We decided to hold a contest to let people have their say on a vision for what Congress Ave could look like. Today is the day you can help determine the winner, who will receive a gift certificate generously donated by Popbar. Here are the entrants!
Kaz’s Congress Avenue has a more walking-oriented vision, with a generous sidewalk in the median. [EDIT: Kaz adds: “my vision includes a capped subway that StreetMix was unable to show.”]
Dan’s Congress Avenue is our first asymmetric entry, with sidewalks, street maps, three rows of trees, transit, separated bike lanes, and transit shelters.
Stefan’s Congress Avenue has street maps, a bus lane, bike lane, driving lanes, turning lanes, parking lanes, and sidewalks, capped with a nice row of palm trees down the median.
John Dawson of Rocket Electrics has produced a bold vision for a Congress Ave with a wide median sidewalk, bike lanes (presumably including electrics!), and transit on the edge.
That’s it! Please step back, imagine yourself on each of these visions for Congress Ave and vote for your favorites. Make sure to scroll down and click “Vote.” And while you’re at it, take the time to think of all the possibilities not only for Congress, but all of our streets. We get around on foot, bike, car, bus, train, scooter, and however else. And sometimes we don’t get around at all, but we just sit outside and enjoy the ambiance. But what we do is affected an awful lot by the environment we live in, so let’s dream for the best streets we can get!
The YIMBY moment hasn’t exactly arrived in America but it’s on the platform and the train is coming. The framework for political arguments in many City Halls has transformed from “Neighborhood vs Developer” to “YIMBY vs NIMBY.” State Houses like California are being shaken up by YIMBY legislation, both passed and proposed.
The movement’s growth has created a scramble to define where it lies on the broader political spectrum. Various YIMBYs have staked a claim to be the true flagholders for popular local political labels, whether that be “progressive,” “free market,” or other. Opponents have been quick to identify YIMBYism with disliked groups in their local environments, whether that be United Nations Agenda 21 or the Koch brothers.
This ideological mishmash is more than rhetoric. I correspond daily with (or twitter my life away, my wife would say) folks with radically different beliefs about economic systems who nevertheless work together toward a common goal of addressing the housing shortage. It doesn’t feel like an uncomfortable alliance of convenience, but rather a group of friends with different ideas. In a world where we’re constantly reminded of evergrowing ideological divides, how does this movement maintain this hodgepodge?
Jaap Weel gets to part of the answer here:
The ability to bridge ideological divides is a strength baked into the YIMBY movement from the start. We have @SonjaTrauss to thank for that, I think. You can't make a city affordable to more people without more homes in it, whether you're a liberal or a radical or whatever. https://t.co/TdAk5HLeey
YIMBYs believe places should accommodate as many of the people who want to live or work there as they can. This belief is so simple and the need so basic that it can fit into nearly any ideology. Indeed, human beings have been building and designing cities since millennia before Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Rather than saying that YIMBYism is socialist or capitalist, it’s more accurate to say that socialism and capitalism can be YIMBY or not.
A free market YIMBY platform could be “abolish height limits and developers will build more housing to meet market demand.” A socialist YIMBY platform could be “raise property taxes to build public housing.” An environmentalist YIMBY platform looks like SB827 while a social justice YIMBY platforms can focus on ending practices that exclude people from the best jobs or schools. All of these policies share the fundamental assessment that there aren’t enough homes (and/or workplaces, etc) and we need to build more of them, but they accomplish that goal through different mechanisms.
Many YIMBYs are inspired to ideas based on their previous ideas about economic systems (“cut regulations”, “community land ownership”, “better planning”). But further complicating the ideological picture, policies are often judged within YIMBY circles based on their ability to address the housing shortage and not necessarily based on ideological priors. It’s not uncommon to see the same person arguing for different solutions that could be glossed as “socialist”, “planned market”, or “free market.” Some ideas defy easy classification: for example, many YIMBYs believe that transit planning should be pushed to the local government level while land use planning should be pushed to higher levels of government. If you insist on looking at their ideas through a prism of capitalist vs socialist, this would be hopelessly confusing. But if you understand all of these as potential ways to get more people access to the places that they want, it makes sense.
So here’s a challenge: try to, instead of judging whether YIMBY as a whole is more an offshoot of one ideology or another, fully understand what problems it’s trying to solve and how you think those problems would best be solved.
We have a contest for you! With prizes including a $25 gift certificate generously donated by Pop Bar, offering ice cream bars at 247 W 3rd Street downtown starting Friday January 26th. Read to the bottom for details on how to enter!
One of the great forces in shaping Downtown Austin is its capitol view corridors. As we speak, downtown Austin is being made over in their image, with Austin’s signature architectural feature becoming the corner-cut tower. Capitol view corridors are a relatively recent phenomenon, passed into law in 1983 on the initiative of then-Texas State Senator Lloyd Doggett. But the granddaddy capitol view of them all, the terminating vista along Congress Ave, has been baked into Austin’s DNA since 1839 when Judge Edwin Waller laid out the street grid of the Republic of Texas’ brand new capital city. Congress Ave has undergone many changes through the years. James Rambin did a fantastic rundown on those changes at sister site Towers.net, so I’ll just do a quick picture recap here.
Here is Congress Ave in the 1880s (via KUT), when Austin had no cars except mule-pulled streetcars.
