Austin’s city demographer was ordered to alter a city report last week after critics of the Austin City Council’s overhaul of the land development code pounced on the report as proof the effort was unnecessary.

In his latest quarterly report on new multifamily housing developments in Austin, demographer Ryan Robinson concluded that sustained growth in the sector contradicted "the false narrative that housing production within the city is somehow severely constrained by the city's land development code."

"And even if the code were to be dramatically opened up with vast increases in entitlements," Robinson’s analysis continued. "I'm just not sure we would see levels of production much above what we're currently seeing — the pipeline of production must be nearing a maximum threshold of sorts."

Robinson’s analysis could be explosive because it directly conflicts with a central premise of the controversial effort to update codes governing what can be built and where in Austin: that the city’s housing affordability crisis is exacerbated by a decades-old code that is preventing the creation of much-needed housing amid a population boom.

One day after Robinson’s report garnered the attention of opposition group Community Not Commodity, any mention of the land development code was scrubbed from his analysis.

Now, some critics of the land development code are clamoring that the city censored Robinson to hide information that proves why they believe the overhaul is unnecessary.

"This is a major reason the community lacks trust in the code rewrite," said Fred Lewis, Community Not Commodity’s leader. "The city’s ’alternative facts’ approach is expected for Donald Trump, but not here."

Jerry Rusthoven, assistant director of the city’s Planning and Zoning Department, ordered Robinson to delete a portion of his analysis from the report and made Robinson refer all inquiries to Rusthoven.

When Rusthoven spoke to the American-Statesman on Monday, he said he ordered Robinson to remove any mentions of a so-called false narrative in Robinson’s report because it was not germane.

"The purpose of the report is to analyze trends on certain segments and trends in developments," Rusthoven said. "I thought the two sentences that talked about the land development code were not relevant to the purposes of the report."

The City Council is in the process of approving the rewrite of the code, something that has been in the works since 2012. The effort could reshape the face of Austin for decades to come.

A central goal of the City Council is to increase the city’s potential for new housing units by 405,000 units in hopes that a third of them, or about 135,000 units, would actually be built in the next 10 years. Much of the focus for new housing has been on multifamily housing with an emphasis on using the code to encourage affordable housing.

But Robinson’s report showed that for the last nine months of 2019, developers indicated intentions to build 18,000 multifamily units in site plans — building plans submitted to the city that mark a significant milestone in a development’s creation.

The numbers for the last three quarters of 2019 are likely record-breaking, according to data going back to 1992. The second quarter of 2019 recorded the largest gain ever in multifamily housing, followed closely by the fourth and third quarters respectively. The fourth-largest gain in new multifamily housing was in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Robinson also estimated that 74,266 new multifamily housing units are in the pipeline, counting developments under construction, approved site plans and new site plans.

His report called the amount of new housing "simply phenomenal," but Robinson said his findings do not fully undermine the land development code’s rewrite.

"It is not meant to be incendiary, but it is hard not to comment," Robinson told the American-Statesman before Rusthoven ordered him to cease speaking with the media.

"How can we have a land development code have that much constraint to it when we have this much construction going on?" he said. "We have enough housing capacity, but it is not in the right place and it is not the right type."

Council Member Kathie Tovo said that Robinson, who has worked for the city for about 30 years, is a "very valuable" demographer. Tovo disagreed with the decision to remove Robinson’s analysis.

"For various reasons I would have kept it in," Tovo said. "It is creating a lot of concern in the community about information and the shaping of information before it reaches the public."