9 Barriers to Building Housing in Central City Austin
5th April 2016
The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America’s two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in suburban-style areas of the city. Our city is growing out more than up.
How come? The desire for living in central Austin has never been higher. But Austin, like most cities, has rules that prevent new housing from getting centrally built. That makes it easier to buy and build on virgin land in the suburbs. Here are some of those rules.
Austin (heck, all of Travis County) is the blue pustule on the otherwise red butt of Texas. As a result, it suffers from typical Democrat diseases like over-regulation and stupid housing policies. This is a good list of such moronic policies.
By contrast, Houston (which doesn’t have any of these stupid ‘zoning’ policies) is doing very well indeed, and growing even faster than Austin. I wonder why….