Congress Avenue looking north at the state capitol in the 1880s. Image courtesy of the Austin History Center, via KUT.
By 1913, the street had been paved and the streetcar electrified, but streetcars, carriages, and pedestrians still ruled the day:
Congress Avenue and 6th Street, via the Austin History Center.
By the 1930s, the personal automobile had overtaken streetcars and carriages as the dominant use of the Avenue.
Ellison Photo Co. South Congress Avenue looking north, photograph, 1930/1939; via University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, and the Austin History Center.
A 1976 proposal that never got adopted included a vision for a Texas makeover of Congress Ave intersections. The last major shakeup to actually happen was in 2014, when Cap Metro’s bus network shifted its major downtown spine off Congress Ave to Guadalupe and Lavaca Streets. But there may be a new shakeup coming soon! The city of Austin has undertaken an initiative to redesign Congress Ave and has already begun the process of testing out ideas.
Well, recently I took a trip to Mexico City, where I stayed on Avenue Mazatlan in the Condesa neighborhood, a street the same width as Congress Avenue, but configured entirely differently, with a tree-lined pedestrian/bicycle/dog/rollerblade shared-use path running down the center of the street (top two pictures in the first tweet):
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This inspired to me to get out the Streetmix tool and put together a vision for how Congress Ave could look with an emphasis on giving people access to the terminal vista of the Capitol while walking or on their bikes:
How would you feel about being able to take a stroll along Texas' most iconic terminal vista? pic.twitter.com/HLN4sCh78j
So, Austin on Your Feet and Towers.net have decided to give everybody a chance to design their own version of Congress Avenue and vote for their favorites. You can remix my Streetmix or start your own. The rules are: submit a design from streetmix by tweeting with the hashtag #CongressTowers by February 8 or emailing to contest@austinonyourfeet.com. The street must be exactly 120′ wide. We will select the best entrants and give readers a chance to vote for their favorite alternative. The entrant with the most votes will receive a $25 gift certificate to Pop Bar and Towers.net sunglasses. So get out there and get designing!
The second was a political earthquake, emanating from across the bay in San Francisco:
I’m introducing an aggressive housing legislative package: 1) require denser/taller zoning near public transit, 2) require cities’ housing goals be based on actual future growth & make up for past deficits, & 3) make it easier to build farmworker housing. https://t.co/YLQ9djH5pN
So, here are six things to like about the transit-oriented development bill that’s making waves in state politics:
1 It acknowledges the state has an interest in land use
Many decisions are better made by cities than states. Where will the next branch library go? Should this park have a splash pad or a lawn? But some problems are too big for one city alone, like intercity transportation. If Austin and San Antonio decide to be connected by a train, Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, or New Braunfels should have input (as the train would go through these cities), but they shouldn’t be given a flat veto. It is up to the state government to help manage this process so that local interests in one city don’t hurt local interests everywhere else.
In California and some other states, housing and land use have become problems with statewide and national implications. Housing prices aren’t just high in San Francisco or Los Angeles or even Berkeley; people unable to find housing in those cities are spilling over to suburbs and exurbs all across the state. Whole companies are looking to other states to set up offices because their workers can’t afford California rents. The greenhouse gases from long commutes affect every person on the planet. When a problem is widespread, the solution needs to be widespread too; cities rules by local interests just doesn’t cut it.
When one city’s rules starts to affect not just themselves but others, it can be time for the state to set in and make rules.
2 It creates fair and impartial rules
Laws made at the local level can take into account local context better than statewide rules can be. But laws made at the state level can better take into account the statewide context. In a drought, we need fair rules so that everybody does their part to conserve water and everybody has access to the water they need. In a statewide housing drought, we need fair rules so that everybody does their part to build housing.
Everybody has to play by the same rules.
3 It forges a link between transit and density
In the sphere of YIMBY and placemaking, the problem in California is a very YIMBYish problem: there aren’t enough homes to go around for all the people who want to live in California’s cities. But the solution that Wiener proposes isn’t just focused on getting people into homes anywhere. By proposing rules for allowing more homes near transit, it creates the chance for cities to use this as an opportunity to make great places for the future, where high-capacity transportation solutions are matched with high-capacity housing solutions.
Transit is great because everybody can ride together.
4 It acknowledges how parking rules can hurt housing
One type of land use rule that’s particularly pernicious is the minimum parking regulation. These rules not only incentivize car use by forcing everybody to pay the price of car storage whether they drive or not, they also cut into the budget (both financially and physically) of new housing. This legislation will stop cities from using these pernicious rules near transit stops and opens the possibility for people to find new ways to live cheaper while using less parking.
Not everywhere is perfect for parking.
5 It helps bridge the gap between people and jobs
The problems of California’s cities aren’t their problems alone. Vast swathes of the state are home to unique industries, from Silicon Valley’s tech economy to Hollywood’s movie industry. Sure, tech jobs exists outside Silicon Valley and movies are filmed all over the world. But place has, if anything, grown more important over the last decades, not less. Young workers looking to break into an industry would do well to show up where the jobs are, and new companies looking to start up would do well to show up where the workers are. Today, though, many people are shut out of these engines of prosperity because they can’t afford to live in Palo Alto, San Francisco, or Los Angeles while they lean the trade. Who knows what great technology or film talent we may cherish tomorrow if only we make room for them today?
