Neighbors push back on city plan to direct future land use around Cap Metro sites

A hearing at the Planning Commission on a proposal by city staff to change land use plans around two Capital Metro park-and-ride sites in North and South Austin was postponed during a March 25 meeting after neighborhood advocates raised alarm.

The postponed plan revolves around the North Lamar and South Congress transit centers, which Capital Metro intends to redevelop as part of the Project Connect plan enacted by voters in 2020.

In materials shared with commissioners and the public, Capital Metro provided some details about those redevelopment plans, which would see the parking lots built up into parking garages sharing space with affordable housing, retail and public plazas.

The proposal to be heard by the Planning Commission was for the most part not related to the redevelopment of those sites directly, but rather to the future land use maps, or FLUMs, attached to the land around the sites. That’s where the angst from neighborhood advocates comes in.

Both sites are, by design, at key intersections that butt up against multiple neighborhoods, and so the land that surrounds them crosses over into multiple neighborhood plans, a kind of special zoning overlay in the Austin city code common across the city.

Typically, these plans were, and are, formed with involvement from neighborhood residents and their organizations. FLUMs are another kind of overlay, sometimes included within NPs, that set intentions for what kind of zoning and development will happen in an area over a longer period of time.

What the city wants is for that land to be removed from the various FLUMs under the various NPs, to “ensure that the (station area plans’) vision of future land use in the station area does not conflict with any pre-existing neighborhood plan’s future land use map,” according to a memo provided to the commission.

The new, station-related future land use plans are rolled into another four-letter planning acronym: ETOD, or Equitable Transit-Oriented Development.

The city is presenting ETODs, which were formally adopted as a policy plan by the city in 2023, as a fairer and more, well, equitable version of the existing Transit-Oriented Development framework, which was at the center of another Planning Commission case recently reported on by the Austin Monitor.

The “equitable” part of the new district type involves a system of color-coded typologies for areas based on how quickly they’re developing, how many people live there and how vulnerable residents are to displacement.

Those commitments notwithstanding, community advocates who spoke against the plan at the meeting signaled their feeling that the city wasn’t letting them in on it.

Monica Guzmán, a former City Council candidate for District 4, who was speaking on behalf of the North Austin Civic Association, said she had talked to residents and business owners around the North Lamar Transit Center and “the earliest anyone had heard about it was last Monday.”

“This is not the way Austin should be doing things. This is not the way anyone should be doing things,” Guzmán said.

The city is separately asking for the station area plans, including for the land around the stations themselves, to be added to the larger Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, and for an amendment to the Land Development Code to make area planning simpler.

Stevie Greathouse, a division manager with the Planning Department, pushed back against the idea that the city hasn’t engaged with the community, noting that the Planning Department had among other measures mailed over 7,000 postcards, distributed over 400 flyers, held more than two-dozen focus groups, workshops and tabling events, and visited 187 businesses.

All 11 items on the meeting agenda related to the plan were postponed on the consent agenda – meaning without individual discussion by the commission – to April 22. Greathouse said Planning was amenable to the delay, and to more engagement.

“Based on the attendance so far of (public events), we would recommend that we would meet directly with impacted neighborhood organizations and groups on an ad-hoc basis, rather than trying to host an additional large come-one-and-come-all kind of meeting over the next month,” she added.

Photo of North Lamar Transit Center via Wikimedia Commons.

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