There are two problems with Austin's neighborhood plans: (1) Neighborhoods don't know what ought to go on a piece of property; and (2) they don't have an incentive to care.
What I mean by "ought" is, "What use will produce the most value for the City as a whole?" NG's just ask, "What use will benefit us the most (or harm us the least?)" Neighborhood plans naturally end up as obstructionist documents, tailored to satisfy the "stakeholders'" most trivial preferences and concerns.
Take the recent battle over the Time Insurance property at the corner of East Riverside and IH-35.
The property owner wants to build a mid-rise commercial/residential mixed use property. Problem: Part of the tract is zoned LO and part SF-3. SF-3 is single family. LO allows business offices and little else.
It's hard to believe this would be very controversial. This is the kind of high-density project that everyone says we need. It sits at the intersection of an interstate highway and major through arterial. A high density condominium/apartment project is planned across the street. The project will attract the quality retail that this stretch of Riverside lacks.
Yet the neighborhood plan has LO and SF-3 zoning, and the neighborhood group doesn't want to give it up. They have lots of reasons. They want a "buffer" between the single-family homes and Riverside. They want the green space that SF-3 zoning guarantees (i.e., parkland at someone else's expense). They want to encourage office space. They don't want traffic. They don't want multi-family.
Thanks to their opposition, it has taken three years, two failed mediations, two trips to the Planning Commission and multiple trips to Council to get the rezoning tentatively approved.
None of the neighborhood's reasons seems very compelling to me. I don't think they outweigh the benefits of 60-70 new housing units relatively close to downtown and new retail to serve the thousands who drive Riverside every day.
The real point, though, is that the neighborhood had absolutely zero incentive to weigh the benefits to others when it developed its plan, other than pressure from city planning staff.
This is a problem with all neighborhood plans. They are city-sanctioned NIMBYism. They encourage neighborhoods to think and act selfishly. Even if a neighborhood were inclined to take the interests of others into account, why should it? It has no assurance that another neighborhood would reciprocate its altruism.
This is a pretty cruddy land-use system. Council opened this Pandora's box many years ago. I'm not sure it can be shut now. Perhaps the best Council can do for now is to treat the plans as the irrelevant documents they are.