Some folks in California’s economy find good jobs and places to live while others are simply couch surfing.
6 It might just save humanity
With the United States federal government oriented away from action against climate change, individual states badly need to step up their game. While trying not to overstate the importance of this bill, the fate of the entire human race might depends on our ability to transition the United States and our high-emission society into one in which we can get around more efficiently.
If we don’t address climate change, there’s a wave heading our way that California — and humanity — might not be able to ride out.
So congratulations to Senator Scott Wiener! You brought a proposal that deals with the scale of the problems your state and this country are experiencing, and you may have changed the conversation on housing for good.
Words by Dan Keshet. Gif selection by Susan Somers.
Susan Somers is a north Austin resident near the North Shoal Creek area, President of urbanist organization AURA, and the genius gif editor who made this blog’s most famous piece pounce.
The city recently released a draft version of the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan. North Shoal Creek is on the far edge of what you might consider north central Austin – bounded by Anderson Lane to the south, Highway 183 to the north, Mopac Boulevard to the west, and Burnet Road to the east. The plan is set to be the first new neighborhood plan in several years and City planning staff seem to have billed it as a kinder, gentler neighborhood plan: one that would try to fulfill the goals of Imagine Austin and identify new opportunities for growth. As such, the draft plan may give us a decent sense of what small area planning would look like if we continue churning out neighborhood plans in the CodeNEXT era.
How does the draft North Shoal Creek plan stack up?
Outline of North Shoal Creek, via the draft plan.
Five things we like
The plan acknowledges the reality that apartments are more affordable and single family homes are not. The plan repeatedly points out that the apartments and multifamily condominiums in the neighborhood are more affordable that the single family homes. What’s more, “Apartments and condominiums in North Shoal Creek provide more affordable options relative to much of Austin, while single-family homes are less affordable than the citywide average.” It also acknowledges that the majority of people in the planning area live not in the single family homes of the “Residential Core,” but in apartments along the edges of the neighborhood. Furthermore, it points out that the neighborhood’s residents are aging, and young families are being priced out.
The plan prioritizes walkability. Almost half the “needs” and “values” identified by the community involved walkability in some way. The plan calls for new sidewalks and trails, better access to transit stops, and improved safety for schoolchildren walking to Pillow Elementary. It even contemplates innovative ideas such as opening up a pedestrian trail to access Anderson Lane businesses or allowing the community better access to Shoal Creek.
Hundreds of people live here, but this is not a place that invites walking. Image via Google Maps.
The plan allows homes on the neighborhood corridors. The plan acknowledges that retail, particularly along Burnet Road, is dying. It allows for mixed-use development including apartment homes to be built along Burnet Road and Anderson Lane, the neighborhood’s major corridors. It also acknowledges that transit access is a very important reason to allow these homes to be built, and that apartment density should be clustered near transit. While allowing apartments on transit corridors may seem obvious, North Shoal Creek has fought apartment homes in the past, so this is a promising development.
The plan supports granny flats (aka “accessory dwelling units”). The plan seems to support allowing homeowners to build granny flats throughout the single family section of the neighborhood. Adding another home to a lot is an easy, almost invisible way to add more housing!
Theplan envisions an innovative “Buell District.” Buell Avenue is currently dotted with light industrial development like self-storage facilities and auto-repair shops. The plan envisions change along Buell Avenue, including special zoning opportunities like townhouses, small apartments, and live-work spaces that would allow a greater variety of housing into the neighborhood.
Five things to improve
Choose some side streets for rowhouses. Other than on Buell Avenue, the plan does not call for allowing missing middle housing types like rowhouses on any side streets. We’ve previously argued rowhouses are an underappreciated and underused housing form in Austin, and CodeNEXT should allow more of them. But over and over again, our planning processes shy away from this awesome type of home. There are plenty of larger neighborhood streets in North Shoal Creek that would be appropriate for rowhouses. The plan leaves the impression that the only reason townhouses would be allowed on Buell is that the neighborhood likes the current light industrial businesses even less than they like rowhouses.
Rowhouses are a residential type of building and, as such, they belong every bit as much in residential-only areas as areas of mixed use.
Multiplexes or small apartments on corner lots. Similarly, other missing middle housing types like multiplexes, small apartments, or cottage courts, are not placed in the “Residential Core,” even on large corner lots. Large corner lots are the perfect place to allow this kind of missing middle.
This fourplex is one of the last standing of a formerly common missing middle housing type in residential Austin.
Sanctity of the “Residential Core.” Let’s talk more about that “Residential Core” phrase. As we note above, the plan acknowledges that the majority of residents live not in the interior of the neighborhood in single family homes, but in apartments on the edges of the neighborhood. Thus, calling the single family section of the neighborhood residential as compared to the corridors is a kind of double speak. Literally, more residents live outside the area termed “residential” in this plan! Based on the plan’s constraints, that pattern will become even more pronounced! Why does this terminology matter? Many other aspects of the plan focus strictly on the “Residential Core.” Three of the six bullet points regarding the goals of the Neighborhood Transition area focus not on making the zone great for its residents but on how not to encroach on the privacy of single family homes. The poorer majority residents are treated as interlopers on the richer minority. In fact, it’s not even clear that the existing apartments in the Neighborhood Transition lots would fit the constraints of the plan.
