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This Thursday, the Austin City Council will discuss whether to award the California-based consultants working on the controversial CodeNEXT process $2.3 million more in taxpayer funds that the group has requested “for additional architectural, urban design, planning, and engineering services.” That would bring their total contract for revamping Austin’s municipal code to nearly $8.5 million, ...

Last week, Community Not Commodity released its response to the revised text and the new map that CodeNEXT’s consultants plan to use to redevelop huge swaths of Central Austin, East Austin, and other areas throughout the city. Here’s a video from a September 28th press conference we held on the subject: As our expert reviewers ...

The following is reprinted from an article of the same name, with permission of the author. Austin last took a hard look at its historic preservation program in the early 2000’s, where a joint task force made up of Planning, Zoning and Platting, and Historic Landmark Commissioners made some recommendations to upgrade but not fundamentally ...

Ora Houston grew up in East Austin. She attended historic Blackshear Elementary and the original L.C. Anderson High School, then went on to graduate from Huston-Tillotson University—all in the newly created district that she now proudly represents on the Austin City Council. That close connection to her home community is why she took to the ...

  Yesterday, the city staff directing Austin’s sprawling CodeNEXT initiative released the latest version of the map they plan to use to redevelop established neighborhoods throughout our community. It didn’t go well. This is nothing new: CodeNEXT’s mapping process has been fraught with controversy from the start, with each of its steps coming under heavy ...