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Last week, Council Member Leslie Pool shared a link to the Atlas of ReUrbanism, published late last year, on the City Council Message Board and said that the findings of the study would “give a good perspective on the questions we have before us in the code rewrite and illuminate the value that exists in terms of affordable market housing and small business within these older neighborhoods.” (Read Full Article)

For more than 50 years, East Austin was a neighborhood, home to the overwhelming majority of Austin’s African American and Latino families. Schools, community newspaper offices, barbecue and taco joints, beauty and barber shops, clubs, Mexican restaurants and storefronts that sold everything from hair supplies to groceries, filled out neighborhoods with brick and wood-frame homes, libraries, public housing and shot-gun shacks. And goodness knows, there were churches on nearly every other corner. ( …read article on Statesman.com)

“The code we have now does not do what we want it to do.” That was Mayor Steve Adler at a recent CodeNEXT meeting. He’s having to remind people how bad the current code is with some frequency, because as bad as it is, people really hate the draft release of CodeNEXT – and while that’s often the sign of a good compromise, there’s ample reason to believe in this case that it’s largely the sign of a bad product. There are enough areas where all sides agree, and enough good points about the new transect, or form-based codes, to suggest that this process could actually yield a very good result. But it’s in need of a lot more work, and desperately in need of top-level policy direction.

“The code we have now does not do what we want it to do.” That was Mayor Steve Adler at a recent CodeNEXT meeting. He’s having to remind people how bad the current code is with some frequency, because as bad as it is, people really hate the draft release of CodeNEXT – and while that’s often the sign of a good compromise, there’s ample reason to believe in this case that it’s largely the sign of a bad product. There are enough areas where all sides agree, and enough good points about the new transect, or form-based codes, to suggest that this process could actually yield a very good result. But it’s in need of a lot more work, and desperately in need of top-level policy direction.

By AUDREY MCGLINCHY – KUT 90.5 Billy Thogersen offered to narrate the scene. “People are [milling] about, looking at 24-by-48-inch maps of the new zoning, lots of colors and confusing acronyms and codes,” he said in the cafeteria at LBJ High School in Northeast Austin. The room, emptied of students, held roughly 30 community members interested in ...