Council caves to Allandale.

As I’ve explained before, the real point of Austin’s Vertical Mixed Use ordinance is to open up more property to multi-family development.  There is precious little land set aside for that purpose in central Austin.  Neighborhood interiors are reserved for single family — aside from the occasional small multi-family complex — and most property on commercial streets is set aside for commercial uses.  The VMU ordinance aims to fix that.  Adding the “V” designation to a property on a “core transit corridor” opens the property to multi-family development, and fairly dense multi-family at that.

Neighborhoods traditionally have fought new multi-family developments.  Nothing incites the townsfolk to march on City Hall like a proposed up-zoning for a large multi-family project.  The VMU design guidelines and “mixed use” components aim to fix that.  They are sweeteners to make the bitter multi-family pill easier to swallow.

For some neighborhoods, though, they are not sweet enough.  Their pathological hostility to multi-family housing — even multi-family housing plopped down on a 30,000-vehicle-per-day transit corridor — simply cannot be softened by incentives.  They will fight multi-family as hard as they can, regardless of the design standards, regardless of the compatibility standards, and regardless of the new mix of retail the developments promise.

Allandale is one such neighborhood.  Given its hysterical reaction to the Northcross Wal-Mart, this should be no surprise.  But its VMU application was a real gem.  Its eligible VMU tracts included most of Burnet from North Loop to Anderson, and all of Anderson from Mopac to Burnet, 2.51 miles of eligible linear frontage in all.  Allandale’s initial application, however, asked to opt out almost all of its eligible tracts.  It volunteered just two tracts:  Northcross, which it knew would not be redeveloped as VMU any time soon, and a tract off Northloop already designated for mixed-use.  Moreover, it asked that any development that managed to slip through be limited to 12.5 units per acre, a ridiculously low density for multi-family.  I characterized Allandale’s application as a “temper tantrum” over Northcross.  But perhaps it was just that deep-seated hostility to multi-family.  As one Allandale resident wrote in opposing VMU in her neighborhood:  “I own a home directly behind one of the proposed tracts and prefer to have a warehouse in my backyard than an apartment building.”