On Thursday, October 1, our city council will make a final decision on the latest East Austin gold rush. Will they side with land developers or support the community’s protest rights? In August, at the first reading of the Montopolis zoning change, the council majority voted with developers and did not honor the neighborhoods’ valid ...
No Austinite knows more about city planning and municipal zoning than Jim Duncan. Duncan is the former president of the American Planning Association and former head of Austin’s planning department, and as a private consultant he has helped more than 200 cities across the nation successfully rewrite their land codes. During Austin’s last major land-code ...
This Thursday, our city council members are poised to do something unbelievable. If they accept the municipal staff’s recommendations, they will award two affordable-housing projects to a pair of arts groups that have no experience in the field. If they do so, they will be passing over East Austin’s Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC), which ...
Buried on the Austin City Council’s September 17th agenda is a pair of easily overlooked items that will set a disastrous precedent if passed. They are Trojan horses, part of an insidious and reckless scheme by the council and their land-developer supporters to strip property owners of their right to due process—one of the most ...
The gold rush is on in East Austin! On Thursday, August 27, for-profit land developers will push the city council to massively and speculatively rezone numerous tracts in modest and low-income communities of color in East and Southeast Austin. They are hoping to pass these upzonings under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is ...