Groups team up to demand more speed on development code changes

A coalition of community advocates is asking the city to move a little quicker in implementing changes to the Land Development Code. As we have reported, though City Council has approved a number of progressive changes to the code in recent months, city staff has presented a timeline that predicts implementation of those changes will not take place for more than a year. On Monday, members of the Austin Housing Coalition, Transit Forward, HousingWorks Austin and the Austin Justice Coalition asked city staff, Council and the city manager to pick up the pace in codifying things like changed occupancy limits and elimination of parking requirements. “For many of the most impactful amendments, staff is planning for months of development and engagement. While we understand that it is crucial to study the potential impacts of these code changes, we urge Council to press staff to refer to the results of the outreach from the previous land development code rewrite process and prior Council-initiated code changes, where millions of dollars were spent to demonstrate that our city needs to use every tool available to allow more housing. While we support representative and thorough community outreach, we believe that at this point, most efforts would be redundant and likely to just perpetuate the code-created housing crisis that every Council Member campaigned to address,” reads the letter, in part. “Our organizations urge City Council to provide staff with whatever resources are necessary to shorten these development and engagement timelines so that these much needed code amendments will be implemented within the year. We hope that such resources include funding for consultants and additional staff, as well as an investigation into work policies that might expedite filling the many vacancies in departments responsible for implementing these policies.”