Austin at Large: And Our House Is Your House: What did you do today to provide decent housing where it’s needed for everyone? – News
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I’m going to pick up right where we left off last week this week: Austin and central Texas are failing all along the line when it comes to housing. We have to regroup.
We must unpack and remove many burdens and obstacles before we can fulfill our moral obligation to provide decent housing for all of Austin where it is needed. In the past 15 years or so – that’s about 250,000 Austinites and nearly 1 million Central Texans – there has been a political realignment in our communities that has broken the technocratic consensus we had achieved to guide our growth. Some people still aren’t done with it, but what can you do? We’re moving on now.
It is important to get this work going so that it can shape next year’s elections, not just for a new mayor and half of the city council, but also in the suburban councils and district courts and for our subordinate members of the legislature and congress, and for our school boards. All of these competitions should, at least in part, be about how America’s fastest growing metropolitan area doesn’t reach its sustainability limits and becomes California. And this conversation begins with living.
No growth? It’s not cute
My appeal here, in case it is not clear, is that this conversation start all over again, just as we have tried and are still trying to have new conversations about public safety, which itself would be easier if we ourselves Housing would unite. As has happened with police brutality and climate change, and is happening right now in Texas with regards to reproductive rights, the great shifts in “centrist” attitudes between older and newer Austinites must be reflected in the obligations we make to protect one another. There are enough people in Austin who can’t live where they need to, it’s become a problem for all of us; Insisting that people just shouldn’t move here or anywhere isn’t cute.
The May elections – less than five months ago this year, but it feels even longer – when the Austinites reintroduced the ban on public camping in the city, showed how exhausting our two-way housing war is. The city has spent about $ 150 million on ending homelessness in the past two years, but the results are not as good as the results, and the latter still appear meager. But we don’t know! How much should it cost us? Maybe we should just agree to help the poor instead of repairing them? At the same time, the Save Austin Now initiative, which allowed people to let off steam about All The Homeless People and play their class and racial muscles in ways that aren’t cute either, has changed very little locally because it’s nowhere otherwise for people who have gone camping.
Everyone is mad at each other because it continues to feel unsatisfactory to assume our unsatisfactory status quo – doing more of what we do with more money, be it building supportive housing units or removing unwanted stocks from the public Space – just like the expansion of the self, in order to briefly and slightly improve travel times. How can we rethink, reinvent, reinvent, reconnect, or whatever you want the way we house Austinites at any point on the housing continuum?
This is what defines our brand
There are as many pragmatic ways of answering this question as there are people making homes in central Texas, but again, this is not a technocratic, but a political challenge. We actually have very good technocratic approaches, in both the public and private sectors, in Austin and in the surrounding cities and counties, to meeting the needs of those who can and those who can’t. Our housing producers and real estate experts and community planners are smart. It is the lack of decent civil infrastructure – the tools for communities to decide collective action and exercise power – that has led many very good technocratic approaches to struggle and failure.
That is why I keep speaking of the need for a literal obligation to provide humane living space for every Central Texas man out of a moral obligation where it is needed. If we don’t believe this is something we have to do instead of it just happening, we will never get a handle on it. If we believed it, then we could authentically agree that it is good for real stakeholders to play a role and share their wisdom in land use discussions about the land around them, while also agreeing that the need to create housing, NIMBY bullshit takes precedence over and is itself the most useful tool in combating gentrification.
When I was a consultant and we were talking to customers about their brands, we told a bit worn stories about the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, and his commitment to the “low-cost airline”. Every quirk of the Southwest brand – the peanuts, the unallocated seats, the use of exactly one model of airplane – is an answer to the question “How can we be the low-cost airline?” So I want Austin to think about housing – how does this decision, this investment, this regulatory approach, this political stance, this public outcry, create decent housing for every Central Texas where it is needed? And when someone answers: “So what? That’s not my problem”, I want to know: Why not?
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