Friday, January 24, 2014

Assessing Austin's Community Character

Austin's CodeNEXT team (the team that is leading an overhaul of the City of Austin's land use code) is currently conducting an assessment of our city's community character. The team wants to know what the Austin public values about our neighborhoods, favorite places, and opportunities for improvement, with a focus on the built environment.

There is a final city workshop tomorrow where Austinites can offer their input on the community character assessment, and then later this month the City will be rolling out a "do-it-yourself" Neighborhood Community Character kit.

I hope that lots of Austin's families are weighing in on this assessment. What about our neighborhoods' unique character supports families' ability to raise children, and what makes it hard to raise children?  What do we like and not like about our homes, our streets, our public spaces, and our businesses?

Here is my (partial) list of things I love about my community's character, with a focus on the things in my neighborhood that contribute to my family's happiness and well-being. What does your list look like? 

1. Yards: I love my neighborhood's backyards and front yards. With the focus on densifying Austin's urban core, what often gets lost is the importance of providing safe places for kids to engage in free play outdoors. Outdoor play is a critical part of a child's development and a parent's sanity. In a household with two rambunctious boys, I don't know how we could have survived raising kids so far without being able to send our kids outdoors to run around and play--while also being able to keep a close eye on them when cooking dinner, working at home, etc.  In fact, the only reason I have been able to write this blog post today (since school was cancelled) is because I could send my kids and their friends into the yard to play.

2. Neighborhood school and park. When we first bought our house, before we had children, we did not realize at the time what a blessing it is to live within walking distance of an outstanding neighborhood school that was next to a park. Now that we have school-age kids, we are thankful everyday for living so close to such a community treasure that we can walk and bike to each day. Beyond the educational benefits, both our neighborhood school and park have fostered tons of new friendships with our neighbors, a greater sense of neighborhood identity, and community stewardship. 

3. Affordable, family-friendly restaurants. When my kids were younger, it was important for us to be able to go to restaurants with outdoor play areas for children. Now that my kids are older, a family-friendly restaurant is one that serves affordable, healthy, and kid-friendly food within walking or cycling distance of our home. 

4. Access to parks and athletic facilities.  I love the fact that my neighborhood is close to great parks as well as athletic facilities where our kids can play baseball, soccer, tennis, and more.

5. Eclectic, artistic and diverse character. I love living in a neighborhood where my 80-year-old neighbor can grow a field of corn in his front yard, where there are art cars parked in the driveways, and where multiple generations live on a street. I cherish the fact that our neighborhood includes affordable housing, including public housing for families and MHMR housing for persons with mental disabilities. And I appreciate all the artwork in the neighborhood, including the hand-knitted artwork on the stop sign pole, the mural in the alley, and other artwork gems that pop up in nooks and crannies throughout the hood.

6. Cul-de-sacs. While cul-de-sacs are generally shunned in urban planning circles, I love my neighborhood's cul-de-sacs.  Our cul-de-sacs offer the safest places for kids to play in the streets, learn to ride their bike, shoot hoops, roller skate, and more. Studies have found that cul-de-sacs result in a substantial increase in play activity compared to an open grid street pattern, and the Atlantic Cities recently ran this great article on how cul-de-sacs increase social interaction among neighbors. Here's to the cul-de-sac!

7. Back to nature. I love going to sleep at night to the sound of an owl hooting in my back yard, and then waking up on in the morning to the sound of a woodpecker. I love the canopy of trees that line our streets, the butterflies that appear in our flower beds, and the lizards that appear on our front porch.






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12 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing this, Heather. I cross-posted it to www.AustinDistrict7.org.

    I had a similar idea, bringing a photo of children from my neighborhood to the Neighborhood Character workshop at Murchison last week. Demographics needs to be part of the Neighborhood Character assessment process.

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  2. All these reasons are definitely why they are out of the price range of most families with children.

