Sara just sent me a link to the Austin Contrarian, a weblog covering Austin housing from Chris Bradford's mildly libertarian, pro-affordability perspective. There's a lot of great stuff, including his series on the evils of our new McMansion ordinance. My neck is sore from nodding, but at least a couple of passages from a post on affordable housing quotas seem especially worth quoting:
What kind of affordable housing solutions should we expect the neighborhood activists to push for? If we assume their behavior is consistent with home-price maximization, the answer is easy: affordable housing quotas.[snip]
As I've noted before, my take is a "behavioralist" one; I'm not making claims about the subjective motives of NA's. For example, I can't dispute that some of these homeowners feel genuine concern about the lack of affordable housing in Central Austin. I just don't care. NA policies should judged by their likely effects and not NA's subjective intentions.
Now I don't know about the economics of affordable housing quotas but I do know about neighborhood activists in Austin, and Bradford's identified the perfect yardstick for measuring their claims: "I don't want an apartment on a residential street" reads raise my property value. "Duplexes will destroy the character of the neighborhood" reads raise my property value. "Large houses are an eyesore" reads raise my property value. It's simple and effective.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at September 19, 2006 11:22 AMThanks, this helps to explain one of the disconnects in our previous conversations. Apparently your "neighborhood activists" are against affordable housing. Ours are for it.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 20, 2006 03:32 PMOur neighborhood activists are residents of older (1890s-1940s) neighborhoods that were usually (but not always) white during segregation. These neighborhoods are composed of single-family dwellings in the 800-1500 sqft range, depending on the tastes and budgets of the original purchasers. I hesitate to tar all these activists as buy-and-flip owners, but the ratio of gentrifiers to long-term-residents among the politically active homeowners is extremely high.
If I were to paint a stereotype of a typical Austin neighborhood activist, they would be either a professional or an artist in their 30s or 40s who'd owned their home for more than 5 but fewer than 15 years. They are intensely opposed to any zoning changes that would -- let's face it -- expand the supply of housing. Most prominant among those positions is the opposition to building dormitories or apartments in the neighborhood directly across from the University of Texas campus and opposition to building a new-urbanist apartment complex on a vacant mid-city tract of land.
The most recent effort, the "McMansion Ordinance" prohibits homeowners from building garage apartments or expanding their own homes. This, of course, doesn't trouble professional DINKS one bit, but those of us whose families may expand -- whether due to additional children or aging relatives -- aren't too fond of it. It doesn't help, of course, that several neighborhood representatives on the board that defined the proposals have houses too large to pass under the ordinance they have proposed.
Not coincidentally, the neighborhoods that spawn such activists are the main supporters for an environmentalist movement that has prohibited development on vast tracts of suburban and exurban land. While I'm sympathetic to the intent, I can't help noting the effect this necessarily will have on housing prices across the city, as the inverse-square law is prevented from operation. I've heard rumors that the same activists are opposed to converting empty warehouses downtown into luxury lofts -- which is fine for them, but not so much for the poorer hispanic residents of East Austin that are being pushed out of their homes by the young professionals in the lofts' target market.
Of course, these neighborhoods are composed of fine people. They either vote Democrat or Green (Austin gave Nader 11% of the vote in 2000), and I probably would live there if I could afford it. I just wish they'd let me build an extra bedroom.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 20, 2006 06:28 PMBest summary I've seen. And thanks for the plug.
Posted by: Chris Bradford at September 20, 2006 07:07 PM...and you're quite sure the Green Party voters are the ones with the big houses?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 21, 2006 09:42 AMApologies -- my last paragraph got ambiguous and switched referents between the actual residents (who are, based on city election maps, the most liberal in the city) and the stereotype I had drawn earlier.
One thing I should point out is that the unpleasant effects I'm describing are not motivated by malice. They're largely the result of a sense of aesthetics I share combined with a commendable love of place and a NIMBYism I can't really fault. Some have charged hypocricy among certain of the activists, but I suspect it's likely just a lack of self-reflection.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 21, 2006 11:48 AMI've actually gotten direct responses (not TO me, but at least to stuff I wrote) from both of those task force members, and it's pretty clear it's not a lack of self-reflection that's to blame.
Since speaking before the Planning Commission (and observing the barely-veiled antipathy towards secondary dwelling units exhibited by McGraw especially), it's become more apparent to me that the motivating force for at least some of these people isn't large houses per-se, but instead, a desire to protect single-family-only-never-anything-else development; but they are self-aware enough to know that the PC especially and even the CC believe differently.
The Planning Commission saw through it. The City Council either didn't, or didn't care.
Posted by: M1EK at September 26, 2006 02:23 PM