Surreptitious view corridors
A property owner has proposedbuilding a slender, 28-story mixed office/retail/hotel building at the corner of Congress & 8th, on the site of the Hickory Street Bar & Grill and the Bosche-Hogg building. The building will retain the facade of the Bosch-Hogg building.
To do this, the owner needs special zoning that would allow a 20:1 floor-t0-area ratio (“FAR”) rather than the 8:1 allowed by code. (The stupidly-low FAR allowance downtown means one has to assemble a large chunk of a city block in order to build even a modest mid-rise.) The owner has also requested the right to locate all parking off site. (It should get a super-duper special new urbanism award if it can find a bank willing to finance a large commercial project in downtown Austin with no on-site parking.)
Neither of these zoning requests is particularly controversial.
But the owner is also asking to build within the Congress Avenue Overlay “setback.” The Overlay requires structures within 60 feet of Congress Avenue to be between 30 and 90 feet high. Or, put more intuitively, any structure over 90′ must step back 60′ from Congress Avenue. The owner wants to reduce that 60′ setback to 30′.
This request has proved quite controversial. Condo owners in the new Austonian condo tower complain that the development will block their view of the Capitol. There’s nothing terribly surprising about homeowners complaining about blocked views, I suppose. But they are not the only downtown property owners unhappy about the request. Some are arguing that granting an exception is not fair to those who built their buildings to the 60′ setback. The Downtown Austin Alliance, which usually cheers requests for additional entitlements, opposes the setback request (but supports an 18:1 FAR and off-site parking). On the other hand, the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association, in a rare instance of disagreement with DAA, has endorsed a reduced setback for this specific project.
I support the zoning change because I think the 60′ setback was and is a bad idea, for reasons I’ll elaborate in another post. But I want to address the fairness point here — specifically, the argument that it is unfair to people who bought their properties — perhaps at a premium — on the assumption that they had protected views of the Capitol.
The Congress Avenue Overlay was not enacted to protect views. Austin has adopted a Capitol View Corridor Overlay, and the state has adopted its own version, specifically to protect views of the Capitol from clearly-defined points within the city. (The property owner here is not seeking a variance from the CVC overlay.) The purpose of the Congress Avenue Overlay is to “protect the historic character and symbolic significance of Congress Avenue and to enhance the pedestrian environment of the area.” Austin City Code Sec. 25-2-165(A). The Overlay is about “character,” not views.
Of course, any ordinance that prevents construction of a structure in a specific space can end up protecting someone’s view. That does not turn it into a view-protection ordinance, though. Protecting views is a very costly kind of protection to give. A view corridor can encumber dozens of properties with restrictions that, at best, require costly design and construction workarounds and, at worst, relegate the affected properties to low-intensity, auto-oriented uses like drive-through banks. The deeper the protected vista, the more properties affected.
Some views are worth protecting. Some are not. View corridors force us to make the implicit trade offs explicit. One of the most important questions for any given vantage point is “Who will be able to enjoy this view?” We want to protect important views. Which mainly means we want to protect public views. For good reason: the high costs imposed by a view corridor are not likely to be worth it unless lots of people enjoy the view. Blocking the construction of one house merely to preserve a neighbor’s view is almost always economically inefficient. Sure, the view is worth something to the neighbor, but it’s presumably worth about the same to the would-be builder. Blocking the view deprives the would-be builder of both his view and his building. In order for view protection to make any economic sense, there must be a high ratio of beneficiaries to affected properties.
The public intuitively understands that view corridor protection is expensive; I don’t believe there would be much support for protecting the views from a relative handful of private bedrooms and offices. Would Council pass an ordinance explicitly protecting the views of the residents of the Austonian or workers in an office building along Congress? I don’t think so. We therefore shouldn’t treat the Congress Avenue Overlay as a surreptitious CVC.
The zoning request should be approved or disapproved on its own merits. If the stepback is a bad regulation (and I think it is), we should not continue to enforce it out of a misguided sense of fairness.
