But there’s one key difference between Austin and Boston. The Texas capital has done a lot more about its housing problem. Rents there are actually falling now, while here they rise ever higher.
And that’s why Boston City Councilors Henry Santana, Enrique Pepén, and Sharon Durkan this week invited a group of their colleagues north to compare notes and help figure out how Boston might dig out of its deep housing shortage the way Austin is.
“Austin has undergone substantial reforms in its zoning and development practices resulting in an increase in housing production, stabilized home prices, and even reduced rents, despite a growing population and strong local job market,” Santana said at a Boston City Council hearing with the Austin delegation Tuesday. “The success Austin has experienced demonstrates the potential for zoning land use and planning reforms to create lasting impacts on housing availability and affordability.”
For decades, Austin was considered by many who lived there to be more of a college town than a big city. But since 2010, it has been among the fastest-growing cities in the country, thanks to an influx of technology companies and workers. The city’s population has more than doubled since 1990, to just under 1 million people today.
Rents boomed too, as did political tensions over how to address the city’s housing crunch.
Like Boston, at the root of Austin’s trouble was a zoning code that prevented the construction of much of anything without an extensive special permit process that favored bigger developers and added cost and time to projects. So the city council, after a nearly decade-long fight, began simplifying that zoning last year to make it easier to build moderate density housing.
One of the cornerstone policies of the reform effort made it so that homebuilders can construct two- or three-unit buildings on almost any lot where single-family homes are allowed, effectively eliminating single-family-only zoning. They also broadly allowed construction of accessory dwelling units: smaller, add-on units that often are built in the basement, garage, or backyard of a single-family home.
The council also eliminated minimum parking requirements, meaning that developers can now build their projects without having to add parking spaces, which can add significant cost and logistical challenges to a project. (Cambridge eliminated parking minimums in 2022.) Then, earlier this year, they significantly reduced minimum lot sizes for single-family homes, theoretically allowing smaller, denser homes that are more affordable to lower- and middle-income families.
“Seeing young families struggle financially to put down roots made it clear to all of us that our housing market wasn’t working,” said Austin City Councilor Leslie Pool. “Why can a wealthy homeowner build a single 4,500 square-foot house, but a community-minded developer can’t build three 1,500 square-foot homes without the municipal equivalent of an act of Congress?”
The reforms, which were broadly embraced by the city council, have made Austin a success story for the national YIMBY — or Yes in my Backyard — movement, a loose coalition of community groups, advocates, and housing wonks who believe paring back land use restrictions will make it easier to build market-rate housing in abundance.
The YIMBY movement has strong roots in Boston — one of the first annual YIMBYtown conferences was held here in 2018 — but has yet to be fully embraced by the city’s top policymakers, some advocates say, as it has in some other cities. Abundant Housing Massachusetts, a local YIMBY group that started in Jamaica Plain, helped organize this week’s visit.
Durkan, Pepén, and Santana’s hosting of the Austin delegation is a signal that at least a portion of Boston’s 13-member council sees that style of reform as a path forward for Boston. To be sure, the Boston City Council does not have a direct say on the city’s zoning, which is crafted by the planning department, though councilors can be influential when policies impact their districts.
It is still early days in Austin, but there are at least some signs that building a lot of new housing quickly can help to reduce prices. Over the last couple of years the city has seen a surge in apartment construction. In 2021, for example, permits for more than 51,000 new units were issued in the Austin area. And with the new supply, rents have steadily dropped, this year by more than 7 percent.
To be sure, there are some important differences between the two cities that would likely limit the success of the sort of “gentle density” reforms that Austin has focused on, the biggest being that Austin has far more developable land available than old, largely-built-out, Boston. Land here is also far more expensive, which pushes developers to build larger projects to make the most of each acre.
Still, the councilors see lessons in Austin’s embrace of YIMBY policies. For one, the council in Austin conducted an extensive public outreach effort and garnered significant support for the reforms. There was still outrage among some groups who thought they would effectively ruin the character of some single-family neighborhoods and lead to speculative investment by developers.
But the council passed the most recent slate of policies with a 9-2 majority.
“Centering policy around people, but also centering policy around empathy, is really important,” Austin City Councilor Zohaib Qadri said at a panel at the Boston Public Library Wednesday night. “We have a moral obligation to be effective.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.
