Austin Texas Community

On Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an additional 30 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to Austin, according to a spokesperson with DPS.

The order comes one day after the City of Austin said it would be suspending the partnership between the Austin Police Department and DPS.

The additional troopers would bring the total number to 130, not including the troopers that work the Capitol.

DPS said overall, there would be 80 of the original troopers that began patrolling at the beginning of the partnership, the 20 Criminal Investigations Division officers that were also deployed as part of the partnership, and now the new 30 troopers.

Austin’s City Council is currently on summer break, but when its members return next week for the meeting scheduled on July 20, they’re taking on a fairly significant land use resolution with the potential to shape the future of housing across the city. You’d think Agenda Item 126 might have dropped with a little more fanfare, considering its seemingly enormous scope — let’s dig in:

If you don’t want to sift through all those “be it resolved”s, the gist is that Austin’s 1980s land development code imposes a minimum lot size of 5,750 square feet for homes built under the single-family zoning regime that dominates the vast majority of the city’s available land. This size requirement, combined with Austin’s sky-high land values, drives up the price of even modestly sized “starter” homes — so the resolution proposes amending the code to reduce the minimum lot size in single-family zones to 2,500 square feet or less “so that existing standard-size lots can be subdivided, and be developed with a variety of housing types such as row houses, townhomes, tri-and four-plexes, garden homes, and cottage courts.”

The housing types listed here represent the so-called “missing middle” residential typology that’s currently absent from most of Austin due to the current restrictions of our code, and unlocking this style of lower-density infill development is generally considered an effective way to increase housing stock in existing neighborhoods. To incentivize this kind of development, along with its proposed minimum lot size changes the resolution also proposes amending the code to allow at least three units per lot in single-family zoning districts.

To streamline this process, the resolution also directs the City Manager to propose amendments adjusting current limits on setbacks, height, impervious cover, floor-to-area ratio, building cover requirements, and other tweaks like only imposing the city’s McMansion Ordinance on projects that intend to construct a single home on one lot. The time and cost of jumping through all the hoops of the city’s current code is reflected in the final price of new housing, and fast-tracking the development of these missing middle residences should benefit local affordability.

If this isn’t surprising enough for you, perhaps you could chew on the fact that this item is sponsored by Council Member Leslie Pool — yes, that Leslie Pool — with co-sponsors including CMs Vela, Qadri, Ellis, and Mayor Watson. We’ve often ripped on CM Pool as part of council’s longstanding NIMBY bloc, but she (and her staff) deserve a hand for taking a clear-eyed look at Austin’s housing crisis and rejecting the typical priors of the do-nothing crowd with this proposed legislation. The part we can’t figure out is how the resolution, as a change to existing zoning regulation, plans to avoid the property owner notification requirements that currently have even more modest tweaks to Austin’s zoning code mired in legal trouble thanks to those aforementioned NIMBYs — fingers crossed that the folks on the dais know something we don’t.

This is a lot to drop on a humble blog without any official urban planning credentials, but we’re doing our best to wrap our heads around the ramifications of this change. Although these code tweaks are a major step in the right direction, they’re similar to light rail in the sense that we should have passed them about 20 years ago to truly stave off a crisis — at this point, we’re trying to close a wound with band-aids, but it’s a lot better than doing nothing. For the record, that 2,500-square-foot minimum lot size is a more modest reform than the infill renaissance we’ve seen with townhomes in Houston, where the minimum lot size is a mere 1,400 square feet.

Still, a triplex on every residential lot could win over at least a small portion of the housing-skeptic crowd with its lack of intensity compared to a typical apartment building rising five floors or more. We’re fond of all types of housing, but this proposal has the potential to become the most significant land use reform Austin’s passed since the failure of the land development code rewrite in 2018. Can you tell we’re nervous?

Austin's Interim City Manager Jesús Garza has suspended the Austin Police Department's (APD) partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), in consultation with Mayor Kirk Watson.

"From the start of this partnership with DPS, I said I wanted Austinites to feel safe and be safe. Recent events demonstrate we need to suspend the partnership with DPS. The safety of our community is a primary function of City government, and we must keep trying to get it right," Watson said in a statement. "This partnership was an innovative approach to address acute staffing shortages that were years in the making. However, any approach must be in sync with Austin values."

Austin's Interim City Manager Jesús Garza has suspended the Austin Police Department's (APD) partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), in consultation with Mayor Kirk Watson.

"From the start of this partnership with DPS, I said I wanted Austinites to feel safe and be safe. Recent events demonstrate we need to suspend the partnership with DPS. The safety of our community is a primary function of City government, and we must keep trying to get it right," Watson said in a statement. "This partnership was an innovative approach to address acute staffing shortages that were years in the making. However, any approach must be in sync with Austin values."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1357336

Dozens of members of the neo-fascist, white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the streets of Austin Saturday. The group did not announce the demonstration in advance, leaving no time for opposition groups to mount a counter-protest. It was the largest public gathering of the group’s members since they held a similar march in Washington, D.C., on May 13.

After pulling into a gas station, FWPD said the vehicle’s occupants began running away and jumped into a different car. The helicopter followed this car to where it stopped under a bridge, and the occupants fled on foot. Officers were able to locate five people that were in the car.

Both cars were reported stolen from the Dallas-Fort Worth area with fake license plates.

Fort Worth Police said three people were taken to the city jail. Two juveniles were taken to a juvenile detention facility.

Top largest metros in 2100:

1. Dallas-Fort Worth (33,907,275)
2. Houston (31,384,122)
3. Austin (22,293,980)
4. Phoenix (22,271,212)
5. New York City (20,810,467)
6. Atlanta (18,370,497)
7. Los Angeles (15,502,798)
8. Washington-Arlington, D.C.-Virginia (14,972,830)
9. Orlando (14,172,727)
10. Miami (13,779,843)

"You may have seen the video online of a man taking a swing at CBS Austin's morning meteorologist in a road rage altercation. Avery Tomasco posted the video to show how volatile these interactions can be and to vouch for dash cams."

I’ve found places where I can paint premade pottery but I’m having a hard time finding a place to learn from the beginning. I found one that only offered classes in the middle of the weekday but that doesn’t work for me. Any suggestions?

USPS has suspended mail service for weeks in a portion of the Travis Heights neighborhood because of a particularly territorial hawk and its fledglings, postal service officials told Axios on Friday.

Prepare your sinuses

we will be celebrating this occasion with drinks tonight @ chili's off 45th and lamar

A short history of heb that the tube fed me

We who are about to die salute you

I saw the fireworks at the Q2 stadium tonight, but from a building nearby.

I thought they were kind of meh. 11 minutes and the grand finale was not grand.

Were people inside the stadium able to see them? From a distant angle, it looked like they were being launched off the top of the roof on the southern seating area.