Vision for connectivity/reconnecting streets. Residents in North Shoal Creek have asked for a more walkable neighborhood and for better access to transit stops. One way to make this area, designed with meandering streets and suburban cul-de-sacs, more walkable would be to designate opportunities to acquire lots and reconnect streets separating people from one another. While the plan considers this for connecting homes to retail via urban trails, there are no such connections proposed in the “Residential Core.”
Google Maps recommends a 17 minute walk along a freeway to walk between these backyard neighbors.
Tying desired neighborhood amenities (sidewalks, parks) to opportunities for density. There are many ambitious, desirable aspects of the plan that are unfunded mandates. These unfunded plans include building out the sidewalk network, adding urban trails, developing more parkland, and creating the Shoal Creek trail. The plan acknowledges the challenges of getting funding to make these a reality. But other neighborhoods where these improvements have actually taken place (like Bizarro Austin) have done more than make a wishlist and hope. They created incentives for redevelopment to happen and required developers to fund improvements to the public sphere as part of that redevelopment.
In some ways, the North Shoal Creek draft plan lives up to its kinder, gentler billing. It recognizes the real problems the neighborhood has: from families being priced out to unwalkability impinging on quality of life. The plan promotes the two main fixes we’ve also seen coming out of the latest draft of CodeNEXT: accessory dwelling units and apartment homes on transit corridors. Let us acknowledge that many of Austin’s older neighborhood plans don’t go even this far. However, to truly confront the problems the plan identifies, broader changes are needed, including in areas where the minority of neighborhood residents live. By opening up to a bit more change, some of the truly visionary elements of the plan could be funded and constructed.
Not every tower in downtown Austin looks exactly the same, but there is one defining characteristic that describes almost all of them: parking. Most towers rest on top of what they call in the industry a parking plinth, the tower base where folks store their cars. (Plinth is a Swedish word meaning ugly thing.) Here’s a typical example, the Seaholm Tower in southwest downtown.
On the ground floor, there’s a restaurant. Above that, the area with small and sporadic windows is the parking garage. Above that, the area with balconies is where the condos live. Simple, effective, but not always super sightly, at least to my tastes. Why not build parking underground, freeing up aboveground levels for more homes? For one thing, building underground car parking is very expensive. The exact difference varies by site but I’ve seen estimates that moving a parking space underground can add $10K to the cost of the space — and the further you have to dig, the more expensive it gets. So perhaps underground parking is reserved for the most expensive buildings?
No, even in Austin’s newest luxury towers you see aboveground parking:
The Independent (aka the Jenga Tower) under construction. The open floors are parking, the one with windows above are where the residences start.The Fifth and West Tower’s parking structure (behind the vet’s office) is much wider than the tower above it, which is constrained by capital view corridors.The parking plinth at the Seven Apartments is again much wider than the building itself. The larger the footprint of the parking structure, the less expensive it is per space and the fewer stories a car needs to climb to reach its space. This reduces incentives to build a taller, thinner structure on the same footprint as the tower itself.
Parking underground is just too expensive for Austin, or so I thought, until Sid Kapur pointed out to me that there is somewhere in Austin building underground parking:
[tweet 938849429121060865]
Yes, of course, West Campus (aka Bizarro Austin) is building underground parking. See James Rambin’s writeup at sister site Austin Towers of projects like Skyloft and Aspen West Campus with four stories of underground parking. So why do developers building student housing decide to put parking underground? Are students more discerning aesthetic connoisseurs? Sorry, students, but I doubt it. I have an alternate theory.
There are many different ways that zoning codes can limit the amount of space that can be built. In downtown, the binding constraint preventing even larger buildings is something called Floor Area Ratio or FAR: roughly, the square footage of climate-controlled space in a building divided by its footprint. In West Campus, the binding constraint on the size of a building is regulations on maximum height. Crucially, parking counts toward a building’s height but doesn’t count toward its FAR. If a developer in West Campus moved their parking from below-ground to above-ground, they would have to remove apartments in order to fit it in, costing them a lot of money in lost rent. Developers downtown, though, don’t have a height limit so building a parking plinth costs less than putting parking underground, doesn’t use up the building’s FAR, and even makes the residential units more valuable by giving them better views.
If my theory is true, it makes some predictions: portions of northern downtown that are slated to be rezoned with height-constrained zoning categories (CC-40 and CC-60) will likely see underground parking, while the FAR-constrained central business district will continue to see parking plinths. Indeed, the condo building I live in downtown was built pre-CodeNEXT but it had height limits imposed as part of the rezoning process and consequently built most of its parking underground:
Previously, I have been skeptical of a convention center expansion. As a member of the Visitor Impact Task Force, I came around to a positive recommendation after the Task Force recommended ways to make expansion a positive for the city:
Incorporating expansion as part of a larger tower to share costs and add activity when the convention center isn’t being used.
Keeping the convention center expansion on the tax base.
Keeping the street grid, the long-term source of value in the downtown district.
For background on the convention center and its surrounding environment, check out coverage from TOWERS.
On August 29, city of Austin staff casually dropped a bombshell that gives the possibility of multiplying these benefits many times over: building a Convention Center expansion may open the possibility of redeveloping the existing Convention Center. The possibility seems remote but it would be an enormous development so let’s step through it.
What is there to gain from redeveloping the area?
