Future land use plans for CapMetro sites pick up a recommendation from Planning Commission

A bundle of subtle planning changes around two Capital Metro park-and-rides in North and South Austin may lay the groundwork for a major redevelopment on the sites, and some residents still aren’t happy about it.

The Planning Commission voted unanimously to approve nearly a dozen related items during their regular meeting on April 22, as part of a hearing that lasted nearly two hours.

The Austin Monitor has previously reported on the plan, which was postponed during its last hearing at the commission in March. A month later, not much seems to have changed about the plan.

The city wants to facilitate the redevelopment of two existing but underutilized park-and-rides in North Austin, near Research and Lamar boulevards, and in South Austin, near Ben White Boulevard and South Congress Avenue. Capital Metro wants to build up those sites as new multimodal transit stations with on-site housing, businesses and better infrastructure for bus riders.

To do that, the city is asking City Council to remove land in a roughly half-mile circle around the sites away from various neighborhood Future Land Use Maps, or FLUMs, and add them to a new FLUM within that circle. The change will streamline the process of later rezoning and redevelopment around the stations.

In addition to all of the items related to the FLUM changes, which had to be broken into many items to deal with each individual neighborhood plan, were two items asking for the addition of two new vision plans into the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, a city-level document that various departments use to inform their work.

Those also passed unanimously, with some amendments from the commission mostly aimed at integrating the new vision plans with other planning documents, like Transportation and Public Works’ Strategic Mobility Plan.

“We believe that this plan offers a clear way forward to help us realize the full potential of our transit investments and improve the quality of life for our community members,” said Planning’s Ana Villarreal during a prepared presentation to the commission during the meeting.

FLUMs don’t establish zoning. Rather, they set an agenda for what kind of zoning a site might receive in the future, whether initiated by a property owner or by the city. Likewise, zoning  doesn’t determine what gets built — it just determines what can be built. Nonetheless, the implication of redevelopment of any kind happening around the sites is concerning to some residents, including local political activist and former City Council candidate Monica Guzmán, who spoke against the plan at length during the meeting in a capacity as the chair of the North Austin Civic Association’s contact team.

Though development under the ETOD framework includes incentives for affordability and some tools for the city to try to protect vulnerable Austinites from displacement, Guzmán said that the city isn’t likely to succeed in altogether preventing displacement caused by real estate speculation spurred by city-sponsored redevelopment.

“I have seen plenty of other plans at my day job, especially [Density Bonus-90], where the affordability is 50, 60, 80 percent MFI,” Guzmán said, referring to the estimated percentage of the local Median Family Income that residents of an apartment considered affordable would have to be making to be able to comfortably make rent.

“On paper that sounds great,” she continued. “But when you’re redeveloping in a community that is 30 or 40 percent MFI, that’s still unfavorable to them.”

Several other residents spoke against the plan during the meeting, or in written comments submitted to the city. The Austin Neighborhoods Council, an umbrella group representing over 80 neighborhood associations, said in an undated letter to council, the commission, and media outlets that the plan would be harmful to residents of surrounding neighborhoods and called for an “equitable anti-displacement overlay.”

A few also wrote in favor of it, including the chairperson of the Wooten Civic Association contact team, Ryan Nill, and several named and unnamed residents in photocopied, handwritten comments collected during outreach the city conducted before bringing the plan forward.

Chair Awais Azhar asked Planning Department staff if the plan included measures for preserving subsidized affordable housing. Stevie Greathouse, a division manager with the department, pointed to language in the vision plans that would flag those projects during any subsequent review for rezoning.

Greathouse also said in response to a question from Commissioner Felicity Maxwell on the potential for affordable housing at the station site itself, which would likely be built by third parties, that that max out at anywhere from “100 percent affordable” units subsidized by the city to 60 percent MFI, or Median Family Income, units achieved through incentive programs.

“We would assume that that whole range would be available,” Greathouse said.

All votes related to the plan were taken with commissioners Nadia Barrerra-Ramirez and Anna Lan, who both work for CapMetro outside of their work on the commission, abstaining and off the dais.

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