Austin Regulations Impede Freedom and Business

Austin-American Statesman: Developers tire of running city's gantlet

Codes, limits, neighbors, officials are stuff of builder legend.

The Austin City Council reframed the historic Rainey Street neighborhood — long a quiet spit of residential land hidden between a mass of commercial property and Interstate 35 — as an extension of downtown with a zoning change Thursday. In doing so, it ended years of struggle and signaled the advent of dense, comparatively unfettered development in that area — or so it seemed.

At the same meeting, the council considered a raft of restrictions, requirements and incentives about minimum heights, maximum heights, sidewalk widths, the banning of drive-in service and efforts to "avoid creating a canyon effect."

The long lists of similar restrictions on other parts of downtown being redeveloped with the city's help have reignited a long-standing debate about whether the city's play-by-play management style helps keep Austin handsome or simply stifles development and competition.

Several developers have grumbled that Austin's reputation for lengthy procedure — built on its occasionally contradicting regulations and its meddlesome community — has driven away some builders altogether. Slow growth, they say, has meant long headaches.

I've written about this before: Walgreens, South Austin, and Zoning Regs, The Twisted Means Towards a Good End, Allen's Boots Under City of Austin's Gun, Brewster McCracken's Jihad, Austin Bans "Big Boxes" Over Edwards Aquifer, Another Victim of Democracy, City of Austin Survey on Building Regulations, Fight the Austin Smoking Ban, "You Have Been Challenged"? - Don't Fucking Challenge Me, Survey Time! and Survey Time! II, etcetera.

My philosophy may have changed over the years since I've written the older of these posts, but my opposition to the regulation imposed by city, county, and other local governments on property owners remains the same. Some of the very worst examples of state intrusion into our lives come from the locals living down the street who presume to have the right to run things for city dwellers.

"There are several cities in the country where people will not go because of the perceived difficulty with dealing with bureaucracy," developer Perry Lorenz said. He named Aspen and Boulder in Colorado and San Francisco as other sites. "Austin is one of those cities. We suffer a little bit for that."

[...]

"For all the angst you hear about development in Austin, it sure doesn't slow down supply," said John McKinnerney, a vice chairman of the Urban Land Institute's Austin district council and a principal at Simmons Vedder, an Austin-based developer. "There's nothing that impedes the square footage that gets built."

While this debate might interest demographers and social statisticians, it doesn't capture my attention as much as it once did. Each side can produce a survey or a study proving their contentions and the public is left to pick which ones they like. I firmly believe that with every law that goes beyond the punishment of property rights violations, there is always at least one person who chooses not to invest, work, start a company, or otherwise produce additional value within that government's geographical reach. Given the complexity of human action, such withdrawals aren't always going to show up in the tables of academic journals. This is the hidden damage done by regulation, very similar to the unreported thousands of effective and just uses of firearms in self-defense every year.

Still, McKinnerney said, Austin is the most difficult place in Texas, and among the trickiest in the Southwest or Southeast, to develop. Navigating the process here requires patience and money.

"Mention regulation to many City of Austin businesspeople (at least the ones interviewed and surveyed for this report) and eyes will usually roll, tempers will flare and frustrated stories of drawn-out marathons to receive city permits ensue," noted a 2003 report commissioned by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.

"Certain segments of the business community in Austin are at a boiling point over the pace, scale and supposedly capricious nature of the city's permitting process. . . . One respondent likened the City of Austin's permitting officials to the Roman army - if the first wave doesn't get you, the second, third or fourth will."

In Austin, you have a very powerful anti-capitalist mentality that is employed to prevent residential and commercial development. Often enough the people who want this growth stopped, halted, or changed have decent-sounding goals in mind: a healthy environment for Nature and Man, safe transportation for all, etc. Those motivations, however, do not justify the imposition of the City of Austin in the way of legitimate property transactions. It simply is not theirs.

The land development code conflicts with fire protection regulation, or the environmental code clashes with landscaping regulations, real estate consultants say. But even trickier is divining how codes will be interpreted by different city agencies, they said.

"I appreciate the city's trying to protect quality of life," said Paul Bury, an Austin real estate consultant, "but tell us the rules before we play."

"It's very difficult to get projects approved, and it's very expensive to get through the process in Austin," said Charles Heimsath, an Austin real estate consultant. "The regulations are extensive and sometimes conflicting."

Some developers and architects who have worked with the city or currently have proposals before it said they did not want to publicly criticize the development review process for fear of jeopardizing their ability to work in Austin.

I'm no conspiracy theorist and I don't think there is some grand plan organized by drooling Commies somewhere to deliberately shackle individuals in order for them to march down the roads they've booby-trapped. I see this as the simple outgrowth of what happens when you the Elected assume power they don't rightly have and then attempt to please both everyone such that they'll get Elected once again...and perhaps throw in a gesture or two towards what might be called something they believe in. The result is a fifth-dimensional interwoven web of bullshit that every businessman must peer through when doing even some of the most basic of business maneuvers.

City officials say they have implemented a "one-stop shop" to make development review more efficient. Up to 13 departments with different missions were involved before; now there will be just one, "with a single goal of fast, efficient process to review development and maintain compliance with our code," said Joe Pantalion, director of the development review office.

Since October, the start of the fiscal year, the cycle time for the reviews has dwindled to 140 days from 165 the previous year.

Copyright 2001-2005 Cox Texas Newspapers, L.P. All rights reserved.

But they'll never learn. Businesses will continue to grovel at the City's feet. Politicians will continue to denounce "greed" over "people." And as long as people think they have a right to tell you how to use your property and how to act, we're fucked. Because they have the numbers, the police, and the media on their side. Changing that mental framework is probably beyond anything short of revolution.

Posted by Drizzten at April 11, 2005 05:09 PM