Our friend Marc is back with a simple message about Demolition and Displacement: Tearing down our existing Affordable Housing isn't just a 1:1 equation. As each existing market-affordable home in a "hot" neighborhood heads to the landfill, other neighborhoods will feel the trickle-down pain.
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| Marc, with today's Math Lesson: Knock down a house, and you're going to need more than one U-Haul |
The proposed code is designed to incentivize demolition and redevelopment of existing housing. That's one of the big ways the politicians and code writers are getting the increased housing capacity they want. They've aimed the bulldozers at the "hot" neighborhoods in Central and West Austin, and are working to reduce the incentives for demolition on areas that have already suffered impacts from Gentrification. That sounds good, right? If we're only displacing affluent people from affluent neighborhoods, it's all good, isn't it?
Not quite.
Developers don't normally tear down rich people's homes, do they? They buy and demolish the least expensive houses in any given area, whether they're rentals or homes owned by lower-income residents. In Rosedale, Bouldin, or Tarrytown, the bulldozer nearly always takes a home away from someone who's contributing to the economic diversity of the otherwise more affluent neighborhood.
These folks don't just vanish like their home does. Some might relocate or move to the suburbs, but many are going to want to find housing close to their work, or school, or their grandkids, so they're forced to join the game of Musical Chairs that we play in Austin for housing. They'll look for a rental in a less affluent neighborhood, where they may be able to out-compete the existing residents of that area. That in turn bumps the existing residents from that zip code and forces them to search for housing, where they could potentially displace someone with still less buying power.
The bulldozer doesn't just damage the fabric of one neighborhood.
Some would say that if we had adequate housing Supply, then this wouldn't be a problem, but that's just not true. The primary housing supply this code will bring will be luxury housing, and much of it will come with displacement of lower-income residents. They're just going to speed up the music and take away more chairs for the less affluent. No city can build its way out of an affordability problem, and we shouldn't tolerate the continued use of this bogus and self-serving justification for adopting a Displacement Code.