Props to Council

City Council continues to show that it is serious about opening the core transit corridors to Vertical Mixed Use development by standing up to neighborhoods trying to wriggle out of the VMU bargain.

A couple of recent actions by Council are especially reassuring:

The neighborhoods in the East MLK Combined Planning Area asked to opt out all of their eligible tracts, most of which lie along Manor Road east of Airport Boulevard.  They offered the typical pretexts (pp. 8-9) -- e.g., lack of infrastructure (although citing chronically stopped up toilets was probably a first), increased impervious cover, inadequate planning and coordination -- while still managing to invoke New Urbanist guru Andres Duany as cover for their unambiguously anti-Urbanist stand.

Props to Council.  At its February 28 meeting, it voted 7-0 to retain VMU zoning on all of the tracts, and approved parking reductions and additional ground floor uses to boot.  (This was 1st reading only; 2nd and 3rd readings are on the March 20 agenda.)

Bryker Woods was not nearly as intransigent as the East MLK neighborhoods.  It agreed to leave most of its tracts in the VMU district, but asked to exclude seven tracts (mainly over worries about parking, from what I saw of the Planning Commission hearing.)  Council voted (6-0) to zone five of the seven tracts VMU anyway, and deferred the other two to its March 20 meeting. 

Council has decided that it is not a rubber stamp.

Not every neighborhood is an East MLK.  Some neighborhoods have embraced VMU unreservedly.  Not only did North Loop not ask to exclude any of its VMU-eligible properties, it asked to opt in several other tracts.  Some neighborhoods, at least, recognize that VMU developments will enhance their neighborhoods even as they provide additional room for multi-family development.

Comments

[M1EK]

North Loop's getting new leadership - the same people who railroaded the Howard Nursery buyers out of town - so don't count them in yet. They've already been buzzing about how they can pull back their previous VMU application.

[M1EK]

Here's the link:

http://northloop.14gram.com/nndl-vmu-meeting-tonight

Site strips attributions, but I think it's from Jody Horton, their new Prez, who was heavily involved in the submarining of the Howard tract redevelopment (ilovenorthloop.org).

They're basically trying to garner enough neighborhood support to go to city council and say "We changed our mind", I think.

[heyzeus]

I don't believe North Loop PT has elected new leadership yet. Also, at this point the NLPT isn't considering removal of the Howard Nursery property from VMU, but is considering (led by the Horton group) requesting some sort of restriction be placed on the VMU designation requiring curb cuts to front to Koenig or Avenue F rather than 56th Street. Don't ask me how this is possible, but that's the idea.

[M1EK]

You're right, but:

http://northloop.14gram.com/nndl-officer-nominations

the presumptive Co-Presidents are indeed the bozoes behind ILoveNorthLoop and the torpedoing of the Howard project. Nobody else nominated, and the old leadership is giving up in disgust. Basically a coup, a la Allandale with RG4N.

[Tim]

Won't someone think about the trashy run down buildings? What about all those crummy office buildings from the eighties that give Koenig such a wonderful "flavor". What about the car lots?

Hopefully the council will just stand up to them. The work-live spaces on North-Loop have already made the street much more interesting and desirable. They'll like it when it's done. People resist change. It's our nature.

[M1EK]

One can hope; but sooner or later campaign season is going to have an effect here. Leffingwell already caved once on Judges' Hill's ridiculous request to opt everything out, after all.

[Chop Chop]

Your support for micro-manager Brewster McCraken's Commercial Design Standards and its VMU Subchapter baffles me. These standards are nothing more than the codification of current architectural trends. As you point out, they mandate design down the the detail of the shade of glass needed on the front windows and the height of the ceilings. The VMU section of these standards offers to release developers from current regulation (which was simply the codification of architectural trends from earlier decades) if they provide a residential component in a retail building.

The entire premise of the VMU argument seems bogus: The Austin that we know and love is threatened by sprawl. This sprawl is encouraged by overly prescriptive regulations, such as setbacks, parking requirements, density limitations, and segragated uses. As a solution, we will lift the sprawl inducing regulations on our favorite parts of Central Austin, but we will maintain them on the sprawling perimeter.

The end effect of this regulation is that it grants additional development rights to owners of land in central Austin, driving up the price of that land and encouraging redevelopment and gentrification. But it does absolutely nothing to address sprawl.

I'm all for lifting regulations. If we need development codes to make sure buildings are safe, fine. If we what to make sure that some uses are restricted to industrial parts of town, fine. But let designers make the architectural decisions.

