit routes, decrease the demolition of low-income housing, and create more missing middle housing types. We encourage the commissions to make thoughtful amendments to the Code based on valid and constructive critiques.

Moving Forward

Austin can do better than an outdated land-use code that discriminates, excludes, and holds us back. As we have watched families be displaced and pushed out to the edges of town, we have resolved to take action. We can’t wish our way out of our current crisis. It’s time for a change.

We need to have serious conversations about what that change looks like. There are many paths unfolding before us and even more difficult decisions to make. At the heart of the matter is a question: What kind of city do we want Austin to be? We need to decide how committed we are to the shared values we claim to embrace.

As these conversations take place, we should expect basic respect for the facts. We cannot allow those who benefit from the status quo to continue to mislead with disinformation and hyperbole.

The four of us are committed to engaging in honest and open conversation with diverse communities and welcome constructive critique. With your help, we can elevate the discourse, fix the failed policies of the past, and create a land-use code that provides opportunities for all Austinites.