The Frost Bank Tower paid $7.5M in property taxes in 2017. Expanding that out to the Convention Center’s six blocks, that’s about $45m in potential tax revenue from the Convention Center’s 6 blocks! That’s almost as much as the city spends on the repaying Convention Center construction loans and operations put together!
These taxes represent the real benefits to Austinites that onsite towers could provide: homes, workplaces, shops, restaurants, etc. Today, way more people wish they could live downtown than live there, as evidenced by the record prices people are paying for downtown condos and apartments. Building more offices and homes will allow more of the people who want to live and/or work downtown to do so. According to the staff presentation, there could be up to 4 million square feet of buildable space there. That could be enough housing for 4,000 households, enough office space for 20,000 jobs, or some combination thereof.
Artist’s rendition of the Southeastern Quadrant downtown map with a re-stitched street grid.
Lastly, the convention center doesn’t just occupy land that could be used for other purposes, but it also occupies the streets and sidewalks that people would otherwise use to get around. Returning that land to be used as streets would make it easier for people to get around, making all of the land around it more valuable. For example, the City of Austin and Waller Creek Conservancy are currently investing large resources in renovating Palm Park on 3rd Street, but few people downtown use that park in part because it’s hard to get to! It may even provide traffic relief by providing alternative means to get to destinations on opposite sides of the convention center.
Why does redeveloping the Convention Center depend on expansion?
Designing a vertical convention center is difficult; one of the most important aspects of convention center space is beam-free space ― enormous wide-open rooms without any vertical supports to obstruct views. Designing spaces to be beam-free is difficult as part of larger tower structures which require vertical supports. Convention centers are not generally built vertically for this reason and the Austin Convention Center was definitely not built with vertical expansion in mind.
The beam-free space is large enough to hold a Roller Derby track and stands. Photo by Steve Dement photography via Texas Roller Girls.
Without expansion, redeveloping the convention center for more square footage in place would entail years of foregoing hosting large conventions in Austin. While Austin is a hot convention market today, taking such a dramatic step would risk crippling the future convention industry in Austin. Skills and connections would rust as convention bookers would lose touch with Austin, convention center staff find other jobs, and convention-oriented businesses like the JW Marriott or Fairmont Hotel would need to reorient.
The Convention Center redeveloping could therefore only be approached out of strength or serious weakness: with the strength of new modern facilities in place to accept conventions or the weakness of a rapid decline in Convention Center fortunes forcing a desperation move. We are nowhere near the latter―Austin has been moving up the ranks, not down the ranks, as a Convention destination.
What are the next steps?
The possibility of a redevelopment of the existing Convention Center changes the ideas for expansion dramatically. While the expansion has focused more on meeting space and ballrooms, if it is to serve as an interim or permanent replacement for some or all of the existing Convention Center, it would necessarily include more exhibit space and an area for trucks to unload into it. For the city, therefore, the next step would be to include information about potential for redevelopment of the existing Convention Center in any Request for Proposals it releases.
For the Austin urban design and architectural communities, the next step is to develop ideas and visions that can inspire stakeholders and the whole city to believe that a megaproject like this could make sense for the Convention Center, for other downtown business, for transportation, and for the city and its finances. So architects, designers, placemakers, enthusiasts: do you have thoughts about how this could happen? A phased approach to redeveloping the southeastern corner of downtown? Please send them to dan@austinonyourfeet@gmail.com and let me know if I can share them with my readers!
There’s a neighborhood in central Austin that everybody knows but only its true students really understand. It’s a place where the normal laws of neighborhoods (or zoning ordinances at least) don’t apply. A place where up is down, zig is zag, and 40-minutes cursing at bumper-to-bumper traffic on MoPac is 15 minutes humming with your headphones on the walk home. This magical place is Austin’s secret midrise neighborhood: West Campus, where development never stops. I’ve long been fascinated by this little neighborhood, precisely because it’s so different than the rest of Austin’s neighborhoods. In walking through it, I came to a realization: West Campus is Bizarro Austin. Every thing about Austin’s standard development model is turned on its head. Here are six ways:
1. In Standard Austin, prices go up. In Bizarro Austin, buildings go up.
Austin’s central core has seen an unrelenting tide of changes over the last couple decades. Central core neighborhoods have moved from eclectic refuges of Austin’s storied slacker past, where you could get by on a part-time job and a roommate who never does the dishes, to red-hot real estate extravaganzas, with first-day bids $20K over list price and rents only a landlord could love. For the lucky folks who owned houses before the boom hit, that can be a bonanza and a nest egg. But for renters and first-time buyers, this has caused a lot of consternation.
In Bizarro Austin, instead of prices rising, buildings have:
With way more than double the number of apartments available in Bizarro Austin than there were just 15 years ago, more students can afford to rent in Bizarro Austin than ever before. While some of the new rentals have brought luxuries never seen before in Austin student living, older apartment complexes compete on price and some of the new ones have had to as well.
2. In Standard Austin, activists decry new buildings with studios and 1-bedrooms. In Bizarro Austin, 3, 4, and 5 bedroom units are commonplace.
You’ve heard the lament. “Yes, the developer is building new apartments, but they’re all studios! You can’t raise a family in those!” You must be living in Standard Austin. Because in Bizarro Austin, multi-bedroom units are not only present, they’re common. Of course, most are rented out by groups of students, not families. But if a large family were to want to rent a large new-construction apartment, they may find no place with more of them than Bizarro Austin.
