Community Impact: How Austin is responding to a critical audit of the city’s neighborhood planning process

The Austin Neighborhoods Council, which advocates for neighborhood associations, plans to submit a formal response to the audit in the coming days.

ANC President David King said he believes city planners should play a limited role in the neighborhood-planning process, and the residents who live in the planned areas should have the greatest say in shaping it.

“Fundamentally, we believe it’s important to have a bottom-up neighborhood process with the city,” he said. “I think we’re not achieving that goal in any significant way.”

Friends of Austin Neighborhoods, another organization that advocates for the city’s residents, is also drawing up a response to the audit in the next week or two.

FAN member Pete Gilcrease, who is helping draft recommendations for improving the planning process, said he wants to do away with contact teams.

“People that live in the neighborhood, they mean well, but they don’t have city planning experience,” he said.

Gilcrease said he would rather see professional city planners gather input from neighbors but ultimately make recommendations to City Council based on what they think is best for the city.

Dan Keshet, who attended his first NPCT meeting in his new Greater South River City neighborhood as a non-voting member in November, said he sees a flaw in the neighborhood-planning process.

“The idea of contact teams is to create more of a participatory, local democracy,” he said. “Instead of just having 11 people at City Council making a decision, you have people who have more intimate knowledge of the area, and you have a wider participation.”

The problem, he said, is limited participation and representation of the entire neighborhood prevents contact teams from truly serving in an active government role.

“If [participatory democracy] is the goal, and you want to be making these bodies mostly a body of decision makers, then I think that this audit comes into play a lot,” he said.

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This is great! Thank you @Pete_Gilcrease and @dkesh for your leadership!

In trying to figure out how we can have such a big gap in perspectives here, it occurs to me that a starting point is “neighbourhood” - what is it? The English are clever.

One definition is the area surrounding you. The State of Texas follows that one with the valid petition zone of 200 feet surrounding a property, which the City of Austin then validates with a 500 foot notice area for any proposed zoning changes. Everybody has a different experience of “neighborhood”, and that is reality.

The second definition is more of a fixed boundaries concept, it is convenient, simplistic for communicating, but it is an artificial construct, representative of the life experience of those in the borders “interior” at best, and given the interior in Austin is mostly lower density / single family use, that is who largely has represented “neighborhood” views in the past. Those who live in “transition zones”, which tends to be more dense uses, renters, etc - their voices are largely marginalized in the process because their “neighborhood” borders do not extend to their brothers / sisters across the street in the adjacent transition zone. Otherwise - heaven forbid - they would call the shots.

Austin Neighborhood planning areas are to some extent the quintessential exercise in gerrymandering. Then we wonder why we are the most segregated major City in the country? Austin State Hospital is part of Hyde Park? On what basis - can anyone there vote in “the NA”? Control against “them” moving in. Shoal Creek Blvd is part of Judges Hill? On what basis - can anyone there vote in “the NA”? Control against more of “them” moving in. Enough already. Strong Townes is providing a 3-D view of Austin in their work, I understand the City is doing more in that area, it’s the 21st Century after all, let’s not get stuck in the prior one.