Housing panelists examine what’s worked in Austin, and across Texas

At a South by Southwest panel discussion last week on housing policies in Texas, City Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison shared possible new components of the “agrihood” housing-plus-agriculture approach she championed last year.

While sharing her views on steps the city has taken in recent years to address affordability concerns around housing, Harper-Madison talked about the possibility of allowing a wide-open “rogue zoning” classification to housing around small agricultural parcels. From prefabricated housing and trailers to multifamily projects, she said the removal of most regulations on housing types would make the projects attractive to builders who want to do business in Austin’s healthy real estate market.

“You can have trailers, you can have manufactured homes, you can have multifamily, you can have single-family, whatever you want. Just rogue zoning in this particular area, this designated area, to see how it works,” she said during the panel discussion organized by Realtor.com. “For no other reason than because we are so deeply invested in our innovative tendencies and because some of our capital is in our humans. Why don’t we try it and pilot it and see if it works?”

During the event, Harper-Madison discussed another possible policy she’d like to enact before her term expires: creating an onboarding program for new Council members, including a pre-hired temporary staff so the newly elected leaders can become more effective at land use and other policy requirements more quickly. Learning how to operate those “levers of power” faster, she said, would make it easier to enact change that is needed for the city to keep up with growth and demands coming from all sides.

Panelist Felicity Maxwell, executive director of Texans for Housing, said officials across Texas and at the state level are looking at how to emulate some of Austin’s recent actions related to zoning, including the Affordability Unlocked initiative, which was intended to remove many of the bureaucratic steps that made affordable housing too expensive to pursue profitably.

“The idea was essentially that we should loosen all the regulations that we normally have for housing projects related to affordable housing, and that just makes common sense,” she said. “If you’re doing affordable housing at a certain percentage, you get the constraints that we would normally put on some of these projects are lifted. That move was related to parking and setbacks and a number of things so we could also use our affordable housing bond dollars more efficiently. We were so lucky … our Council as well as all the community members really support affordable housing and have twice gone out for big bonds and supported that development.”

Harper-Madison said the gradual steps the city has taken around housing and zoning requirements in the aftermath of the abandoned CodeNEXT overhaul have been effective, even if it took the city far too long to revise its building code.

“What we did was we got creative, and the creativity was piecemealing Land Development Code changes that would allow for more development in the city in a way that transcended political parties,” she said. “Austin is one of the most economically segregated cities in the country. It transcended economics. It just makes sense the way that we’re doing things currently. I’d say we got a long way to go, but we’re moving in the direction of having the general public be able to speak the same language.”

Panelist Sara Bronin, president and CEO of the National Zoning Atlas, said Austin’s substantial reduction in minimum lot sizes to encourage infill development is supported by her organization’s analysis of most zoning policies and building codes across the country.

“If you don’t have a minimum lot size requirement in your zoning code or if you have a very small, let’s say a quarter acre or smaller, that’s a good thing because what it says is that you can build a house in a small lot. That’s a good thing for affordability. So overall in Texas, we do see a different approach to land use regulation,” she said.

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