A colorful complex of multi-bedroom apartments.
3. In Standard Austin, sidewalks are a hopeless tragedy. In Bizarro Austin, sidewalks are a point of pride.
Standard Austin is proud of a lot of things: our live music, our breakfast tacos, our history. But sidewalks aren’t one of them. We have a 99-year backlog of sidewalk projects to get built. Where they exist, they’re often crazy cracked and cramped. They end abruptly and restart on the other side of the street. I have literally had a police officer pick me up off the street because “this didn’t look like a safe place for you to walk” and drive me back to where there were sidewalks.
In Bizarro Austin, sidewalks are wide, shady, filled with benches and fancy street lamps. They are well-used and safe. They are still a little patchy — fancy in some places and not in others. With each new building that gets built, the sidewalk in front of that building is upgraded to this pedestrian paradise.
Sidewalks in West Campus have trees, fancy lighting, and well-used bike racks.
4. In Standard Austin, development is seen as a threat to trees. In Bizarro Austin, new development creates new trees.
When a lot of central Austin neighborhoods were built out, they didn’t have many trees. In a land where temperatures are high and energy bills higher, this is less than ideal. Understandably, neighborhoods have come to cherish the shade-giving trees they do have and fight hard to keep them. Bizarro Austin has found a different technique. With each new building that goes up, trees go up with it, lining the sidewalk with shade. Soon, Bizarro Austin may have the most tree-lined streets in all of Austin.
Young trees growing up in Bizarro Austin
5. In Standard Austin, cars are needed for chores. In Bizarro Austin, stores come to you.
I’ve heard this question more than a few times: “Hey Dan, I’m moving to Austin. Do I need a car?” Well, I don’t have one, but unless you’re crazy, chances are you probably need one. Even I now live in a car-lite household, though I myself don’t drive. Life in Standard Austin without a car is possible but certainly difficult.
In Bizarro Austin, not only are the sidewalks pleasant and walkable, but every year, more and more stores are coming to the residents. It started with convenience stores, then neighborhood restaurants, then grocery stores, martial arts dojos, and dessert shops. The neighborhood is rapidly becoming a complete place — somewhere residents can find more and more of their needs a walk or bike ride away.
With enough residents in the area to support it, a Fresh Plus grocery store opened right in the middle of the neighborhood.
6. In Standard Austin, street parking divides visitors and guests. In Bizarro Austin, street parking pays dividends to residents.
“We’re not against this bar, we just want them to have enough parking so none of their customers park on our streets!” Street parking is a divisive issue in Standard Austin. Residential-only parking areas force customers of nearby shops to wander deep into side streets before they can park their car.
Bizarro Austin, situated as it is next to one of the biggest attractions in all of Austin (the University of Texas), is no stranger to parking by, well, strangers. However, in Bizarro Austin, street parkers aren’t just a nuisance, they’re a revenue stream. Bizarro Austin has a parking benefit district, which means that every time somebody pays the parking kiosk, a percentage of their money goes back to the neighborhood. This money has been used for improvements to sidewalks and lighting.
Many students have decided to forego cars and park their bicycles instead.
We could take some lessons from Bizarro Austin
One of the reasons few among us know about Bizarro Austin is that most post-college adults don’t want to live where convenience stores sell bundles of ping pong balls and Solo cups. Many folks probably lived in West Campus more than a couple years back when it was part of Standard Austin and don’t realize how otherworldly it has become. But there’s a lot to like about this place and a lot of lessons we could take for Standard Austin.
This newly renovated public plaza in downtown Austin houses zero residences and few long-term jobs, yet it is one of the most highly anticipated projects downtown because of the enjoyment people will get from it. (For more on this project, visit the landscape architects behind it, dwg. landscape architecture.)
People get involved in shaping cities for different reasons. Some because they ride bikes or take trains, some because of a professional interest, and some because the rent is too damn high. As rents, land use, public space, and transportation are deeply interrelated, people who are interested in one often bleed over into another. But people talk about cities in very different terms. Placemaking urbanism is concerned with creating places people value. YIMBY urbanism is concerned with making sure all people who want access to places are able to. Let’s walk through the difference in these two languages about cities.
Placemaking urbanism
Placemaking urbanism or design urbanism includes organizations like CNU. Placemakers are more likely to be professionals involved in building cities — planners, architects, designers, developers, land use attorneys, etc. Their emphasis or focus is most strongly on:
issues of the public realm: how wide are streets? Are there sidewalks? Are they comfortable to walk on? What materials are the sidewalks made of? Are there street trees for shade and benches for sitting? Do people have access to parks? Is a place a destination or just a pass-through?
issues of where the public realm meets the private realm: Do private buildings make it easier for people to walk into them or drive into the garage? Do buildings add interactions between the inside of the building and the street or are they focused on enforcing separation? Are different kinds of buildings and building uses well-situated relative to one another?
Where it’s at its best
Placemaking is at its best in making places great. In the one time I attended a CNU conference, I saw a dozen different presentations, workshops, or talks that gave lessons on making places better — from the minutiae of exactly what materials to use in crosswalks to how to get buy-in from business owners on improving traffic safety. There’s an attention to detail within this movement that can be truly remarkable. Great places are made of a thousand tiny design decisions, from the species of tree to the width of a travel lane to the location of utility poles. People walking down a street may not know why they prefer one place to another, but there are deliberate, planned choices going on behind the scenes.
