Housing costs in the Austin area rose dramatically in the past decade as the region transformed into a major tech hub and companies like Apple, Google and Oracle ramped up their presence in the city. "It shouldn't be that you need to be so lucky to have a high-paying job to be able to afford a home in Austin." "I'm here because I care that other people have housing, my family and my friends," Handal said. Her husband, Edgar Handal, an engineer at a tech company and a board member at AURA, an Austin organization that advocates for denser housing, said they can afford a home in East Austin but some of their friends have had to move far outside of the city. "If they want to move out of supportive housing, they would have to move out of the city." "There's nowhere to go if they had to," Razian said. Often, she said, the women would hesitate to move out of supportive housing because they couldn't find homes they could afford. Demonstrators held signs that read “Support affordable housing” and “Housing is a human right.”Īnoosh Razian, a 34-year-old Austin therapist, saw the effects of the city's housing shortage while working for a nonprofit that helps single mothers experiencing homelessness regain their footing. On a morning in late August, dozens of demonstrators crowded the steps of the Travis County Civil and Family Courts Facility in downtown Austin to protest a court challenge by a group of homeowners seeking to kill a popular affordable housing program and other housing initiatives. “Is this an Austin for everyone, or is it just for people who want to maintain their large home and neighborhood?” An unignorable crisisĪn organized and steadily growing activist movement is backing - and pushing - city officials to allow more housing to be built. “Without change, where do you think this will go? What are you preserving at that point?” said Dianne Bangle, CEO of the Real Estate Council of Austin. A group of homeowners, deftly wielding state law to their advantage, persuaded a judge in 2020 to kill a major overhaul of the city’s land development code that would have allowed denser housing.īut as musicians, teachers, police officers and firefighters struggle to find affordable housing within city limits, Austin’s housing crisis is increasingly seen as an existential one. For decades, efforts to loosen the city’s land-use regulations have run into opposition from homeowners fearful of neighborhood change, old-school environmentalists and anti-gentrification activists - even as policymakers increasingly backed the idea and the city’s housing woes mounted. “We've got a supply and demand problem, and we're going to have to come up with unique and different ways than we've thought of in the past to solve it.”Ĭity leaders have proposed a number of measures to try to stimulate more and denser housing, like allowing more single-family homes on smaller lots and taller apartment buildings near single-family homes, as well as doing away with mandates that require developers to set aside a certain amount of land for tenants to park their cars.īut these reforms will probably run into some familiar obstacles. “We have a significant affordability crisis, and it is an emergency,” Austin Mayor Kirk Watson told The Texas Tribune. The current restrictions, the thinking goes, impede the city’s ability to build enough homes to meet the crushing demand for housing - resulting in higher home prices and rents. After the collapse of big housing reform proposals in recent years, the Austin City Council is embarking on a new push to ease city restrictions on how much housing can be built and where. The crisis - along with the rise of a new political bloc calling for reform - has given Austin leaders a renewed mandate to tackle the problem. Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.Īs Austin’s sky-high housing costs put increasing pressure on renters and homeownership out of reach for many working Austinites, a yearslong fight over what kind of housing the city should allow could be at a turning point.Īustin has long been the epicenter of the state’s housing affordability crisis, but the problem reached new heights in the pandemic era amid massive population and job growth.
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