Austin at Large: People Can’t Live at the Bank

A media gig I don't envy is that of staff writer Michelle Pitcher of the Austin Business Journal, who monthly has to write up the latest statistics from the Austin Board of Realtors. (Sorry, REALTORSTM.) I mean, what more can you say about Austin housing prices? They're stupid high! And supply is mighty scarce: "In February, there was only 0.4 months of inventory throughout the [five-county] metro, about 7% of what a balanced market needs," she writes this week. Ipso facto, the median home sales price in each of those five counties is increasing by double digits (percentage-wise) year over year to the highest levels ever recorded, or likely even imagined by many Central Texans. Officially, the metro's median home price is $499,995, which you can go ahead and round up; that's 28% higher than last year. In the city of Austin, it's $565,000, for what in many cases is a smaller house. To the southeast, on the far side of Tesla, prices in Bastrop County are 61% higher than last year; Caldwell County's are up 57%.

Those latter two are, you may be aware, the poorest parts of a metro area where the east-west economic divide demarcated by I-35 is far from being eradicated, no matter how quickly Elon Musk builds "Gigafactories." I know many of you agree with me that creating decent housing for all 2 million-plus Central Texans where it's needed is not just one, but really the only, policy goal worth the attention of local elected officials, who here as elsewhere are the chief decision-makers of housing policy. Without it, none of our economic development efforts will be sustainable (even Musk says so), the educational performance of our schools will not improve, the social determinants of good or poor health will never change their trajectory, and we will be inviting climate catastrophes through the door. Other than that, Austin will still be just fine, right?

Nobody Really Lives Alone

I am not one of the cranky Armadillo-era die-hards who thinks that metro Austin's three decades as one of America's top three fastest-booming boomtowns (joined formerly by Las Vegas and Orlando, now by Raleigh­-Durham and Nashville) have been broadly destructive. I don't know when the cut-off date is that distinguishes the "more or less natives" from the toxic newcomers – the Chronicle's first issue date was September 4, 1981, which is seven years before I moved here and at least 20 years before everyone else. More importantly, despite Austin's decades of self-identified specialty and Weirdness, most people came here for the same reason they go to other places – to be prosperous. We were ahead of the curve in defining that prosperity as including more things than money and latching on to "quality of life," but it was good jobs that brought people here (including good jobs as artists or musicians or filmmakers) and it continues to be.

But people can't live at the bank! The most recent phase of the boom seems to have been accompanied by a greater awareness that Austin is not inherently and inevitably more affordable than the tragic coastal cities that will be the human-made disaster areas of our century. Nor are our current housing costs and shortages a function of historical and economic accidents, a confluence of black swans come home to roost on Lady Bird Lake.

They exist here because we have proven to not be more clever or more creative or of better character than the rest of America, which is undergoing a nationwide housing crisis, from the coasts to the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt to the countryside. Federal policy­makers and financiers suggest the U.S. is lacking as many as 4 million housing units to meet the needs of its people. Those lacks are not evenly distributed, of course, but neither do the shortfalls exist independently of one another. Housing prices in Bastrop are influenced, at not all that great a remove, by rich NIMBYs in California.

Maybe Better Character

When I first started pleading and scolding about making solving our housing crisis the moon shot of Austin's modern generation, I heard enough positive feedback to make me think that we do realize that our lives as Central Texans are likewise interdependent, that nobody really lives alone. That was about as far as the happy talk went, as we realized that 1) we were going to also have to shoulder the burden of defending civilized democratic values and indeed basic human rights from the barbarians (who it took America four years to realize were not the proletariat); 2) that said barbarians have well and truly broken all the furniture and dishes here in their most extensive modern project, the state of Texas; and 3) that we were going to be arguing this out for the next year of local Austin electoral politics. But we need to return our attention to this, and be happy warriors about it.

The best way to go about this, not just in the scope of our activities but in the very substance of the ideas and goals they're meant to advance, is to be collaborative and not competitive. The nasty hash that got made of efforts to rewrite Austin's 40-year-old land-use code was intended to be the former (participatory planning! yeah!) but instead became the latter, as blowhards fired up the messaging machine to position the self-centeredness of affluent white complacency as a radical act. (Genuine political radicals in Austin are all YIMBYs, you should have noticed by now.) The fruits of this bad faith are often disguised as concern for the poorest among us, but that often evaporates as soon as it becomes clear that the best thing we could do for the poor is give them money, and failing that give them services, for as long as it takes, which can be generations. Building them new subsidized housing, as good as we've become at it, is the least efficient and most expensive way of meeting their needs. Simply building a bunch of new housing for everybody and anybody – hundreds of thousands of new units in locations all over the region (but not just anywhere; that's why we have horrible traffic that we're spending about $15 billion to solve and, in doing so, creating new places where housing is needed) – and making sure everyone in this ever-wealthier town has money to rent or maybe buy, would be both more direct and more effective. We need to judge our next mayors and council members on how they plan to do that, and nothing else, and not let them change the subject.