An open letter to City Council, my belated response to this Chronicle piece:
Dear City Councilmembers:
I note that the Zilker Neighborhood Association has discovered a "good eats" exception to VMU zoning. It has asked to opt out more than 70 of its eligible parcels, largely for the sake of "beloved" restaurants and other preferred local establishments. (I couldn't help but notice that the "beloved" restaurants are especially likely to sit near single-family housing.)
Before basing major zoning decisions on the quality of the Tex-Mex, please consider this:
The Zilker neighborhood is almost completely built out under current zoning entitlements.
According to the City's residential acreage data (pdf), a paltry 11% of the Zilker neighborhood's residential property is zoned multi-family. Only 2.6% is zoned at the reasonably dense MF4 or MF5 levels.
These multi-family parcels are nearly maxed out. According to data collected by the city demographer, ZNA had 933 occupied multi-faily units in 2005, or roughly 1,000 total units (assuming a reasonable vacancy rate). Using the residential acreage data above, the City's minimum site area standards, and a reasonable assumption about the mix of one-room and two-room apartments, I've calculated that the current zoning permits fewer than 1,200 multi-family units. While some of ZNA's 1,000 existing units are non-conforming (i.e., not built on MF-zoned property), there is clearly little room for more housing under current zoning entitlements. And we all know what happens when a developer asks for greater entitlements in the Zilker neighborhood.
As Mayor Wynn likes to point out, the City of Austin has doubled in population every 20 years, and will likely continue to do so. Thousands of these new residents (and plenty of the current ones) will want to live close to downtown and central Austin's other amenities. We must find space somewhere.
VMU zoning is supposed to provide that space. That was the "deal" with the neighborhood groups: density will go on the transit corridors and not in the neighborhood interiors. That deal did not, and does not, permit neighborhoods to gerrymander the VMU district to indulge their officers' fondness for a particular business -- or a dozen or more businesses, in ZNA's case. (It must sting the local businesses who weren't favored by ZNA to discover their customers left them off the "beloved" list.)
A number of neighborhoods -- including neighborhoods represented by high-ranking ANC officers -- have taken the VMU deal seriously. ZNA has not. The City Council has the right to deny a neighborhood's opt-out application in its entirety. Please do so here.
