Here's an article in today's paper talking about lower-cost/income housing downtown. For downtown to truly be dense, vibrant and be a real neighborhood, there needs to be people there of all income levels. Otherwise you'll still have the bank tellers and hotel staffers driving into work everyday. I read somewhere that Austin has around 20,000 millionairs, that's a nice number, but I doubt all of them have plans to move downtown. So for the city council to achieve their goal of 25,000 people living downtown, they had better think of a way for lower-income people to be able to live there, otherwise it'll never happen.
From the Austin American-Statseman
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/29/29affordable.html
Incentives could spur lower-cost housing downtown
Proposal would offer extra height, density in exchange for building cheaper units.
By Sarah Coppola
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, January 29, 2007
Living in downtown Austin is a mere dream for many lower-income residents.
A task force hopes to change that by proposing incentives that the city could offer to spur more lower-cost housing downtown.
The group thinks developers should be allowed to build taller, denser downtown projects than city rules allow, in exchange for selling or renting some units at less than the market rate or giving to an affordable housing fund.
The city-appointed task force of developers and housing advocates hasn't agreed yet on how to encourage lower-cost housing in other parts of the city. It has until mid-February to write a final list of incentives, which the City Council will have to approve.
Developers say building affordable housing downtown is tough because land prices are high. When building there, developers often ask the city for extra height or density.
The task force thinks the city should grant more square footage if developers make 10 percent of rental units affordable for households earning less than $56,900 or 10 percent of for-sale units affordable for households earning less than $84,000. The units would have to remain affordable for at least 40 years through deed restrictions.
Instead of including lower-cost units on-site, developers could also pay $10 into an affordable housing fund for each extra square foot that they build. The city would have to use that money to buy or build lower-cost housing within a 2-mile radius of downtown.
Task force member Cathy Echols agreed to the fee as a compromise but would prefer that developers build lower-cost units in their projects.
"If you follow the line of reasoning that it's too expensive to build affordable housing downtown, it becomes a reason not to build it elsewhere. We need a mixture of income levels in all parts of town, even downtown. Some of the people working at the banks and restaurants and offices downtown should be able to live there," said Echols, who is on the board of the nonprofit advocacy group HousingWorks.
The incentives would not create a surge of lower-cost housing downtown, said Tim Taylor, co-chairman of the task force and a former president of the Real Estate Council of Austin.
"It will create some (affordable units), but it's not going to solve the affordable housing problem downtown. Probably the only way you'll have true affordable housing downtown is with subsidies or government help," he said.
One big hurdle to building lower-cost housing is finding cheap land, so the task force is considering recommending that housing be allowed on lots zoned for industrial use.
Task force member Charles Heimsath, who tracks the hous- ing market as president of Capitol Market Research, said freeing up more land would lower the cost of housing citywide. But some housing advocates worry that would create a ghetto effect, clustering lower-income people in undesirable areas.
Another idea is to tailor incentives to certain parts of town, based on land costs and development difficulties. Some task force members say such a scoring system would be too subjective and unpredictable, but task force co-Chairman Frank Fernandez said it could even out the value of incentives. "Incentives are going to be worth more in different areas. The city has scarce housing resources, and we don't want them to be giving money away" to projects that don't need it as much as others, said Fernandez, executive director of Community Partnership for the Homeless.
For areas outside downtown, task force members want to beef up the city's SMART Housing program, which offers fee waivers and faster project reviews to projects that include lower-cost housing.
Eugene Sepulveda, a task force member and lecturer at the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business, said the city should also offer height and density bonuses in areas outside of downtown such as the Concordia University campus at Interstate 35 and 32nd Street, where neighbors have resisted denser development.
Density bonuses alone won't spur builders to construct the housing that's needed most: for households with incomes less than $42,650 a year, said Walter Moreau, executive director of Foundation Communities, which runs lower-cost apartment complexes in Austin.
Reaching deeper affordability levels will require other solutions, such as the city building on land it owns or using the $55 million in affordable-housing bonds that voters approved in November, he said.
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