Response to Zoned Out

[thefuturemesozoic]

So there's this film called "Zoned Out" that a local film-maker produced, with a lot of fearmongering about the land development code revisions being discussed by City Council and being worked on by staff. This is my response to a few of the claims made in the film (adapted from an email that I sent to a list). Quotes from the film are in bold.

Let's say it will be cleansed. It will be cleansed of low-income people, a lot of middle-income people, and it can become a playground, and the people who service the playground will probably have to live in Pflugerville.

All of this is already happening, under the current code. Ditto for San Francisco, where the same supply skepticism has applied. People are working there and commuting from Sacramento. In Generation Priced Out, Randy Shaw mentions a neighborhood (Noe Valley, I think) that looks the same as it did decades ago, so it could be said to be successful in terms of preserving neighborhood character, but the median sale price for a house is over $2 million. It is true that new, market-rate multi-family housing won't be cheap, any more than "modest" central Austin bungalows are cheap for anyone who didn't buy them decades ago. The best time to build more multi-family housing would have been 30 years ago--it's my understanding that a lot of it stopped in 1984 with the code rewrite that Jim Duncan was in charge of, with the exception of large projects on the corridors and special cases such as Mueller and the Crestview TOD. At the same time, if, hypothetically, 100,000 people would like to live in a neighborhood that only has enough housing for 20,000 people, then what will happen?

We love living here because of the trees, the convenience. It's very easy to get to just about every place from here.

I do, too, which is why more people should have the opportunity to live in neighborhoods like mine. They shouldn't be essentially closed off to people who aren't affluent and didn't buy a house decades ago when the houses were affordable.

The day the ordinance is released, if you live in a transition zone, you will be out of compliance.

This is not true. See the City of Austin's blog post on the subject. I don't have a position on what Council is doing here, but the intention is to prevent single-family homes from being torn down and replaced with larger, more expensive single-family homes--either the original home should stay, or, if it is demolished, then multi-family housing should be built. Edit: this is no longer relevant. Staff's current thinking is that home owners will still be allowed to demolish a single-family home and replace it with a new single-family home.

Property taxes are going to go up.

This is debatable and often assumed/feared. Dave Sullivan often brings up Enfield as a counterpoint, however. The city rezoned both sides of Enfield as MF-3 in anticipation of it becoming a cross-town expressway. The expressway never happened, but the road is still zoned MF-3. There is still a significant amount of single-family housing in the MF3-zoned areas. According to him, the appraisals and property taxes on these houses are identical to the appraisals/property taxes in the nearby SF3-zoned areas.

More broadly, I've heard that the land development code rewrite is going to raise property values and property taxes. I've heard that it is going to lower property values in some cases. I've heard that it will result in far fewer children living in Austin. I've heard that our schools are already overcrowded and that it will exacerbate the problem, presumably because too many children would be living here. I've heard that it's a tool to enrich capitalist developers. I've heard that it's a tool to implement Agenda 21 (and, presumably, part of imposing a globalist one-world socialist government run by George Soros, or something). The only common denominator seems to be that change is bad and should be feared, and people seem to project their existing world view and fears, whatever they are, into the LDC rewrite.

The new concept is if we just eliminate parking, all of the sudden people will ride the bus.

This study suggests that abundant parking does lead to increased driving. Speeding is another thing that I often hear people complaining about, and, if cars are parked on the street, then drivers need to slow down.

People have been continuing to move here, even as many wish that this were not so. Given that this seems to be a fact of life, as does climate change, should we continue to plan for everyone to drive and push most of the population into the suburbs? Or should we seek to encourage walking, biking, and taking transit, and allow more people to live in places where transit is relatively frequent and where our transit agency can justify improving it further if there are additional riders?

EMS comes in. A fire truck comes in. Fire trucks plant out feet on either side. There's not enough room in the street to plant both feet of a large fire truck.

While it is important to consider the needs of EMS and the fire department, there are other cities that need to handle access to emergency vehicles and that often have relatively narrow streets, sometimes with cars parked on them, so I am not convinced that this presents an intractable problem. Additionally, the status quo does not prevent vehicles from parking on the street. A home owner could host a party and invite several guests who all park on the street. If it is unsafe for cars to be parked in a particular location, then parking needs to be prohibited there.

80% of the people moving here are high-income people. The average salary of the Google employee is $248,000 a year.

I wonder whether central Austin home owners are looking at their new neighbors, seeing mostly high-income people, and concluding that most people moving here are high-income. Thus, the people who they are seeing are the people who can afford to buy houses in central Austin, which often sell for $500k or more. If this hypothesis is correct, then people are drawing conclusions without having a representative sample, since they are not seeing the people who cannot afford to buy houses in central Austin. They are not seeing the people who need to stay within a budget of $300k or less and who end up living off Slaughter or in the suburbs, or the people who rent and wonder whether they will ever be able to afford to buy a house. As an aside, I work in tech, and I do not earn in the six figures. I don't know what Google is paying its employees in Austin, although, given that AUstin's cost of living is lower than that of Silicon Valley, I presume that Google pays its employees here less than what they pay to their Silicon Valley employees. And boomers also make fun of millennials for supposedly taking on too much debt to get useless degrees, moving to the big city, and whining that they're broke and that housing is too expensive. While not directly addressing income, Farm&City has a blog post that suggests that the six-county Austin region is becoming more racially diverse.

The City Council set a goal of providing for adding capacity for over 400,000 units in Austin in ten years.

Because they hope that, if they add capacity for 400,000 units, then something like 135,000 units will actually get built. Of course, housing capacity isn't the same as new housing. If it was, then, to give one example, every lot where it was feasible and permissible to build an ADU would have an ADU.

And that's why local policy changes or zoning ordinances aren't a fix to this any more than a zoning ordinance can fix any other global problem."

The person who said this is someone who also thinks that voting for Democrats won't fix anything--only a socialist revolution will fix things--so he is consistent at least.

In general, the debate over the LDC rewrite reminds me of the debate over the Affordable Care Act. For many, the ACA was a compromise on top of a compromise, and it didn't go far enough. The LDC rewrite will likely end up with some compromises and will be seen by some as not going far enough, since it will need votes from more moderate Council members. Yet, for many, the ACA was an abomination. Some people (not the people with pre-existing conditions) felt that they could barely afford their insurance premiums as things were, and they worried that the ACA would raise their premiums past the point where they could afford them. Many home owners are barely able to pay their property taxes as it is, and they worry that the LDC rewrite will be the thing that pushes their taxes past the point where they can make the payments, so, if they want their heirs to reap the benefits of their house having multiplied in value, then they worry that they will have no choice but to sell and move elsewhere. When the ACA was being discussed, many people were loudly telling anyone who would listen that it contained death panels that were going to kill off our seniors. Now we have a film saying that the LDC rewrite is going to cleanse our city of low and middle-income residents. Now the ACA has passed, and, while not everyone is happy, and some wish to push further, life has mostly gone on. I suspect that the same will hold for the LDC rewrite.