Point Austin: Can This Code Be Saved?

A few years ago at a Windsor Park Neighborhood Association meeting, we were looking over a proposed land use map that contemplated some mixed-use changes on corridors and a few larger intersections, amidst the repetitively suburban blocks. The response was mixed – but I particularly remember one neighbor's reaction: "I like everything exactly the way it is right now, and I don't want anything to change."

That's a comically widespread Austin sentiment often echoed over the years, and it might serve as a summation of much of the public response to CodeNEXT. Despite what was once a community consensus that the city's decades-old land use code needed major revision – and the 2012 adoption of the Imagine Austin comprehensive plan to move toward a more "compact and connected" city, in the last couple of years, far too many Austinites have joined an anti-CodeNEXT hysteria campaign, blaming the in-progress revision process – neither finalized nor implemented – for all of the ills of the modern city.

On the other hand, there are plenty of well-meaning folks who have convinced themselves that if only we devise the perfect land use code, affordable housing will spring like magic from every tract and lot. This, in a state where the Legislature spends every interim devising new ways to prevent cities from implementing the slightest progressive policies – just on the housing front over the years, forbidding inclusionary zoning, any kind of rent control, and most recently, banning affordable-housing linkage fees on new development. Certainly the Dome-heads will approve any Austin zoning changes aimed at limiting housing costs and making a substantial dent in the affordability crisis.

As I cheerfully told my neighbor, "Good luck with that."

Stunt Your Growth

That's not to say the endless CodeNEXT debate has been without occasional entertainment value. Over the weekend, for example, the Community Not Commodity folks – instigators of the likely illegal, certainly nonsensical petition against any and all changes in the code – found themselves in the awkward predicament of barring from their latest forum a small group of More-Radical-Than-Thou knuckleheads intent on contributing to the public discourse by shouting down anyone who dares disagree with them. Yet for the past year or more, CNC has been enthusiastically promoting the idiotic dogma that "CodeNEXT," "Developers," and "Growth" – i.e., people moving to Austin from elsewhere – embody Satanic Evil Incarnate and must be stopped, by any means necessary. All the knuckleheads are demanding is salvation: When does the exorcism finally begin?

Meanwhile, having fended off this assault from the left, the Austin Neigh­bor­hoods Council Executive Com­mit­tee – not to be confused with the wider ANC itself, and unsurprisingly including some of the same CNC people and their allies – fought off a challenge from what they see as their right flank, by excluding from membership any neighborhood association that dares differ from ExComm orthodoxy on land use and related matters. As one long-time, disillusioned ANC activist told me, "It's the nail in the coffin for relevance in this city by ANC."

Politics of Nostalgia

In conversations this week, some folks close to the revision process remained guardedly optimistic that the Planning Com­mission and the City Council will be able to amend and approve the draft code into small but real improvements in planning – better stormwater protection and green infrastructure, more walkable new subdivisions, greater density along corridors that might (eventually) sustain better transit and less reliance on cars, while slowly bending the housing cost curve. Some of that might even happen within a potential delay between adopting the code overall, and the precise mapping to follow – not an optimum solution, but perhaps the best we can hope for in light of all the polarization and active obstructionism.

There's plenty of blame to go around for how long, expensive, and contentious this process has been, even by Austin standards. The obstructionists have done whatever they can to muddy the waters, turning what might have been an intensive public engagement into a shouting match over imaginary horrors; their pro-code counterparts have imagined an equitable paradise quite unachievable by municipal policy. City Council, visibly split on direction, has failed to provide sufficient leadership, leaving staff and the hired consultants to instead recast the current code in more complicated detail, and by trying to please everybody taking potshots at them, pleasing no one at all.

And of course, there's the rest of us not-so-innocent bystanders, largely on the sidelines even at election time. We watch the circus from afar but seldom engage, except when there happens to be a contentious zoning case in our immediate neighborhood – thereby adding months of delay and millions of dollars to land use decisions better (and more cheaply) addressed by a simplified, rationalized, and future-oriented land use code. We could plan for growth, rather than fighting endless rearguard battles against it. Or we can go on pretending, nostalgically, that if we ignore the future, it will all just go away.