What a courtroom loss for the city could mean for Austin home prices

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin Mayor Steve Adler said the city is evaluating its legal options after an appeals court all but shot down a years-long city council attempt to loosen housing development rules.

On Thursday, the 14th Court of Appeals in Houston sided with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city. A group of homeowners maintain the council failed to get enough public feedback on proposed changes to the land development code.

Experts have said rewriting the code could spur more home construction and bring down home prices. Critics fear changes could alter the character of established neighborhoods.

“[The city council] needs to hear from the city attorneys about our options at this point,” Adler told KXAN in a statement Friday.

“Whatever the final outcome in the courts, our city’s most pressing challenge is still housing affordability and increasing housing supply,” the mayor said.

Candidates looking to succeed Adler in the November election agree housing prices are too high, and the development code is too complicated.

“Austin has become an unrecognizable city to many people,” State Rep. Celia Israel told KXAN. “But there’s a role for the mayor and council to change the way that we build things — more types of houses in more types of places, more creativity.”

“We need to do something that makes sense for the City of Austin and do what it needs to maintain its character and charm,” said Jennifer Virden, a local real estate business owner.

“These cats really put the DUH [sic] in development,” said candidate Erica Nix of the council’s efforts. “This was time sensitive three years ago.”

KXAN did not hear back from the campaign of former mayor and current mayoral candidate Kirk Watson.

Future changes to the development code could land in the lap of a very different city council. Six of the council’s 11 seats are in play in November, including the mayor.

Mike Kanin, a longtime local journalist and former publisher of the Austin Monitor, called the code “an incredibly complex series of rules, that often are contradictory.”

Kanin added with soaring housing prices, any candidate running for a seat at city hall should know the history of the code and have a vision for its future.

“The question of affordability is everywhere, and the most direct way to impact that, I think, is with the code,” Kanin said.