New CodeNEXT Petition: Make Austin Diverse Again!


#1

Please sign & share: https://www.change.org/p/save-austin-s-middle-class-make-austin-diverse-again

To the Mayor and City Council,

At the most recent State of the City Address (January 28, 2017), Mayor Adler remarked, “We know that diversity makes us stronger, that taking care of our environment is to our credit and not to our detriment. We’re laid back and focused. We’re willing to fail so long as we learn quickly and keep trying. The character of Austin is important to us for a reason. It’s about a quality of life where we don’t thrive despite our weird, diverse, and inclusive values – we thrive because of them!”

Due to the current land development code, Austin is experiencing an unparalleled housing crisis in which we are losing our class and racial diversity at an alarming rate, with the majority of Austinites (being renters) bearing the brunt of the costs. If the latest preliminary maps for CodeNEXT are approved by Austin City Council, the zoning for much of Austin’s core neighborhoods will be composed of the same (such as Neighborhood Conservation Combining Districts or NCCDs) in the current code which have proven to inhibit affordability, class and racial diversity. NCCDs are zoning overlays that override city zoning laws. NCCDs applied to Hyde Park (and other core neighborhoods within Austin) are a main reason much of current housing stock has become out-of-reach for nearly all Austinites, save upper middle-class and wealthy homeowners.

Hyde Park and many other core neighborhoods were founded as a product of Jim Crow segregation. Not only that, but the segregationist founder M.M. Shipe has the most prominent park in the neighborhood still bearing his name (Shipe Park). Allowing more affordable housing types in Austin such as missing middle housing that would allow a greater diversity of people to afford to live in Austin. Missing middle housing are housing types such as garage apartments, smaller homes on smaller lots, townhouses, bungalow courts, and smaller scale apartments.

While Austin is engulfed in a housing emergency, preserving only single-family zoning in core neighborhoods create de-facto zoning barriers to class and race. That’s not a zoning code. It’s a betrayal of Austin values.

To ensure diversity in Austin, we ask the Mayor and City Council enable the following in CodeNEXT:

Allow missing middle housing throughout Austin.

Lower minimum lot size to 1000 square feet & minimum lot width to 15 feet.

Lower minimum front, rear, & side setbacks across LDR, T3, T4 and T5 zoning categories & within transect zones.

Eliminate undefined housing conservation districts (such as NCCDs), except historic districts.

Enforce “compact and connected” wherever possible in land development code.

Austinites have a responsibility to break the horrific legacy of Jim Crow and have a zoning code which adheres to the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan for a thriving middle and working-class and Strategic Austin Housing Blueprint 10-year goals to enable every Austinite to achieve housing security.

According to the Obama White House Housing Development Toolkit on land use regulations, “when new housing development is limited region-wide, and particularly precluded in neighborhoods with political capital to implement even stricter local barriers, the new housing that does get built tends to be disproportionally concentrated in low-income communities of color, causing displacement and concerns of gentrification in those neighborhoods. Rising rents region-wide can exacerbate that displacement.”

Austin must say no to zoning Donald Trump would approve! Let’s make Austin diverse again!

(Endorsed by Austin Affordable Neighborhoods Coalition.)


#2

Who is the individual that wrote this letter? How were they funded?

There are so much misinformation and language in this anonymous letter that promotes real estate speculation that I thought it would be useful to clarify a few things.

There is already great density in the Heritage Neighborhood where I live. While there could be more racial diversity I do not think it is a legacy of Jim Crow as the writer suggests, it is purely economics. While the real estate speculators of the late nineteenth century may have seen segregation as a selling point for Hyde Park when I moved here in 1975 Hyde Park was largely run down with speculators tearing down Victorian era houses to build cheap apartments for student housing. In 1975, my first apartment living on my own was a room (with a shoddy kitchen and bathroom) in an old house on 21st Street that rented for $70 a month all bills paid. Congress Avenue in the city center was a ghost town in 1975 with no residential apartments and businesses having left for the suburbs and the “new” phenomena of office parks and shopping malls.

Gentrification came slowly in Hyde Park, Hancock, Aldridge Place and Heritage not as an act against diversity but to save the old neighborhood from further destruction. The same cheaply built apartments are still in these neighborhoods. The same garage apartments are still there. Part of what happened was that living in the suburban sprawl of distant suburbs without a master plan for traffic mitigation became so onerous over time that many Austinites wanted to move back into the inner core of the city. Keep in mind, at the turn of this century taxes and property values were such that students couldn’t even live near the UT campus any longer which brought brought another wave of real estate speculation in West campus where old houses and small apartments were torn down and replaced with high-rise and mid-rise apartments.

The changes that are driving this next phase of development are rooted in economics not altruistic ideas about providing affordable housing. The city has grown and continues to grow, there is not enough housing, taxes have gone up, and the market has driven up rents. “Middle housing” or affordable housing is not going to happen in Heritage or any part of North campus. The market determines prices and the speculators are poised to make money by breaking up what is left of the old historic neighborhoods in central Austin using density code changes as their ticket. Any property in decent condition in central Austin can bring $1,000 per bedroom in rent today.

We have “garage apartments, smaller homes on smaller lots, townhouses, bungalow courts, and smaller scale apartments” in Heritage right now. But if you will look at the new houses built at King and 33rd Street, these are selling for more than $800K each on reduced size lots. Ostensibly these were built as single family houses but the potential is there for $1,000 per bedroom rentals.

I have lived in Austin for more than 42 years. I came here to attend the University of Texas in 1975 and I have lived in the North campus area for all but about 10 of those years. I currently live in the Heritage Neighborhood in a beautifully restored 1907 house on 31 1/2 Street. I have lived on Speedway, Helms Street (twice), 22nd 1/2 Street, and 21st Street. I have also lived in the Hancock Neighborhood, South of the Colorado River and West of Lamar but have always felt most at home in the North campus area. We need the city to protect old neighborhoods not sell them out to real estate speculators. CodeNEXT as it stands now is making a gift or Heritage to the monied interests.

Richard Whittington
614 W. 31 1/2 Street


#3

@Richard_Whittington I wrote younreaponse to your NextDOOR post as well. But to reiterate, it’s not anonymous.

It was started by Hyde Park resident Tommy Ates. He used his full name when registering for the Friends of Heritage Forum because we ask that all posters do so. You can see his full name by clicking on the user name and looking at his user profile card.

You can read all about the petition and Tommy in this Austin Monitor article:http://ow.ly/b3FJ30cBEF2

If you want to ask who started another petition and posit conspiracy theories about that group, I’d suggest looking into the petition that opposes transect zones and CodeNEXT.

I’ll address more of your statements on the drivers of real estate and housing markets when I have time time to gather resources and am not on my phone.