@clay , the majority of AISD students (aka families) live in multi-family housing. A strong case can be made that expensive single-family housing is what’s pushing families out of Austin, and if we want families we need to replace it with more multi-family housing (like duplexs, four-plexes, and small apartment complexes).
I think it’s really important for you to realize that everyone in this thread who is disagreeing with you is a neighbor and part of a neighborhood. So you’re a very specific sort of neighborhood activist fighting for a very specific view.
I focus almost exclusively on housing affordability and making sure my neighbors can depend upon a abundant stock of affordable housing. I saw one friend get priced out of my neighborhood by a $200/month increase in rent while members of the ANC in my neighborhood were stalling an apartment complex. I go to bat for renters and home owners who can’t afford massive jumps in tax appraisals (you know what helps lower those? living next to multifamily). You’re right that I don’t advocate for single-family homeowners even though I am one. But that doesn’t mean I’m not advocating for my neighbors or neighborhood.
You don’t speak for your neighborhood. You speak for yourself and some of your neighbors. It’s important to realize the difference.
Clay, actually a lot of people say “freeze the housing stock as is.” The president of the HPNA said that Hyde Park was dense enough and that we should densify the outer edge of Austin. She may not be as tactful as others, but the end result of the neighborhood activists fighting everything that isn’t a single family detached house is that we get nothing but single family detached homes in our neighborhoods. And to be honest, I prefer her honesty. I’m getting tired of people claiming to be in favor of density but then doing everything they can to fight it.
I don’t mean to attack your character. I’m just pointing out the ‘neighborhood activists’ regularly fight every single project and always manage to find something wrong. For this reason, it’s hard to take their complaints seriously.
FAN is working hard to represent the interests of everybody since we all live in neighborhoods, not just the traditional neighborhoods activists that have the time and willingness to participate in city politics.
@tthomas48 - We seem to have gone off track from Stealth Dorm issues here. Stealth Dorms, though often treated as such by leasing agents, are not the good kind of multifamily housing. I agree, we need more multifamily housing, but it should be built to community standards that were put in place to protect the renters.
I’m not sure what “specific sort” of neighborhood activist you think I am, and what “specific view” you think I espouse, but I can tell you that I do speak for my neighborhood (North Loop) when I say we oppose Stealth Dorms. We have already voted overwhelmingly to curtail their construction, twice. We are one of the most progressive, forward-thinking, urbanist-friendly neighborhoods in the city. And we have been living with the stealth dorms and they are a nuisance. We are very open to talking about and acting in favor of densification, but that doesn’t mean densification at any cost.
@clay that’s good to hear. We hope you’ll be an ally in future ordinances that add missing middle housing into neighborhoods that have been traditionally single-family.
Part of the reason I’m not really debating the ordinance is that from the research I’m doing the ordinance appears to have had zero impact (past scoring political points), in either direction, and there may be little reason for us to even be discussing it.
If a house that allows 6 unrelated occupants is not built, where do those students go? They are going to find housing somewhere. All you seem to care about is that they are not in your neighborhood. Well they have to go somewhere, which means there is less housing stock somewhere else in Austin. That is driving up the price of your single family home whether you like it or not due to scarcity. It’s driving up your property taxes. It’s probably driving out some of your neighbors that have been there for a long time, to be replaced with someone who has more money.
Maybe all of that sounds great to you. If your stance is that you only want upper middle class families moving into your neighborhood, then say that. You are not preserving affordability by restricting housing, so you shouldn’t be saying that you are.
Here is a very simple analogy, built on noah’s argument.
Suppose there are 6 houses turning over on the market this month (tenants have left for other cities). There’s also a few new people showing up and bidding for housing in groups.
4 of these groups consist of 6 student friends looking to rent a house each. 2 are families of 4.
Under the old rules, all six groups could find housing in North Loop - 2 families each took 2 houses, and the 6 groups of students took 4 more houses. 6 houses were occupied. The market stayed pretty reasonable, as there was a demand for about as many houses as there was supply.
Now, your neighborhood activists got the occupancy limit lowered. Despite your best hints to the contrary, the students still feel as if they have a right to try to live within biking or quick bus distance of campus, so they continue to shop North Loop, but now they reorganize into groups of 4 so they don’t break the law. There are now 6 groups of students and 2 families bidding for the same 6 houses on the market.
