City Council held their first meeting on the CodeNEXT land development code rewrite in two weeks (see “CodeNEXT and Compatibility,” June 29), and if they didn’t find any answers regarding how to move forward, they at least defined some questions – and sent city staff off to do at least part of the testing and scenario-building that was promised as part of the drafting process, while they take the next month off.
Council spent the entire day Wednesday talking about compatibility standards and transition zones – that is, how close can an eight- or 10-story building be built next to single-family homes? More specifically, if we want to allow those large buildings along major streets (Council generally does), then how deep into neighborhoods should that upzoning go – or conversely, what sorts of protections do existing homes have? Does an existing single-family neighborhood that extends right up to a major corridor trump the desire for greater density along that corridor? Or do we start with the density, and upzone properties away from the corridor to create a “step-down” into the single-family area? (And if so, how gradual or deep should that step-down be?) By the end of this day, Council hadn’t answered those questions, but there did seem to be a consensus that yes, we want to zone for residential density along corridors, and yes, single-family homes should get some sort of buffer zone. And that seemed to be as far as they wanted to get for now. Slow progress indeed.
And while compatibility is one of the thornier issues that has to be worked out – and it won’t have a simple answer for all parts of town – it’s also only one among a number of such issues that Council will have to work through. Parking requirements, affordability incentives, neighborhood plans, “legacy” zones: Those are all looming down the road, and none of them will be any easier than compatibility.
Ora Houston insisted that the transition zone mapping is “going to have to be context-sensitive,” to account for conditions on the ground – she cited a number of streets and roads in her East Austin district that have drastically different characteristics. She also suggested that, since her district’s Chestnut neighborhood had adopted into its neighborhood plan every one of the tools available in the city’s toolbox – duplexes, ADUs, mixed-use, etc. – that the city look at the results there to how those have been used, and what differences they’ve made.
Perhaps that will be part of the testing process Council is asking for; perhaps it won’t. Item 125 on today’s Council agenda is a resolution (sponsored by CMs Ellen Troxclair, Ann Kitchen, Jimmy Flannigan, and Mayor Steve Adler) “directing the City Manager to convene a group of design and development professionals and technical experts to obtain review, modeling, and testing of regulations proposed in CodeNEXT” – essentially, if I understand it correctly, to rerun the charrette process that the Austin chapter of the American Institute of Architects ran on the first and second drafts of the code – and return to Council with the results by the end of August. Adler noted that, “Whatever testing processes have gone on have not been very transparent … to the community.”
But Assistant City Manager Joe Pantaleon sounded markedly skeptical that his staff would be able to run that all down, in a transparent yet comprehensive manner, in the requested time frame. Planning Dept. Director Greg Guernsey noted that even deciding what constitutes an appropriate “design and development professional” might be hard to pin down, as he referenced the ongoing controversy over the makeup of the Planning Commission. Nonetheless, Council will likely pass some version of that resolution today, with the hope that they can get the results just as they’re finishing up with budget considerations in the first week of September.
That’s not going to happen, of course, at least not in a way that will provide the answers in the manner Council wants to see. So it’s another in the long line of unrealistic and artificial deadlines that have hampered progress for the past year and a half. But it’s a step, nonetheless, in catching up on the prep work that should have been completed at earlier stages in the process, so that’s good. And overall, CMs are asking good questions, and not yelling at each other, so, that’s good, too. Just don’t expect any actual product, or relief from the endless loop, anytime soon.
This article appears in June 29 • 2018.