YIMBYTown comes to Austin

Electric bicycles are an unlikely cause for applause, but when Felicity Maxwell wheeled a battery-powered Trek onstage at YIMBYTown 2024, the crowd went wild. 

This year, a crew of some 500 urbanists, developers and housing advocates met in Austin for two days of sessions aimed at finding ways to make more of their neighbors say yes to housing in their backyards. The bicycle was one of many in-jokes aimed at a meme-fluent, hyper-connected crowd that has grown in both size and political influence in recent years. 

As an Austin planning commissioner and board member of the urbanist group AURA, Maxwell has had a front-row seat to the significant policy changes Austin’s city council and mayor have made this year to open up the city’s development code. She has also witnessed the setbacks that seem to accompany almost any move to cut back on development regulations. 

The tone of the conference’s first day was triumphant. As the country faces a severe housing shortage, the audience and speakers were adamant that their stock is rising, by doing everything from winning elections and crafting policy to replying to nosy neighbors on Nextdoor. 

The focus of the day started with Austin. In the last year, Mayor Kirk Watson and the council have moved to decrease minimum lot sizes, eliminate parking minimums and allow three homes on any single-family lot in the city. While the city still lacks a major rail system and is sprawling out at lightspeed, it has become a focal point in the nationwide housing debate. 

Austin is “the blueberry in the tomato soup,” as Watson put it in his speech, a deeply liberal city in a deeply conservative state. Much of the discussion at YIMBYTown focused on the different ways YIMBY groups can preach their gospel depending on the political lean of their audiences. In Austin, the property-rights approach and the environmentalist approach have found eager audiences. 

In his speech to the conference, Watson pitched another argument to persuade Austinites: as he sees it, building more housing is the only way to keep Austin weird. 

“Our distinctly Austin vibe will be gone if only a few select people can enjoy everything Austin has to offer,” Watson said. “And we won’t have as much to offer if only a select few can enjoy it.”

Though rents and housing prices have fallen in the last year, they remain well above pre pandemic averages. If young and unestablished people can’t afford to buy a home in Austin, the city will suffer as a result, Watson argued. 

“The biggest, most damaging change we could allow, would be to lose that youthful thinking and energy,” he said.

After Watson, California State Senator Scott Wiener spoke about his state’s headline-generating efforts to ramp up development. 

Wiener frequently mentioned the burden California cities’ public review processes place on developers. Now the chair of the state senate’s housing committee, Wiener has led efforts to force cities to up their housing supplies.

The most extreme example of that effort is builder’s remedy, a controversial policy that allows some developers to bypass local zoning if a city fails to update its housing plan.

He also took aim at San Francisco’s strict development process. In particular, he highlighted how the dozens of public meetings and lengthy environmental reviews can be abused to delay projects and add hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. 

As he sees it, a project that meets zoning codes should be able to move forward. “If you comply with the rules, you get your permit. That’s otherwise known as good governance,” he said. 

To close out the morning session, land-use expert Nolan Gray and Sara Bronin, the creator of Zoning Atlas, sat for a panel discussion about the future of YIMBYism.  

“In one sense, these are the worst times for our movement,” Gray said, citing sky-high rents, home prices and rental occupancy rates. 

“But another sense is the best possible time for our movement,” he said. “People are thinking about these issues. In the same way that the housing crisis has gone national, the YIMBY movement has gone national.”

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