Mike, it sounds like you are unfamiliar with the specifics of the ordinance we are talking about.** All the existing 6-person houses in Austin are grandfathered in.** That means that 6 students will be allowed to live together in those houses forever.
This is about the NEW houses that will be built in the neighborhood moving forward. We want to see houses built that will be affordable by both families and up to 4 unrelated roommates. Not just projects that will forever be student housing (stealth dorms).
Clay, I am very familiar with the grandfathering provision in the ordinance. I was simplifying the story to make it a valid analogy. Regardless of your feelings on whether simplification was correct, it is true that reducing the number of people that can fit in any dwelling, old or new, will have an impact on supply and demand and henceforth price.
Let’s be careful not to paint too broad a brush here. FANs are neighborhood activists, and we welcome an abundance and diversity of people - and the housing to accommodate them - in our neighborhoods.
How do you fight a geographical area? Or do you mean the vocal minority of residents in a neighborhood that tend to oppose change?
As others have mentioned, we all live in neighborhoods, and we all want neighborhood improvement (although some incumbents may be more in favor of “protection” than the change that improvement requires). It’s exclusionary and disenfranchising to use the term “neighborhood activist” to refer to people who mostly fight projects.
Neighbors and neighborhood activists will sometimes have different opinions on what constitutes a “bad project” or bad policy. We need to respect the diversity of views and not imply that people who favor projects that others might consider “bad” are not neighborhood activists.
I would support that. I feel like the dichotomy between SF regulations and MF regulations is unrealistic. There are many people who want to live in a quasi-MF setting, and we need a set of building and use codes that supports that kind of development.
I would like to challenge every neighborhood to identify areas beyond the main transit corridors that would be appropriate for this new zoning category. Here in North Loop, I think there are many areas where this type of housing would be appropriate, and I think many of my neighbors would be happy to upgrade our FLUM to promote that type of development in those areas.
Your latest statement is eminently reasonable. However, pursuing such an approach (which is going to be very very difficult) in an environment where occupancy limits have been lowered to 4 seems precisely backwards to me.
Occupancy limits should be lowered only AFTER sufficient interior multifamily opportunities are identified and re-regulated.
The whole group homes thing since it’s inception has disturbed me on a gut level and I have searchd for an answer as to why. Why am I so angry at folks who would use the term “kiddy kennel” or 'stealth dorm"? What underlies that rhetoric that is so disturbing and dangerous? Well if you read enough and search enough someone has an insight that gets to the heart of it. Reading “Violence and Non Violence” nailed it for me. This regulation (really all regulation) and the driving forces that created it is an example of “Structural Violence”. Think women in a male dominated society, children in an adult world, standing in line at the DMV to get a licence to drive, Bundy and his bunch in Idaho, the Occupy movement, and renters in a regulatory environment driven by homeowners and investors.
I remember the council meeting where this regulation was enacted. Someone,a lawyer,spoke and basically drew the line in the sand for council and said cross this line and interfere with our capitalist pursuits and we will litigate. So the investors were spared and the renters were thrown under the bus. There was much discussion about how to word it to make sure “unrelated” was not gonna be gay bashing. So everyone assured us that that was not the case and renters got thrown under the bus. Also to make this outrageous act more palatable and seem less onerous it had a built in shelf life. (You know, let’s put the Jews in ghetto’s that’s more humane than killing them outright.)
So here we are two years later nothing really has changed. Nothing really is better understood and the “problem” is, go figure, still here.
No mattter how you phrase it this regulation is a violation of common human rights. No homeowner should be able to decide who lives next door to them. No agency of government should enable that enforcement. Your right as a homeowner to control your environment stops at your proerty line.
If you find the fact that other human beings must cluster together to survive disturbing, then work to imorove the environment which makes such a fact necessary. The cause is not developers doing you dirty. The cause is our national monetary policy, our national trade policy, the decline in employment and a myriad of other powerful factors that no one here is talking about. Thinking regulation or zoning of any kind will change the “problem” is fanciful.
I was building “stealth dorms” in Travis Heights in the 70’s for property owners. Taking two bedroom bungalows and making them 4 bedrooms. Think council member Zimmerman was doing the same. Maybe some of you unwittingly lived in them not nowing you were the “other”. Travis Heights survived more or less intact. You moved on a bought a house.
