Cracking the city's Land Development Code

George Zapalac, development services manager with the city's planning and development review department, said the city's LDC acts as a blueprint for development and can affect almost everyone in the city.

"It regulates what you can build, where you can build it, how much you can build, how you can use a piece of property and when you can use it," Zapalac said. "That's pretty broad, and it can affect everyone at one time or another."

The last time the code had a comprehensive revision was in 1984. During a public presentation, city staff pointed out that Apple Inc. introduced its first Macintosh personal computer the year the city's code was last revised. The current code has grown to include more than 800 pages of information.

"Our existing code has been amended hundreds of times, in piecemeal fashion, but we've never taken a comprehensive look at how all those various amendments impact each other and whether they're helping to achieve the kind of community that we need," Zapalac said.

Zapalac said the code is overdue for a comprehensive rewrite. Concerns that arise from a complicated code sometimes lead to confusion on the part of developers or residents looking to renovate or remodel their homes, he said.

"Sometimes a person can prepare their plans, submit them to the city for review, be well along in the review process and then discover that a regulation they hadn't anticipated will apply. They will have to redesign, or they may not be able to do what they want to do at all," Zapalac said.

Though the rewriting process is in its early stages, officials have already identified a few broad areas the city may improve upon, including middle housing, such as row homes and bungalow courts, as well as affordability.

Parolek said that after gaining a better understanding of Austin's communities, the rewriting team is going to determine if various areas in the city need to "maintain" their area with minimal refinements and improvements to the code, "evolve" with some development and public improvements or "transform" to be something completely different from what they already are.

"A lot of those decisions have been made in Imagine Austin and the neighborhood plans, and [the LDC] will be the tool to implement the Imagine Austin vision," Parolek said. "There's a lot of fear that the LDC process is going to propose changing every place throughout the city, and it's absolutely not."

Parolek said South Austin is a challenging environment in which to redevelop code, but the team has a resource in the South Austin Combined Neighborhood Plan.

"There's a neighborhood planning process that's going on right now called the South Austin Combined Neighborhood Plan, and it's pretty exciting, the work that's being done," Parolek said. "It's a very design-based and community character–based approach that's looking for opportunities [such as] old gray-fill sites, old strip malls or commercial sites that are really underutilized becoming focal points of neighborhoods."

Aan Coleman, an Oak Hill resident who attended one of the public meetings, said she was excited about the city tackling the complex code.

"As it stands, [the code] is difficult to navigate," Coleman said. "It has a lot of competing code requirements. There are departments, each in charge of their own piece of the puzzle, and it doesn't fit together well. It's difficult to know where you are in the process."

One reservation Coleman had about the project was how neighborhood desires will be considered in the rewriting process.

"The beautiful thing about Austin is that we are inclusive, we are democratic and all voices are getting heard, but when it comes down to neighborhoods, I think neighborhoods should have a stronger say than someone who does not live in our neighborhood," Coleman said.

Code rewrite focuses on middle housing and affordability

One area in which city and land development officials said a new code could have an effect is affordability and middle housing.

Dan Parolek, principal at Opticos Design Inc., which is leading the code rewriting process, said this kind of small-scale construction is critical in helping Austin provide affordability and housing choices for residents.

"These are a range of housing types that we feel really needs to be encouraged in the Land Development Code," Parolek said.

Middle housing consists of medium-density building types including duplexes, triplexes or row homes—which are homes of similar and often narrow housing plans—and bungalow courts, which feature small homes centered around a shared garden. Parolek said middle housing promotes affordability by allowing people with less income to still purchase homes and build equity.

David Whitworth, president of David Whitworth Development Co., which is working on building row homes in the North Loop neighborhood, said a variety of housing types will help keep neighborhoods unique.

"I think some of this middle housing could be the missing link where young families could live there and older families could live there and turn over in a different way throughout the years that could help maintain a vibrant neighborhood," Whitworth said.

Whitworth said the Mueller development is an area of the city that provides various middle-housing options.