Victory in Austin: City Council Votes for Incremental Housing Development

Austin, TX. (Source: Unsplash/Justin Wallace.)

On July 20, 2023, the city council of Austin, Texas, passed resolutions that legalize three homes on every single-family lot by right, expedite the approval of three- and fourplexes, and more than halve the minimum lot size requirement in areas zoned for single-family homes. Co-sponsors of the resolutions hope that taking a step toward welcoming more of the missing-middle infill will abate the city’s ongoing housing crisis.

Previously, Austin’s land development code, drafted in and virtually unchanged since the 1980s, imposed a minimum lot size of 5,750 square feet in areas zoned for single-family homes. In a city dominated by single-family zoning, yet wrestling with unprecedented population gains, this has fundamentally limited where and how new housing could be constructed, and consequently impacted affordability across the city, especially for renters. “Until we start to try and address our minimum lot size problem, all we’re going to get are big, expensive homes because that’s all the code will allow,” Scott Turner, a local homebuilder told Austin’s NPR affiliate earlier this year.

Under Councilmember Leslie Pool's resolution, the minimum lot size is reduced to 2,500 square feet or less “so that existing standard-size lots can be subdivided, and be developed with a variety of housing types such as row houses, townhomes, tri- and four-plexes, garden homes, and cottage courts.” The resolution likewise lists peer cities, “such as San Diego, Philadelphia and San Antonio” which “offer a range of more modest lot sizes to enable families of all incomes to participate in home ownership.”

In Texas’s biggest city, Houston, reducing minimum lot size requirements from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet has spurred a transformation of its “inner loop,” producing tens of thousands of low-cost, townhome-style houses, according to M. Nolan Gray. In California, Senate Bill 9 effectively ended single-family zoning statewide and, as a result, homeowners gained the flexibility to subdivide the lot they own and construct accessory dwelling units (ADUs). In a piece for The Atlantic, Gray noted that in Los Angeles, “one in every four homes built last year in the city was an ADU,” adding that “these new ADUs are overwhelmingly used for housing—only 8 percent are used as short-term rentals.”

This isn’t Austin’s first attempt at overhauling outdated codes. The city has been trying to relax the process by which its land development code is changed for nearly a decade, most notably through its failed initiative, CodeNEXT. While strident opposition—which at its peak embroiled the city in lawsuits—ultimately extinguished CodeNEXT, the new set of resolutions has garnered more supporters.

“There has not been a single young person who has spoken in opposition [to the resolution]," a University of Texas student told the Austin-American Statesman. "I plan to continue my education to a doctoral level, and I would prefer for my future to be taken into consideration so I did not have to live with my parents again."

The change in tide is perhaps most notably marked by Councilmember Pool, who firmly opposed CodeNEXT, advancing this current attempt. “[The resolution] means that someone who is being priced out and is struggling can potentially stay,” she told KVUE, adding that ultimately her goal with this resolution is to help the middle class afford to live in Austin.

For Strong Towns Senior Editor Daniel Herriges, this move inspires more optimism than its predecessors. “When you reduce minimum lot sizes over a broad swath of area, you’ll see them pop up here and there but you won’t see the wholesale transformation of a neighborhood into something unrecognizable,” he explained, citing a common anxiety with zoning reform.

CodeNEXT, by contrast, concentrated density across a handful of urban corridors which not only had the potential to translate into unaffordable housing, according to Herriges, but also thrust all of Austin’s housing needs on certain areas, “so that others can be kept under glass.”

These reforms, on the other hand, empower homeowners to transform their property to suit their needs. That’s Councilmember Pool’s hope, in any case. “They also open the door to citizen developers,” Herriges pointed out. Smaller projects—such as upzoning a single-family home to a triplex—are appropriate in scale for the citizen developer, who doesn’t have access to capital the way their corporate counterpart might.

Citizen developers are positioned to affordably and flexibly calibrate to a neighborhood or a city’s emerging needs, and are generally more invested in that community’s fabric—and, most importantly, its future. With Austin bouncing back from a string of failed reforms and a culture of mistrust, an incremental approach can hopefully prove a productive way forward.

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