Creating regulations to solve your personal need to protect your investment will ultimately not do that. It will only do more violence to the least powerful amongst us.
This regulation should be removed from the books, period.
A better zoning approach to shared housing is a much better approach than lowering occupancy limits. Fundamentally, the problem was not caused by 5 or more people (young, old, Frat boys, gentle Buddhists, musicians, coders, state employees, empty nesters, et al) splitting the rent and, predictably, has not been any way addressed by lowering the limit.
What the occupancy limit does do, however, is cut off that avenue for the development of affordable housing options in a city where people who don’t work in my industry (tech) are finding it difficult to afford to live.
If I wasn’t able to split the rent with four other people (all of us went to school and worked in the live music scene at the time), I would have had to either quit school or leave Austin. And this was in 1994. But we didn’t think of people splitting the rent as a “stealth dorm” in Austin then, because property owners were exiting a painful local real estate bust and were just glad to have tenants.
Besides, Austin was always the kind of place where people split bedrooms and crashed on couches for a while. Crashing on couches was the 90’s Austin version of STRs. It’s so central to the character of our city that a about 20 minutes into “Slacker” we follow a couple into a house where several unrelated adults appear to live, and there’s somebody (actually, my brother-in-law) asleep on the couch.
But what does Austin need students and musicians and bartenders and retirees and hippies and public sector employees for? As long as there’s never a local recession again, I’m sure everything will be fine.
@skylar_buffington, no reason to be embarrassed. We should probably try to use fewer acronyms.
VMU - vertical mixed use. All of the those new 4-6 story apartment complexes with retail on the first floor are vertical mixed use.
MF - multi family.
TOD - Transit oriented development. Some streets like Lamar are Transit Oriented Development zones and have special zoning with the intent of increasing transit use.
Ok, now that our voting just finished up I’d like to put forward a resolution. This is definitely not a final version and I’d like any feedback you all have to give. Full disclosure: a lot of this language is from the Seattle HALA recommendations. Also, I need to think of a good way to tie the occupancy limit conversation into this resolution, so please let me know if you have any ideas.
The City of Austin should allow a broader mix of housing types within single family areas to increase the economic and demographic diversity of those who are able to live in these family oriented neighborhoods. This broader mix of housing would include small lot dwellings, courtyard apartment complexes, rowhouses, duplexes, triplexes, and stacked flats. This does not eliminate the option of single family housing; rather it increases the opportunities for more efficient use of very limited land resources. These additional types of housing will be significantly less expensive than new large detached single family structures - the only other type of new housing commonly produced in single family areas.
Ricky, this looks good. My only suggestion would be not to use the word “apartment complex,” as this usually implies a large, sprawling compound. “Small apartment building” might be more appropriate. Perhaps we could even add a reference to missing-middle housing.
I would make it clear that we want them to use Code NEXT to create a broader mix of housing types, and to codify their form, function, and appropriate locations.
And I’m not sure what is meant by “single family areas” or “family oriented neighborhoods.” Could you define that a little more clearly?
I’m also curious about the line “… the only other type of new housing commonly produced in single family areas.” Almost everything that has been built in my neighborhood in the past few years has been duplexes, multiple houses on subdivided lots, or houses with ADUs.
So is there value in adding a line at the end that seems so counter-factual? What is added to this resolution by implying that duplexes and multi-structure residences are not currently being built?
Replacing “single family areas” and “family oriented neighborhoods” with just “neighborhoods” makes sense to me. I’m also ok with just removing “… the only other type of new housing commonly produced in single family areas.” That statement is true in Hyde Park, but I understand it’s not so true in many other neighborhoods.
For your first few suggestions: why do you recommend that we make it clear that this would be part of CodeNEXT? I’d certainly like to see something like this be part of CodeNEXT, but I’m also worried that CodeNEXT could drag on for a very long time. Also, can you clarify what you mean by appropriate locations? In my opinion, any location that’s appropriate for an SF3 house is also appropriate for any of the housing types I mentioned. I’m worried that if we limit such a change to ‘appropriate locations’, some neighborhoods will be able to completely opt-out and other, less politically connected, neighborhoods will bear most of the burden.