Remember the Zucker Report? If you work in the land development industry or follow Austin politics, then the answer is a resounding (but tragic) yes. City officials appear to have learned little from it, unfortunately.

The Zucker Report is a 700-page summary of findings released in 2015 by Zucker Systems, a premier consulting firm that the City of Austin hired to conduct a performance review of its Planning and Development Review Department (PDRD), which was in charge of issuing building permits and managing urban growth.

Its contents were jaw-dropping. Zucker Systems found Austin’s PDRD to be the slowest, most dysfunctional, and least transparent group of urban planners in the United States. The report confirmed complaints by land developers who had long argued that City Hall’s permitting process could slow building projects to a crawl—but it also validated criticism from area residents who felt ignored by the PDRD, as if they were not true stakeholders in the urban-planning process. Zucker Systems discovered that seven of PDRD’s 10 divisions never bothered to answer the public phone lines when they rang, and that they never returned voicemails.

In response to the Zucker Report, PDRD was split up into two separate divisions: the Planning and Zoning Department and the Development Services Department.

So how do things look today? Did the PDRD’s breakup boost its performance? Have Austin’s city planners started to engage with the residents who employ them?

A survey of local land developers shows that the city’s permitting process has sped up, but a memorandum recently released by the Development Services Department raises serious questions about the ongoing relationship between city planners and the general public.

According to that memo, the stakeholder group that the department consulted while implementing the Zucker Report’s recommendations consisted of the following:

  • Austin Board of Realtors
  • Home Builders Association of Greater Austin
  • Barron Custom Design
  • Turner Residential Realtors
  • Real Estate Council of Austin

Why were only land developers and realtors invited to participate in the process? The Zucker Report explicitly called for the involvement of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, the chambers of commerce for ethnic minorities, and other community-based groups. When it comes to land development, the city is supposed to help the public get involved with the land development decisions that affect their community—but it appears that its bureaucrats are primarily focused on the needs of the real estate industry.

The City of Austin seems to have made the same systemic mistake with a pair of recently released initiatives: its Strategic Housing Blueprint Implementation Plan and Strategic Mobility Plan.

The authors of the Strategic Housing Blueprint Implementation Plan held plenty of town halls and fired out thousands of emails, but they failed to engage the citizen-group stakeholders recommended by the Zucker Report. Had they done so, their plan may have included a better response to those Austinites’ number-one fear: displacement.

The Strategic Mobility Plan focuses more on housing than it does on mobility—and like the city’s failed CodeNEXT initiative, it calls for the destruction of much of Central and East Austin’s existing housing to make way for new, market-rate multifamily units. The stakeholders that Zucker Systems urged the city to engage—that is, the people who live in those neighborhoods today—were not consulted.

How will our new city manager, Spencer Cronk, respond to the same challenge? Now that CodeNEXT is dead and buried, the city council has asked him to design a process for revising Austin’s land development code. As a start, Cronk has asked the council to choose from three proposed options: the status quo, something similar to CodeNEXT, or a code that calls for even higher levels of housing density. The mayor and other council members will convene this week to discuss the matter.

Whichever route Cronk takes, his process must be inclusive, transparent, and fair. He should look to Zucker and learn from CodeNEXT. Austin is a community, not a commodity, and the public must have a say on land use and other issues that impact their lives.