This newly renovated public plaza in downtown Austin has created a fascinating place that people have taken to before it even opened.
While each decision may be small, placemaking overall can have dramatic effects in creating long-term value. New homes are usually more valuable compared to aging ones because things work and haven’t accumulated problems or deterioration. But forty years from now, will people still want to live in the places that we’re building today? Some places get more valuable as time goes on while others fall to pieces. Building a place that stays great requires effort.
Great placemakers remind me of great entrepreneurs. They have the vision to take a place that is not yet built — or else a place that is struggling — and through judicious use of (hopefully) small amounts of funds and large amounts of effort and knowledge, create value that didn’t previously exist. Just as a smart developer will engage a great architect to make their building somewhere people want to be, a smart city will engage great placemakers to make each part of their city a place people want to be.
While this value creation aspect is most prominent in public spaces, placemakers also have very valuable ideas about the role of private space in creating valuable public space. What is the right mixture of retail, office, and residential so that the retail has a chance to thrive? How can homes be built so that people passing by get value from being near? A very typical placemaker topic might be garage placement: where is the best place for a garage to be so that cars entering the garage interfere with pedestrians the least?
Placemakers are not focused on density qua density, but rather, density is frequently a tool within the placemaker toolkit to enable other things. It’s easier to make dense places walkable or bikeable because there are more destinations within reach. Transit also requires certain densities to work well. Residential density can make smaller retail outlets viable and give an activated, vibrant feel to public places.
YIMBY Urbanism
YIMBYism (“Yes In My Back Yard”) is a thread of urbanism aimed at opening up cities to use by more people. YIMBY urbanism has more non-development pros, renters, and young people than placemaking urbanism and way more than anti-development movements. YIMBYism is very focused on:
issues of density, prices, and access: how can we make it so more people can afford the costs of shelter (whether rent or purchase)? Who has access to the best urban places and how could we change them so more people do? What effects would building denser places have on prices?
Where it’s at its best
YIMBYism is best when fighting for more people to have access to live in, work in, and visit places they want access to. YIMBYs care about places but are far more focused on people and making sure that they can afford to live in places they want to. In arguing for a development, they tend to tally up the benefits in people — how many more people will this new development give access to — rather than in how much better or worse will this make the place. YIMBYs are often more comfortable with quantitative measures like dwelling units/acre, rent, mortgage cost, housing + transportation cost index, than qualitative measures like aesthetics or vibrancy. Even when going to neighboring fields like transit, YIMBYs are very at ease with quantitative metrics like subsidy per rider or capital expenditures per new rider. YIMBYs fight in City Hall, hearing by hearing, ordinance by ordinance, permit by permit, and election by election. Their main emphasis is not necessarily on how to make a development acceptable to more people, but how to organize people to engage in a political fight for more development in great places.
New central-city housing is the primary focus of the YIMBY movement in most places.
Why the two don’t always trust each other
YIMBYism is a movement born out of political conflict with development opponents. Many YIMBYs are used to sitting through public hearings in which development opponents say everything possible negative about a development and see what sticks: the building is too fancy or too plain, it will raise and/or lower property values, it’s too close or too far from the street, it will cast shadows, loom, stick out, and destroy ground squirrel habitat. To a YIMBY, a placemaker can be one more set of people throwing hoops up for a development to jump through.
But the placemaker movement was also born in conflict. Place-making urbanists have long fought for higher standards of development in reaction to the auto-centric, mass produced sterilized development characterized by sprawl. There is no interest in perpetuating bad development. Auto-centric development, density without amenity, density without proximity is not seen as any kind of tolerable solution to affordability place-makers because, in part because it perpetuates awfulness, but also in part because it fails to address the primary challenge of affordability – a scarcity of good places concentrating demand on the most attractive places.
Most developments that satisfy one movement satisfy the other. High density development often generates the profits needed to make placemaking possible; great placemaking can be the lubricant necessary to make high-density development politically viable. Nevertheless, individual developments can end up dividing people based on which thread they identify with more.
Additionally, the alliance is much stronger in practice than it is in theory. When sticking to support for individual developments or development rules, the two sides agree the vast majority of the time. But when speaking about theory, the two threads diverge sharply. For example: are high property values in a location primarily an indication of a job well-done, because they show high demand for living there? Or are they primarily an indication of a failure, because supply has failed to keep up with demand?
Why the two need each other
On a fundamental level, YIMBYs need placemakers because what’s the point of fighting for access to places if the places aren’t great? Fighting for access to existing great places can easily be complemented by fighting to improve places that are less than great today. On a political level, YIMBYs need placemakers because they can’t afford to cede any argument to development opponents. Development opponents use a vast family of arguments that new development makes places worse — more traffic, less sunlight, more noise, worse aesthetics. The more attractive each new development is, the more it has reckoned with the issues of making great places, the greater a chance it has of winning supporters from outside the NIMBY and YIMBY camps.
