City Council Should Rezone All AISD Properties to Allow Multi-Family Housing
If Teachers Are Important to Austin, Why Doesn’t the City Council Act?
By Nina Hernandez
Earlier this summer, the Austin Independent School District and Austin Habitat for Humanity celebrated a partnership that will soon provide 30 affordable homes across two developments in East Austin. It’s part of a long-standing effort on the part of the district to find a way to leverage its plentiful supply of acreage into affordable housing that could in turn boost enrollment.
We know that we need far more than a trickle of affordable units to make a dent in our city’s housing crisis. So then why is the city waiting around while one of its largest landowners works to address these problems on a case-by-base basis? AISD properties are zoned to allow single-family housing only or less, which limits AISD’s options to help with our housing crisis. What if, instead of single-family, the land in question had been upzoned to accommodate multi-family? How many more families or teachers would be given opportunities that way?
City Council should help facilitate AISD’s work to address the housing crisis its teachers and parents face by moving to upzone AISD holdings and give the district more opportunities to partner with organizations like Habitat that can supply the city with housing stock and fast.
Every time AISD is forced to negotiate with antiquated neighborhood associations to see what that vocal minority will accept, the city loses valuable time in its struggle against displacement. Not only could AISD make its decisions about which properties to sell, lease, or partner with an organization much quicker, but the partnering organization or developer could also avoid the snare of a city of Austin rezoning application – which contributes significantly to the ultimate cost to the homeowner or renter.
AISD has been looking for ways to solve its enrollment and affordability issues for years, and the results speak for themselves. Teachers and students continue to leave the district in droves. Because of the state policy of Recapture, which sends millions of AISD’s budget outside the district each year, the district has little wiggle-room in its budget. Actually, one of the few levers it does have the ability to pull is the massive acreage it's sitting on.
Money the district makes from selling off its land isn’t subject to Recapture. But that bonus would be a lot more compelling if the city wasn’t sitting on land that wasn’t tied up in restrictive zoning rules. Those rules make it more costly and time-intensive to develop, and that means either the city loses out on opportunities or those opportunities are more expensive when they do get approved. But even better than selling their properties would be leasing or partnering with organizations like Habitat For Humanity to build as much permanently affordable multi-family housing on their land as they can.
City Council could in one fell swoop make that land a bigger bargaining chip for the district. AISD currently has five buildings on 45 acres that it considers suitable for housing. It would be a tragic mistake if the city let a few dozen single family homes be built on that land instead of true community assets.
The Hyde Parker Magazine calls on the city council to initiate the process to rezone all AISD properties to multi-family zoning, if they are to take our housing crisis seriously. And with student enrollment numbers dwindling and teachers running for the suburbs, what exactly are we waiting on? At this point, it seems like just the urgency.
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