However, we need to lift the regulations across town. The current code identifies multiple East-Side corridors but west side corridors are missing. What about Exposition? Why is that less of a corridor than East MLK? The current focus of these areas centers around what the city seems to feel is "under-valued" land. Selective lifting of regulations places additional financial incentives to developers in an area already losing the battle against gentrification.

The Commercial Design Standards aren't about good urban planning. They are about forcing Neo-Quaint Achritecture that will create pocket developments of upscale lofts above esspresso shops and hair botiques.

PS- The illustration you've selected is the Waterstreet Lofts. This project was built under existing zoning. It didn't require a single variance.

[AC]

Chop Chop, you're preaching to the choir. I hate the prescriptive restrictions which perpetuate suburban sprawl. I'd love to expand density up and down Expedition, through West Austin, really to any commercial street. I'd permit small, multi-family infill projects in neighborhood interiors, provided they are consistent with the neighborhood scale (broadly defined). I'd permit more mixed use in neighborhood interiors -- I'd go exclusively to a form-based code. I'd permit more housing types in neighborhood interiors, including row houses.

I agree the VMU ordinance over-specifies design, and will stifle innovation. I don't have a problem requiring them to "address" the street, since that solves a collective action problem, but I'd leave facades, window placement, entrance placement, glazing requirements, articulations, ground floor height, etc. up to architects.

But I see the VMU ordinance as an important tool for expanding the amount of land available for multi-family. It's what we can do right now. It takes a carrot -- something for the neighborhoods, such as ground-floor commercial uses and "Neo-Quaint Architecture" (good term!). No carrot, no additional multi-family.

[M1EK]

"The end effect of this regulation is that it grants additional development rights to owners of land in central Austin, driving up the price of that land and encouraging redevelopment and gentrification. But it does absolutely nothing to address sprawl."

Even if the first sentence was all it did, it would still address sprawl a little. Every additional housing unit in the center-city is potentially one less (give or take) in sprawl, period.

Agreed that the new restrictions are too many - but to be honest, the overall effect is to allow MORE things, not FEWER, since they can still put up commercial without housing if they want to. IE, the tracts are already zoned commercial - they can't put housing on them at all today; so even a highly restrictive VMU ordinance is still providing more freedom than business-as-usual.

[M1EK]

BTW, we haven't seen Exposition yet. I'd expect Tarrytown to be just as idiotically reactionary as Hyde Park if not moreso, but the true test will be whether CC lets them get away with it.

Don't underestimate the urban bona-fides of this council these days. Wynn lives downtown now (not Tarrytown); McCracken in the Triangle; and they both clearly get it.

[Chop Chop]

M1EK,
That's just it. You won't see Exposition. It's not defined as a core transit corridor. There are no core transit corridors west of Mopac. Enfield road is four lanes, has an overpass over Lamar, and an Exit on Mopac, but no designation as a transit corridor.

On the other hand, East 5th street is barely one lane and until recently unpaved in places, and it is a core-transit corridor. Riverside, 5th, 6th, 7th, MLK, Airport and other roads that you like to label "far East Austin" when discussing the rail line are all key "urban" roads when it comes to VMU.

Neither the Mayor nor McCraken get it. Opening up affordable, central city neighborhoods for development while protecting the low density neighborhoods of the elite just pushes the lower classes to the failing suburbs. In fact, it doesn't necessarily increase density. As neighborhoods gentrify, density often falls. I've seen it readily enough in my own neighborhood. A house that was divided into 3 apartments, each holding 3 to 4 single male immigrant laborers gets rehabbed. The workers are sent packing and the 10 - 12 residents are replaced by a family of three.

VMU is about developing clusters of boutiques and luxury housing. The design standards are too strict to see any real organic development of a diverse, creative, urban culture. It will create a rise in tax base. Unfortunately, it will also raise the cost of providing services to the displaced.

[M1EK]

Chop Chop, Enfield isn't core transit by my definition either - the #9 runs once an hour most of the time. I'm upset Exposition got left out; but we can get to that next time. It's not one of the highest corridors for ridership but I think it could have been put in as a good faith gesture, personally. (I've ridden the #21/#22 plenty of times; the #9 once or twice; my stepson takes the #21/#22 to/from school, actually - but it's in a different galaxy compared to the #5/#7 near my house as far as ridership goes).

As for VMU not necessarily increasing density, again, these are new housing units - not rehabbed old ones. They don't exist today. Any indirect effect due to gentrification is puny compared to adding 30-60 condos on top of a block of retail, for instance.