(introspective music)
- Thinking about the state
of Texas cities in 10 years,
it's not child's play.
In fact, child's play takes a longer view.
My little baby daughter asked me,
she's precocious and wonderful
and has a tiny lisp, and she said,
"Mama, what's Austin
gonna look like in 2080?"
And as you can imagine, I
didn't have a response for her.
It's a reminder that what we
do today will have lasting
and generational impacts, lots of which
we can't even possibly conceive right now,
kinda like how we can trace a lot
of our collective successes and problems
back to decisions that were
made 80 and 90 years ago.
I know the theme of this
talk is Texas cities,
but as an Austinite, I'm
only an expert at mine.
I can speak to some of the other joints
like Houston and Dallas and San Antonio.
All these cities are
drenched in prosperity,
growing like weeds, and summers
and mosquitoes not withstanding,
they offer a tremendous amount
of quality of life to their residents.
When we talk about the Texas miracle,
the resiliency of our state's economy,
we're talking about what
happens in these cities,
and even though each of these
super successful cities has
its own distinct flavor and feel,
we experience similar
challenges and struggles.
Because despite how good
the narrative of our economy
and quality of life is, we
know that life isn't perfect
for a good chunk of our urban Texans.
We're all dealing with inequality,
rising poverty, sprawl, traffic,
and a seemingly unshakeable
economic and racial segregation.
One of the fundamental qualities
of a city is proximity.
A city is a bunch of people living,
learning, trading, traveling,
and generally sharing space
in close proximity to each other.
So when you reach a certain
level of population,
how you use urban spaces becomes
really, really important,
and the way Texas cities
decided decades ago to use
and allocate our space is causing a ton
of the problems that we see today.
But they're not unsolvable problems,
precisely because of the
urban principle of proximity,
because proximity breeds tolerance,
tolerance breeds compassion,
and compassion drives solutions.
Right now Austin is on the
verge of making big progress
in one solution,
and that solution is
allowing for more housing.
That means more types of housing
in more parts of the city.
For decades we dedicated the
vast majority of our urban land
to large-lot single-family
home neighborhoods
and the roads that serve them.
As more and more people move to Austin
and compete for the limited housing stock
in high-opportunity areas
in the central city,
lower-income residents are finding
themselves priced out and locked out.
Right now we're working on revising
our city's land development code,
and while it's still not a done deal,
if it comes out like I hope,
it will allow more people to live
and work near good jobs, good schools,
good childcare, good grocery
stores, and good transit.
The last one is important,
not just for the sake
of the environment, but
for the sake of mobility.
We can move far more
people way more efficiently
through our limited urban space
on a bus or a train than we can if
they're still stuck in
their cars by themselves,
and if we get folks
closer to the good stuff,
many of them can just walk, or even bike,
and, wait for it, even scoot
to where they have to go.
A major chunk of this new housing
along our transit corridors will come
in the form of missing middle housing.
That's duplexes, that's triplexes,
that's quadplexes, that's cottage courts
and small apartment buildings.
If we lift the de facto
bans on these housing types,
the hope is we'll free up the market
to bring housing supply
in better alignment
with the intense demand
that drives up prices.
But new supply
and high-opportunity areas
won't do the trick alone.
We have to, and I mean we have to,
shatter the wall of de facto segregation
that exists in all of our cities.
We outlawed segregation in schools,
restrooms, and on buses decades ago,
but residential segregation
remains firmly in place,
thanks in no small part
to our land use rules,
things like large minimum lot sizes
and rules that make it difficult
to build apartment complexes
near single-family homes,
work to keep the less affluent
separate from the affluent.
State law doesn't allow
cities to force developers
to include income-restricted
units in any given project.
Instead we can only offer incentives
through what are called density bonuses.
Generally, if a developer agrees
to add a certain amount
of affordable units,
we'll offer them extra
entitlements such as height,
that way they can build
more market-rate units
to subsidize the affordable ones.
Austin currently offers density bonuses
in specific parts of our city,
but the new land development code
could allow them everywhere.
If we can calibrate them in a way
that makes them truly
attractive to developers,
we can take a big step closer
to diversifying our cities.
But more housing alone
isn't the silver bullet.
For communities that have suffered
from the negative, cyclical effects
of segregation for so long,
we have to step up and make sure
to provide wraparound programs,
things like expanded
access to quality education
and childcare, professional development
and healthcare, including
mental healthcare,
even things a lot of us take for granted
like how to use the internet,
how to spend money, how
to use a credit card.
And because affordability
and transportation go hand-in-hand,
we also need to make big, and I mean big,
investments in public transit.
Houston and Dallas have a
headstart on everyone else,
but even those cities
have their struggles.
They're both very heavily car-dependent.
Our existing transportation system,
it makes cars an unfunded mandate,
a very costly requirement
for getting a job,
taking your kids to
school, going out to eat,
or just going to the
store for a jug of milk.
And when everyone is driving,
everyone is stuck in traffic.
Even as cities have added countless miles
of roads in past decades,
traffic has continued to get worse.
It's time to provide competitive,
affordable, cleaner, and
safer alternatives to driving,
even if that means reorienting
our urban space in a way that
makes driving less convenient.
So this is all highly ambitious.
It might be a tall order for Texas cities
to fulfill in just 10 years.
Sticking with the status quo is going
to keep our cities segregated,
unaffordable, polluted, congested,
and crawling with increasing inequality.
We've been able to make good progress
here in Austin, thanks in large part
to our shift to single-member
districts in 2014.
That transition also moved local elections
from May to November.
More people now than ever are voting
in our municipal elections,
leading to a city
that's more representative
of our diverse community
than ever before.
Representation matters, and to
get the resources cities need
to do the job, we are
going to need to work.
We need to work to protect the integrity
of the 2020 census and to register voters
to turn out in next year's elections.
It won't be easy, but actions
have lasting consequences,
and I want to make sure
that our cities continue
to enable prosperity while
also expanding opportunities
and access for all of our residents.
(introspective music)
