The triumph of the YIMBYs

After listening to 14-and-a-half hours of public testimony at 1 a.m. on Friday morning, City Council members recessed for ten hours and returned to the dais at 11 a.m. to quickly approved a raft of major zoning changes that would have been unfathomable only two years earlier.

After years of watching Councils try and fail to pass far more modest improvements to Austin's backwards land development code, it's hard to process the magnitude of the changes passed on Friday. The whole thing is surreal.

And knock on wood, of course. As I'll discuss below, one should never rule out a legal challenge to anything good that happens in this town.

But let's review...

Minimizing the minimum

Austin's minimum lot size for been reduced from 5,750 sq ft to 1,800 sq ft.

The latter figure was a compromise proposed by Mayor Kirk Watson –– in between the 2,000 minimum proposed by city staff and the 1,500 minimum endorsed by the Planning Commission. This means that, at least in theory, even the smallest single-family lots in Austin can be divided into three new lots, although each of those will be limited to one unit and subject to the 45% impervious cover limit.

This puts Austin within spitting range of Houston, whose 1,400 sq ft minimum lot size, introduced in the late 90's, is credited with unleashing a boom of lower-cost townhomes in some of the city's most desirable central neighborhoods.

Much more housing becomes 'compatible'

Council took a big axe to Austin's notorious compatibility regulations, which exist separately from zoning and limit the height of commercial and multifamily buildings based on their distance from a single-family home.

There will naturally be a lot of focus on the fact that the maximum reach of compatibility has been reduced from 540 ft to 75 ft. But what matters more are the changes made at shorter distances. Under the old regs, you needed to be 300 feet away from a single-family property line in order to build a 60 ft of height. Now you can achieve that height as long as you're at least 50 ft away.

Beyond the obvious housing and environmental benefits, I'm eager to see the cultural and aesthetic effect this has on our major corridors, many of which have for years been kept ugly and inhospitable by a regulation that is ironically intended to protect neighborhood character.

eTOD: Getting high on transit –– a Watson compromise

Some confused opponents of land use reform seem to believe that any change to the land development code is due to Project Connect. For the record, the light-touch density promoted by the HOME initiative is hardly the stuff transit planners dream about. The Equitable Transit Oriented Overlay District absolutely is.

Council ultimately approved an eTOD ordinance that was less ambitious than staff's original proposal. That's due to an amendment offered by Watson that reduced the maximum height for developments more than 1/4 mile away from the future light rail line from 120 ft to 90 ft.

TO BE CLEAR: this does not mean that any property within a half mile of the Project Connect route can go to 90 ft and those within a quarter-mile can go to 120 feet. The eTOD applies to 1,100 acres of properties that already have commercial or multifamily zoning. If those properties participate in the eTOD density bonus, they can go up to 60 feet higher than their previous zoning allowed –– up to a max of 120 ft or 90 ft, based on the location.

A three-month delay, a six-month delay

A number of groups that raised concerns about gentrification in minority communities urged Council to adopt an "equity overlay" that would either exempt certain neighborhoods from the reforms or delay them. Some of these groups (PODER, GAVA, Community Powered ATX) are against any reform, but others (the Urban League, the Austin Justice Coalition) are sympathetic to reform but nevertheless vulnerable, in my view, to the unfounded claim that allowing smaller homes or more homes may cause displacement.

Anyway...Council approved an amendment carried by CM Jose Velasquez that delays the implementation of the minimum lot size reform in areas of the city designated as gentrifying or at risk of gentrification according to a six-year-old UT study. It also asks city staff to study the potential for a permanent "equity overlay" in these areas.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the city, the reform goes into effect in three months. It will be interesting to see what staff brings back on the equity overlay. I don't think large minimum lot sizes is any more helpful to the east side than the west side, but I fear staff will feel the need to come up with a more "nuanced" position.

I have a lot of issues with the concept of the "equity overlay," which I'll discuss in greater depth in the coming weeks.

So...when's the lawsuit coming?

That HOME Phase 1 has been alive for five months without drawing a legal challenge is encouraging, but there's always the chance that the city screwed up a technicality on this much larger effort. But there are no obvious legal grounds for a suit.

Council jumped through all of the superfluous hoops (mailing notice, holding a pointless joint hearing with the Planning Commission etc) that recent court decisions have deemed necessary. Plus, the zoning changes were approved by a 9-2 super-majority, the threshold needed to render a valid petition moot.

In NIMBYland, the dream of yet another anti-housing lawsuit is most definitely alive, if poorly defined.

We're never going back

On YIMBY Twitter, there was a conversation about why Austin has been able to go so hard, so fast on pro-housing reforms while many other politically similar cities are still struggling to legalize garage apartments.

There are a variety of factors that explain the decline of NIMBY Austin and the rise of YIMBY Austin –– the change to district-based representation and move to November elections, among others –– but I would caution against assuming that Council will always be dominated by housing enthusiasts. The current crop of pro-housing Council members weren't elected based on their housing positions alone. Many of those who cast ballots for them couldn't pick their Council member out of a lineup, let alone describe their housing positions.

But what I can tell you is that –– absent a legal challenge –– the reforms will not be undone. It is very unlikely that there will ever be a majority on Council, let a lone a supermajority, to wind back the entitlements that Council just approved.

To understand why, consider a question I asked the other day on Twitter:

My question to those who say that "upzoning" causes price increases.

If that's the case, then shouldn't you be advocating for downzoning? Prohibiting multifamily housing entirely? Increasing the minimum lot size to 10,000 sq ft? Barring ADUs entirely?

It's a contradiction that supporters of the ancien régime have never been able to honestly confront.

The only argument of theirs that is consistent and coherent is "neighborhood character," but the new forms of housing enabled by these changes will become part of the neighborhood character. Just as residents of Hyde Park and Clarksville don't freak out about the decades-old apartment buildings sprinkled throughout their neighborhood, nor will the Zilkerites of 2035 be fuming about three-unit lots.

And perhaps more importantly, just as downtown and West Campus will never revert to their pre-high rise form, nor will the mid-rise apartments enabled by compatibility reforms and eTOD be knocked down and replaced with single-story gas stations. And for that we should rejoice.

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