Planning Commission moves to create new zoning category to allow more housing

The Planning Commission took a step on Tuesday to create a new zoning category that commissioners say would allow more housing to be built across the city.

“We’re not building enough housing, and whatever we can do to change that and get transit-supportive density on the ground, we’ve gotta do. And this is a great tool to help get us there,” said Commissioner Greg Anderson, the proposal’s sponsor. 

The new zoning category, called Town Zoning (TZ), would let developers choose regulations like building height, compatibility setbacks and parking requirements for a property, and then ask for city approval. 

In projects with housing, 10 percent of the additional units – that is, units that developers could not build under existing zoning – would have to be affordable for those making 60 percent of the median family income. TZ would also prohibit suburban, car-oriented uses to encourage urban, pedestrian-oriented development.

City staffers, commissioners and City Council members will work out other details in the coming months, including to which current zoning types TZ could be added.

Because each request for TZ would require approval from the Planning Commission and City Council, nearby property owners would retain notification and protest rights – issues at the crux of a lawsuit that halted the rewrite of the city’s Land Development Code.

In the absence of a full-blown code rewrite, commissioners said creating TZ would allow more housing to be built. 

“This is a tool in a toolbox to help us work with what we have, because we know that those big, broad strokes of reform are probably not happening,” Commissioner Felicity Maxwell said.  

TZ is a direct response to developers using the existing Land Development Code in an unintended way: requesting rezonings to Limited Industrial Services-Planned Development Area (LI-PDA) to build mixed-use or residential projects. Though LI-PDA was not intended for housing, developers use the zoning category’s flexibility to build bigger buildings than they otherwise could. TZ would have that same flexibility, but without the baggage of industrial zoning.

“In some of these cases, we were actually going from a zoning category that was not light industrial to light industrial only to then condition out the light industrial uses and then allow residential,” Anderson said. “So much of that has to do with the backwards gymnastics of a 1984 Land Development Code that is very, very out of date.” 

Several of these rezonings have appeared on the Planning Commission’s agenda in recent weeks, including cases that would allow condominiums along Interstate 35 and a mixed-use project in East Austin on the site of a Borden Dairy plant. 

Commissioners voted 11-0-1, with Commissioner Jennifer Mushtaler abstaining, to begin the process of creating Town Zoning. How long the process will take likely depends on city staffers’ workload and where the code change falls among other Council priorities. 

Anderson said that some Council members appear eager to see the proposal adopted. “What I heard back resounding in conversations was, ‘This is awesome, let’s move it forward.’”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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