It’s the end of May in an odd numbered year. In Texas politics that always means good news and bad news. The good news is that the Texas Legislature has adjourned. The bad news is that there is always the possibility that the Governor may call them back for a special...
It’s election time again in Austin with Prop A and B, both about police oversight, on a May 6 ballot. Early voting is already underway. Prop A was put on the ballot by police accountability activists while Prop B looks like a sneak attack from the Austin Police...
The Austin housing market has made the national news again. The latest is an article in Bloomberg which explores one of the subjects we’ve covered frequently here. That is the New Urbanist mantra that simply building more housing, especially apartments, will lower...
We haven’t brought it up much in these pages, but the Texas Legislature has been in town since late January. So we probably need to take a look at proposed bills that would target Austin. In a fairly recent phenomenon, many of the bills are written to target...
OK, we’re going to talk about ETODs again, that is Equitable Transit Oriented Developments. Readers may recall that when we last discussed ETODs, right before Spring Break and SXSW, the City Council was about to take up City staff’s recommendation to “accept” the...
There’s a new acronym in town. It’s ETOD, which stands for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development. The City recently released a 184 page report titled the “Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Policy Plan.” ETODs are something of a blueprint, or zoning map, intended...
Austin housing prices have made the national news in a new way recently, but there has been a paucity of local coverage about it. According to multiple national media outlets, the financial giant Goldman Sachs predicted that Austin will be one of four metropolitan...
The holiday season is here. While some may be coasting already, for people in many walks of life the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas means a mad rush to get things done before the end of the year. And, of course, that is the case at Austin City Hall. The...
I know. I know. Most everything in the news now is focused on the elections; and for good reason. The Mayor, Council and/or City staff, however, have chosen Election Night as the time to start this Council’s final push to pass Land Development Code (LDC)...
(Part 2 of a series) In the first installment in this series we looked at how, contrary to the rhetoric of Mayor Steve Adler and numerous others, Austin is a runaway national leader in issuing building permits. To illustrate the point, we noted that on a per capita...
