Affordability panel looks to city, schools, churches to deliver needed housing

Austin-area housing advocates see major institutions such as the city, local schools and religious organizations as having the most potential for adding affordable housing units throughout the city in the coming years. During a recent panel discussion on the city’s affordability challenges, underutilized tax-free property holdings were seen as one solution to be explored in addition to incentivized developments with affordable units.

During the talk last week, Jeremy Striffler, head of real estate for Austin Independent School District, pointed to the push to redevelop the 18-acre Anita Ferrales Coy Facility in East Austin to include 500 units of workforce and affordable housing. Striffler said the development, which will also include a new alternative learning center, will provide housing badly needed for district employees.

“The district is being forced to think differently and say, how can we recruit and retain teachers in a city that is continuing to become more expensive? How do we keep that alchemy that happens when not only that student, that family member outside the classroom sees that teacher or the custodian or the bus driver or the front office, but they see him on the weekend at the grocery store?” he said, noting AISD is looking throughout its property portfolio for other opportunities to utilize its tax-exempt status that greatly reduces some of the ongoing costs for development partners.

“We have started to identify opportunities where we can build housing to provide another option for our teachers and staff,” he said. “It is not in lieu of paying them more. It is moreso recognizing currently some things are out of our control outside of a lot of advocacy from all of us at the state level to change the system.”

Striffler also pointed to work the Austin Bridge Builders Alliance is doing to work with local churches in exploring how to use some of their property holdings to build needed intergenerational housing. With seniors and families living close to churches in multifamily buildings, he said the added housing could help build community around gathering places that may be at risk of disappearing.

“By looking at what they have, and often it’s excess land, that could be an opportunity to not only monetize in a way to help cover deferred maintenance, but also keep parishioners on-site,” he said. “You could have a senior living type development right next to the church. Guess who would benefit from that? It also could build that sense of community because they’ll be the ones going over to the parish hall on Wednesday nights to play bridge or on Sunday going to worship. I think, especially in the urban core, there’s a lot of opportunity to look at those two.”

Hannah Rangel, vice president of built environment for Downtown Austin Alliance, said City Council likely needs to look at ways to restructure its Downtown Density Bonus Program to more heavily prioritize on-site affordable units instead of allowing fee-in-lieu payments by developers to fund affordable housing elsewhere.

“We’re actually right at a place where we’re looking to rework the Downtown Density Bonus Program, and we’re going to be asking a lot of serious questions about the value of on-site versus the value of fee. We need to be looking to … maximizing output, whether it’s market rate and affordable or fee,” she said. “The development community is happy to deliver fees if they’re seeing it deployed and they’re seeing the benefit there. We were not seeing the fees going out. … Very recently, Council deployed a lot of funds in the project, so we want to keep seeing that happening.”

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