From the Co-President's Desk
growth at the periphery to prevent new suburban tracts from forming encircling new towns, while attempting to influence where growth takes place and exerting some supervision over the form it takes. While this strategy has kept Austin in better shape than most big cities, it has also resulted in a disproportionate amount of City resources going to support peripheral growth while the Central City is starved for resources. Since a rapidly growing city costs more to run than a stable one, this may have produced a city where costs now exceed income. Calls by politicians for more growth to "solve" this problem are not altogether reassuring.
Meanwhile, regional growth is taking place far outside the limits of the ability of the City of Austin to annex and incorporate. The response to that one has been the doctrine of "infill", which is the idea that Austin can absorb some of the regional growth internally by "densifying" existing neighborhoods to accommodate some of the million or so California refuges that we are told will be arriving over the next decade or two, whether we want to participate in Californication or not. (Parenthetically, the fact that there is now a flight from that perennial Boom Land suggests to some that lots and lots of continuous growth may not be an unmixed blessing.) The problem is that Central City SF-3 zoned neighborhoods are seen as the principal location for this infill. Newer outlying suburban neighborhoods, mostly zoned SF-1 or SF-2, have deed restrictions against uses other than single-family houses that track their restrictive zoning. About 13.8% of the city is zoned SF-3, according to the City DemographerÕs latest report, while the more restrictive SF-1 and SF-2 categories together account for about 15% of the City of Austin. City planners and the real estate interests seem strangely indifferent to the remaining 71% as potential infill densification sites. Planners say appropriately favorable things about the concept of "mixed use", which might combine stores with apartments or offices; but they do not appear to be inclined to push this upon resistant commercial real estate interests, while they do seem quite willing to push more dwelling units into SF-3 neighborhoods with a conspicuous indifference as to whether this will makes these communities less attractive places for families to live, An architect from another neighborhood recently pointed out the City has changed the name of SF-3 from "single family" to "family neighborhood" to reflect their determination to transform our neighborhoods, lot by lot, into something different from what they are currently. What they would be like at the end of this transformation is quite unclear, perhaps to the planners as well, but they would have lots more people and, perhaps more importantly, many more cars, parked anywhere they will fit.
I believe that this struggle over the fate of central city neighborhoods will continue for the foreseeable future and will manifest itself over and over in an ongoing series of individual zoning cases, variance requests and move-off permit hearings. It is difficult to resist this continuous push without seeming to be a reviled NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) elitist. An alternative would be to advocate for a conscious policy