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  3. Don't know who anonymous is, but it is true that more and more of our family-friendly homes are becoming inaccessible to families in Austin. Luckily, there are a lot of great models out there of cities incorporating affordable family-friendly housing into their planning so that families with kids will be attracted to live in city and can still have access to important developmental features like green play areas. Vancouver and Portland especially stand out. Family-friendly housing and affordable housing by no means have to be mutually exclusive.

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  4. Heather, I feel that in this post there is some confusion between your personal preferences and a standard of 'family friendliness.' I'm a working mom here in Austin. We rent - basically on the northern edge of Austin, near the Domain. We'd love to move central, whether it was to rent or buy. However, we're essentially priced out. I'll be honest that VMU-style development doesn't hold much appeal for us as a family. However, nor does the type of development you describe. In fact, one of our top priorities for any home we'd consider buying is NO YARD. They're not environmentally sustainable here in Central Texas and they eat up hours of time in maintenance where we could be doing things we actually enjoy. If we could afford where we want to live, we would give up one of our cars and walk lots of places - including to parks.

    I guess, reading your post is fairly frustrating to me. It's really nice that you can afford suburban-style housing in our core. But where am I supposed to go? Due to whatever life circumstances - not earning enough money, timing our move to Austin wrong, whatever - we're priced out. The type of housing we want literally DOES NOT EXIST in this town. Maybe in the form of 'Mueller Homes,' but frankly, as a white middle class family we'd feel awkward about being approved for subsidized housing - it doesn't feel like that is really meant for us.

    Reading this post makes me sad. If this is where we are heading in for CodeNext, I'll never live near my work. If this is what we advocate for as being 'family-friendly,' we'll never solve the affordability issue. Mega-density, VMU-style, on the main arterials won't be enough to fix the problem, at least for working families. But neither will clinging to some ideal of bungalows with huge yards.

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    1. I just posted a response to your comment on my blog, "Assessing Austin's Community Character, Part II." Sorry to hear that my post makes you sad!

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  5. Vancouver and Portland are much denser and urban than Austin currently is. What are they doing that Austin could replicate?

    Also, why do you single out families for affordable housing? Shouldn't we be designing a city code that provides affordable and attainable housing for everybody?

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    1. I have written a prior post about the great things Vancouver has been doing to support family-friendly housing in a dense urban setting, while preserving family's access to yards and green space. And I have been meaning to write one on Portland, which is trying to replicate what Portland is doing. I just wrote a new post today that mentions both Vancouver and Portland, but I need to write a longer post soon on Portland. Lots of examples from both cities that we could be replicating. As for your question about singling out families for affordable housing, I absolutely agree we should be designing a city code that provides affordable housing for everybody, and that is something I have been actively advocating for over the past 18 years in Austin and at the state legislature. This particular blog, however, is focused on creating a city that is friendly to families. I have written lots articles and reports on how to increase affordable housing for all households in the city. You can access some of them on my faculty webpage at UT: http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/wayhk/

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  6. If you want more people to be able to live near parks, schools, restaurants, athletic facilities, and nature (and who wouldn't want that?) you should be going out of your way to support upzoning the parts of residential neighborhoods near those amenities.

    I grew up in a condo in Far West, and while we didn't have much of a yard, my brother and I were able to walk home from school, walk to parks and natural areas, meet up with our friends at the Wendy's (this was in the 90s, I think kids in the neighborhood nowadays go to the Starbucks), all without having to be driven around by our (single, working) mother.

    It was a great childhood, and I want as many kids as possible to be able to experience something similar.

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    1. I just posted a response to your comment on my blog, "Assessing Austin's Community Character, Part II."

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  7. What you're asking for here is a suburban neighborhood. Which is fine, just please be honest about it; there's nothing urban about it.

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    1. I just posted a response to your comment on my blog, "Assessing Austin's Community Character, Part II."

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  8. I just posted a response to these comments on my blog, "Assessing Austin's Community Character, Part II." I am glad to see that this issue interests so many people.

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