Mildly eccentric (colorful?) lawyer and erstwhile City Council candidate Robin Cravey, like me, worries about the flight of children from central Austin. He's a bit more acerbic than I am; he calls it a suicide pact:
Austin’s central city neighborhoods suffer under the grip of a suicide pact. Under this pact, the central city neighborhoods have become fundamentally unsustainable. The question now is whether the neighborhoods will wake up, or city leaders will wake them up, or they will be allowed to go extinct, like the neighborhood around Pease School, where the lovely bungalows are full of law offices and software shops.
This suicide pact, sometimes called the Absolutely No Change pact, has led neighborhood associations to resist every effort at modernization and renewal. They oppose apartments, condominiums, larger houses, and smaller houses being built in their bailiwicks. Their vigilance reaches down to a grim lot-by-lot war against duplexes and granny flats.
There's more. Read the whole thing. I wish I could write like this.
This is particularly notable because Robin is an old-school Austinite who has lived in the Zilker neighborhood for decades and even served as ZNA president.
On paper, he was just the kind of guy I'd expect central Austin voters to support. But the hardcore neighborhood activists who turn out to vote correctly perceived that Laura Morrison would be more reliably anti-development. Cravey split the anti-Morrison vote with Cid Galindo, a solid urbanist who publicly advocates quality infill development (and who received my support).
Judging from this post, Robin has decided not to run for Council again. That's a shame.
