Austin Contrarian

ANC's call for action

ANC has revised the draft growth management resolution I wrote about here.  (Even some ANC supporters had trouble stomaching that one.)  It's calling the new resolution, "A Call for Action to Manage Austin's Growth."

The new resolution manages to avoid patent contradictions, such as bashing sprawl in one sentence and bashing density in the next.  But the upshot is the same:  The City Council should capitulate to ANC/neighborhood association demands, including demands to opt out of VMU.  (If only ANC would practice what it preaches by respecting the "positions of the affected . . . Neighborhood Associations."  How many times has ANC ignored the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association's position on downtown development projects?) 

Let me give you the flavor of the "Call for Action":

A healthy future for the City of Austin that achieves our shared vision requires a viable and living growth management policy.  The ANC identifies the following as essential to success:

• Engage diverse stakeholders and the general public.
• Identify and articulate long-term goals that reflect community values.
• Develop a strategy on which to implement policies.  [AC:  ???]
• Ensure that the policy provides an equitable balance of gains and losses for all stakeholders.
• Secure the citizenry's endorsement of the policy.

"Living" is not the first adjective I would use to describe a growth management policy, although I understand why ANC prefers it to, say, "stifling."  But my main objection to this paragraph is the claim that there are "community values."  There aren't, at least not where land-use regulations are concerned.  There are people who value the status quo, and who believe it is City Council's job to maintain it.  Then there are people who value a dynamic environment, even if it means occasional friction or inconvenience.  There are people who believe that SF-3 zoned property is sacred, and those who believe the city should be making more room for multi-family.  There are those who like density because of the vitality and variety it brings, and those who hate density because of the congestion it brings.  It is no use pretending that there is any such thing as a "shared vision" or "community value"; there are profound differences among us, and we're not all going to get what we want.   

Mother Jones on NIMBYs

Mother Jones on "progressive" NIMBYs:

Bill Duane knows most people can't afford homes like his $1 million bungalow on a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. That's why the Marin County attorney volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Until recently, that is, when the group announced plans to build two affordable duplexes just down the street from him. "Habitat usually goes into a blighted neighborhood and enhances it," Duane says. "Here, they are coming into an enhanced neighborhood and blighting it." Housing advocates say Duane exemplifies a vexing irony: People support affordable housing with their labor, money, and votes—just so long as it's nowhere near them.

. . .

[F]ew development projects have been more enigmatically unpopular than the Marin project, where three luxury houses will be clumped onto a 17.5-acre hill in a way that preserves most of the land as open space. In accordance with county rules, the developer set aside an acre for low-income housing. There, Habitat will build four units, two melded together to look like one Craftsman-style home, which will be sold at below-market rates to families making $40,000 to $56,000 a year (a teacher in Marin earns on average $47,000).

Duane and I climbed into his Mercedes station wagon and drove to the project site, a hillside of chaparral and grass. He'd promised me it would be obvious that congestion was already bad. A lone Toyota Prius with a "Save Tibet" sticker silently cruised by. "Usually this whole area is packed with cars," he insisted. And if I researched the matter, he hinted, I might learn that the endangered Tiburon mariposa lily grows here (naturalists doubt it), and that an Indian burial spear discovered nearby might have belonged to the county's namesake, Chief Marin (a Marin anthropologist says Duane is "reporting things that are not there"). Duane next raised an environmental justice concern: Placing the affordable housing in the shadow of million-dollar homes fosters "a slave kind of mentality."

He restarted his car and pulled up the slope of Eagle Rock Drive, past gardens of salvia, agave, and bird-of-paradise, pointing out houses already owned by minorities; as if making a point, he waved to an Asian man checking his mail. "It's a very diverse community here," he said.

The commenters to the article are debating whether Duane is a racist/classist, or just a homeowner reasonably worried about his ($1 million) property value.  The underlying problem, though, is the artificial scarcity created by Marin County's legendary growth controls.  (Just three market-rate homes on 17.5 acres?)   Marin homeowners perfected the art of using land-use regulations to extract economic rents (inflated home prices) thirty years ago.  Now there is virtually nowhere to build affordable market-rate homes in the county, at least not without government intervention or non-profit assistance.  Individual homeowners or neighborhoods have to play "beggar they thy neighbor" to hold on to the economic rents enjoyed by everyone else.