On a fundamental level, placemakers need YIMBYs because what’s the point of fighting to make places great if people can’t access them? On the political level, placemakers need YIMBYs because they need allies. The placemaker movement has fought for decades to improve public space and left some wonderful legacies in places. But the broader scope of cities and policy in the United States has barely budged. YIMBYs represent one of the most energetic and promising movements to change this; if placemakers can’t land their message with this group, the message needs to change.
In Austin’s West Campus, new development has paid for improvements to the public realm, like wide sidewalks, street lighting, street furniture, and this bike lane.
Although the YIMBY movement says “yes” to development, implicit in its message is the idea that development should be placed where people actually want to be. The mainstream of the YIMBY movement doesn’t, for example, argue that there should be more housing development in, say, the middle of a desert, far from civilization or social networks. The focus of the movement is on facilitating access to places that people want to be. But a key part of accessing places people want to access is making places people want to be in the first place. While the placemaking movement says “yes” to “high-quality” development, the benefits of this development only accrue to people who have access to it. Great places aren’t an end in and of themselves. A city with great neighborhoods will only be enjoyed by those who can afford access to those neighborhoods. Great placemaking is something that can happen at any scale or density — but a great place built at half the size of the population that needs it leaves half the population shut out. Placemakers need to acknowledge that YIMBYs counting units and fretting rents have a valid — and pressing — point.
This should be easy
The alliance between people whose first thought about creating better, denser places is that they’re awesome places and the people whose first thought about creating better, denser places is that everybody deserves access should be an easy one. So easy in fact that tons of people switch casually between the two families of arguments without even realizing they’re doing so or realizing that other people are mostly focused on one side or another. Occasionally somebody will say something that reveals themselves to be in line with one group but not the other: a YIMBY will fight in favor of a development built in a style that placemakers have spent decades trying to reform; or else a placemaker will deride YIMBYs for focusing on how many people have access to a place instead of whether it will be great for those who do. These moments can be deeply unsettling not just because they’re surprising but because they make people realize they’re fighting for different values.
But the fit here is entirely natural. In places where YIMBYs are active, they are overwhelmingly more supportive of placemaking than development oppontents are; after all, they are the ones agitating for change! Placemaking can enhance YIMBY efforts by winning Maybe in My Backyards folks over with placemaking improvements. The yes-and argument here is the true winner!
I have been writing this blog on and off for 5 years or so. Coincidentally, that’s about the same amount of time I have shared a home with my feline life partner, Mikey. He is now a mature, sophisticated cat.
Photo credit: Susan Kirtz
But he wasn’t always this way. He was once young and carefree, testing his limits at any chance.
He believed that any food in the apartment was, by rights, his.
When I prepared food on my kitchen counter, he would jump up on the counter to investigate. I would promptly pick him up and place him back down on the floor, then return to preparing my food for five seconds before repeating the process. Eventually, though, he got to contemplating:
He realized the problem: he was taking the wrong route! So he tried a new route to the counter:
Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work. He had misidentified the issue. The problem wasn’t that he had taken the wrong route to the food. The problem was that I didn’t want him to eat the food and I had more power than he did.
Mikey in jail.
If Mikey really wanted to get more food, he needed to find a way to either beat my defenses or appeal to my heart:
Who could say no to those eyes?
Why am I telling you this story? Is this just an excuse to show pictures of my cat? Well, yes, of course it is. But it’s also a metaphor.
If you pay attention to housing media for very long at all, you will be bombarded by news stories about how a new technology will save the world from high housing costs. Sometimes it’s a construction material, sometimes it’s a fabrication technique, sometimes it’s something totally different. As many point out, this thinking is both common and wrong:
# of companies who believe that building faster will solve the problem, while doing nothing abt zoning, public process, etc. – is staggering https://t.co/XDgydjopSS
The error is very similar to Mikey’s: failing to see the deeper, underlying issue that there are people who disagree with your goals and have the power to obstruct you. There are already construction technologies that could greatly reduce the costs of housing in cities with overheated housing markets if deployed at scale (e.g. townhouses, missing middle, or mid-rise construction techniques). These technologies are greatly restricted in their deployment not because of unresolved technological issues, but because of political disputes that have made their deployment illegal in most parts of most cities. New construction techniques will find new paths to inevitable obstruction.
This isn’t to say that pursuing improved construction technologies is useless. There are exciting construction technologies on the horizon, from higher quality modular structures manufactured in factories and pieced together on-site to cross-laminated timber offering the possibility of more environmentally-friendly, cheaper towers. I’m glad that smart people are trying to make these technologies work! But in many major cities, the cost of land alone in central locations is more than most people can afford before construction costs even play a role. The way to fix that is to change politics, not technology. When we talk about new technology as having the potential to drastically lower prices without recognizing that there needs to be the political will to make use of that technology, we’re deliberately closing our eyes from the real problems we face.
Stefan’s Congress Avenue has street maps, a bus lane, bike lane, driving lanes, turning lanes, parking lanes, and sidewalks, capped with a nice row of palm trees down the median.
John Dawson of Rocket Electrics has produced a bold vision for a Congress Ave with a wide median sidewalk, bike lanes (presumably including electrics!), and transit on the edge.
He believed that any food in the apartment was, by rights, his.
He realized the problem: he was taking the wrong route! So he tried a new route to the counter:
Unfortunately for him, it didn’t work. He had misidentified the issue. The problem wasn’t that he had taken the wrong route to the food. The problem was that I didn’t want him to eat the food and I had more power than he did.
