Oh, I missed the final report

When I wrote about the Affordable Housing Incentives Task Force last week, I didn't realize it had submitted its final report.  (The task force's web site only had the draft report at the time.)

Here's the final report.

Disappointing.  I guess the draft recommendations would have produced too much new, permanently-affordable housing.

One of the draft's best ideas was to permit automatic up-zoning of multi-family property in return for "deep" affordability guarantees.  That is, a developer who set aside 10% of the units for 60% MFI would get to develop any MF-2 or denser property at MF-6 densities.

In English:  MF-2 property is limited to a density of 24 or fewer units per acre.  (It depends on the number of bedrooms in the units).  MF-3 has a slightly higher cap, and MF-4 and -5 even higher.

MF-6 doesn't have a hard cap.  It has minimum open space requirements (100 sq. ft.) per unit.  And it has height limitations and setback limitations.  But there is no pre-set density limit, even though there is a practical limit.  Depending on the height and setback limitations, an MF-6 property might hold two or three times as many units as an MF-2 property.

The draft report allowed a developer to redevelop low-density property as high-density property in exchange for reserving 10% of the units for families who make less than 60% of the median family income.

The draft report protected the neighborhoods by imposing hard height limits on up-zoned properties.  It also required developments to comply with neighborhood compatibility standards.  This was a good compromise: increased density + affordability in return for protecting neighborhoods from "inappropriate" mass and scale.

The best part of the deal, in my opinion, was that it would apply pretty much everywhere.  Any MF-2 or denser property, developed or undeveloped, would be eligible for denser development.  That's a lot of property.  There are a lot of 70s-era, low-density complexes out there.

Alas, it was too good to be true.

The final report limits this up-zoning entitlement to "greenfield" sites:  "sites that are zoned multifamily but have no developed housing units."  I haven't conducted a survey, but I'll wager there aren't a whole lot of large, completely undeveloped, multi-family sites in central Austin.  (Some people call these "meadows," although the more accurate term for many may be "flood plain.")

So between the draft report and the final report, most multi-family property was taken out of play.  And this particular recommendation lost any real bite.

Oh, if you want to know who fought to obstruct dense redevelopment, read the task members' draft comments here.  (The task force had affordable housing advocates, developer representatives, and neighborhood/ANC advocates.  If you can't tell who is who, the people complaining about the multi-family recommendation are the neighborhood reps.)

Comments

[M1EK]

Jeff Jack has been pushing this fallacy that we can just develop multi-family on greenfield ever since I met him for the first time in my first year or two on the UTC (2001 or 2002). It probably came from him in this forum too.