Coming up on Thursday, the 2019 version of the Austin City Council will start deliberating on one of the biggest decisions of this year: where to go now that CodeNEXT is dead. City Manager Spencer Cronk asked for direction from City Council on five questions, including how much we should allow “missing middle” housing (think: small multi-unit buildings like triple deckers or ...
Economic Development without Tax Breaks
Economic development incentive deals -- tax breaks to companies for bringing jobs to a city -- have had a pretty bad run of news in Austin and beyond. Amazon's HQ2 headquarters search earned a mile of negative attention for every inch of excitement even before they gave up on a deal with New York. In Austin, economic development deals have been controversial for a while. ...
The problems with scooters are real. Let’s fix them.
In an age of polarizing issues, there has been perhaps no issue more polarizing than the deployment of shared dockless scooters. Any news article or twitter mention of them rapidly fills up with tales of people's hatred and love for the little rideable devices. The lovers -- myself very much included -- sometimes (always) like to deflect from the problems with scooters by ...
Austin’s draft transportation plan is moving but needs to know where it wants to go
City of Austin staff are in the process of putting together a grand strategy for transportation. These kinds of documents can range from foundational texts that set the stage for city-wide transformations to activist flypaper that channel interested citizens' attention away from the political process that bring change and toward the construction of very expensive paperweights. ...
A Christmas wishlist for Austin’s next City Council
Austin's new city council is shaping up to be the most development-friendly Council in recent memory. What kind of agenda could we expect or hope to see from the new City Council? Here's what's on my holiday wishlist. Reform before Rewrite CodeNEXT is dead. One reason it failed is that it combined two separate but related goals: increasing density and improving design. How ...
