This is one of the more misdirected things the city has done. There are literally rows of empty houses and empty apartments near me that stay permanently empty except some weekends when they are filled with bachekorettes going WOOO at 1 AM.
You can walk down Haskell and see such a row of small apartments, all empty and used strictly for STRs.
And the removal of occupation limits hamstrings one of the only tools holding the AirBNB owners accountable, not that they care much about fines anyway.
The STR issue is rapidly killing our neighborhoods, and now there will just be more.
Here is data if you don’t believe me.
http://insideairbnb.com/austin/
Also people are doing this anyway, just building sheds from scrap lumber and running an extension cord to them and renting them out. Code doesn’t seem to care, so how could this ever go wrong?
This is another mischaracterization. I have no problem with people in those neighborhoods, just the people who live in those communities showing up at City Hall or filing lawsuits to stop every. single. thing. the city is trying to do to bring our land development code into the 21st century.
You just cited a bunch of far flung suburban lots. There is no lack of new housing developments happening in suburbia, more housing is being built in Austin’s suburbs than in Austin now because of how onerous our land development code is. The entire point of this is to build more density closer to downtown.
Like I said before, the city doesn’t get to dictate to Arbor Trails or Lakeline Mall what to do with their properties. The city is already incentivizing high density developments on properties like this though, see the Statesman building, Brodie Oaks, Twin Oaks, up and down South Lamar or Burnet, shit…look at Rainey Street, not one of those skyscrapers was there 15 years ago. High density residential in large buildings is not enough, more needs to be allowable throughout the city.
Will you link to the zoning phases you’re talking about?
Here’s the info about phase two (end of the article). There is no phase three that I can find. I was misinformed.
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2023/12/06/austin-home-initiative-city-manager-changes.html
Phase two will reduce minimum lot sizes. I haven’t done the math to confirm, but the concern is where one home stood on the previous lot size, now there could be six (existing lot cut in half, three homes per lot).