How We Can Make Austin a World Class City

By Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek

Close your eyes and ask yourself this question. Can Austin truly be a city of the future that is world class?

With new leadership at City Hall, with an urgent focus on solving problems, with fresh thinking, and by learning the lessons of other major cities, we do have greatness within our grasp.

More than two years ago we founded Save Austin Now to focus on improving standard of living for every resident. Over the past six months we have been developing this plan, with feedback from more than 75 city, community, business, and government leaders of the past, present, and future.

Our plan addresses the five gravest challenges our city faces: Affordability, Public Safety, Homelessness, Transportation and Transparency. You can read the full plan here.

On affordability, our overarching goal is to enable housing to be built more quickly in Austin to stabilize prices and increase supply to meet ever-growing demand. Government bureaucracy needless delays single-family and multi-family home construction in Austin. On average, new homes take 18 months to be built in Travis County, while our neighboring counties of Williamson and Hays take on average just six months.

We can urgently increase the supply of housing with a few simple steps.

First, we must limit development fees to a reasonable percentage of a housing project (perhaps 5% or even 2.5% for projects under a certain threshold, say $5M). We should also require parkland fees (which have quadrupled over the past two years) be used solely for purchasing future parkland.

Second, we should create a unified Development Review Process under a single leader to ensure accountability and streamline deconfliction.

Third, the city must enforce the 30-Day Shot Clock on permitting decisions. This is state law. After 30 days, we should reduce development fees on a pro-rated basis. Delay is used as a weapon and Austinites seeking affordable housing are paying the price.

Finally, we should enable third party development review of non-judgment decisions for a period of 18 months to reduce the overwhelming permitting backlog that we can never get under control.

We need more housing, built more quickly, to keep pace with the growth Austin is experiencing.

On public safety, we must directly address the police and EMS staffing crises, both of which are profound and rapidly worsening.

We tried to address the police staffing crisis in November 2021, but voters rejected Prop A. As we predicted, the staffing situation is worse now, as our city continues to lose an average of 15 officers a month to attrition, while we only add 60–80 officers each year through one allowed cadet class. This has brought us to 2007 police staffing levels at a time when violent crime is rising, and our population is growing as fast as any major city in America. The EMS staffing crisis is even worse. Their attrition rate is higher, their recruiting is challenging, their work force is badly underpaid and overworked, and they just agreed to a one-year contract extension with a 1 percent pay raise (not even keeping up with inflation). We now also have a 911 call center staffing crisis. This is unacceptable.

Austin must make public safety a funding an urgent priority.

Homelessness is a nationwide problem and unfortunately under the leadership of Mayor Steve Adler and then Council Member Greg Casar, our city followed the failed models of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle by lifting the camping ban. Senior APD personnel have told us that the homeless population peaked at 13,000–15,000 before the passage of Prop B, which we wrote, secured petitions for, and won in May 2021 by a vote of 58%-42% over the opposition of Mayor Adler and nine out of ten council members.

We have a three-step plan for homelessness that is the product of three years of work. To summarize it, we must shift our city’s approach from ‘housing first’ to ‘treatment first’. Housing First has failed in other major cities, including San Francisco and Houston. Treatment First helps our homeless get better before putting them into housing, which burdens taxpayers and can lead to relapses without effective treatment.

Our three-step plan breaks down like this: First, Prop B must be enforced. The city is refusing to fully enforce it, which is why we sued the city in August 2021. But we have never said that Prop B is a silver bullet solution. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Enforcing Prop B ends the magnet drawing homeless people to Austin from around the country.

Step two is that we need temporary spaces (‘stepping stones’) where our homeless can live in safety, while two successful models can either expand (Community First Village for the chronically homeless) or be built (Haven for Hope for the transitional homeless). These areas must be free of drugs and alcohol. We should institute a residency requirement (so we are not incentivizing homeless people from other places to come here). These areas should have security on site, be entirely self-enclosed, offer electricity, showers, toilets, and storage lockers. It cannot be anything like the unregulated camping disaster that we continue to see across our city.

The final piece is ensuring we have adequate shelter for this population. Community First Village is a fantastic facility which is tripling in capacity over the next two years (to more than 2,000 tiny homes). They handle the chronically homeless population. What our city is missing is a solution for the transitional homeless. The finest model we have found nationwide is Haven for Hope in San Antonio, which houses 1,700 people on site, cost $100M to build and costs $22M annually to operate. They require detox on entry, make clients sign a contract, and offer all homeless services on site, as well as case management. Their goal is to get people back on their feet, get them working, and find them a home. We need a Haven for Hope in Austin.

This plan of ours is far more fiscally responsible than the Safe Home ATX plan pushed by Mayor Adler, which plans to spend $515M over three years to house 3,000 homeless people (costing taxpayers $70,000 per homeless person per year). Adler’s plan would require 40–60 more motels be purchased. We can do better than this obscene plan.

Transportation in Austin is rapidly worsening, even with the ‘Work from Home’ trend. Our infrastructure is inadequate and the longer we wait to address it, the more disruptive and expensive it will be. Take Project Connect for example. After selling voters on a $7.4 billion price tag, the project has now increased 59% to $11.6 billion, with only 30% of the engineering studies complete. We should prevent future tax and fee increases to pay for Project Connect and instead seek a model like Houston, where they scaled back and did one line before they did the entire project. Our city’s current effort, Project Connect, will displace up to 300,000 Austinites and is partially paid for with a 22% property tax increase for city residents in perpetuity.

We do need mass transit for our future. An obvious solution hides in plain sight. We have a Union Pacific freight rail line inside MoPac which no longer serves our community or the railway. We should relocate it east, enable the building of a railhead, and remove the S curve at the river which is UP’s slowest point anywhere in their domestic rail lines. Opening up the middle of MoPac could enable 2–4 more lanes or be used for Amtrak commuter rail or even an advanced solution like The Boring Company’s Hyperloop (which is currently being considered to connect San Antonio’s downtown to the airport).

Thankfully the I-35 expansion project is on track, with $7 billion already secure to build it (by getting rid of the upper/lower decks, tunneling under downtown, creating real estate and green space above ground). I-35 must be made more efficient.

Our airport is not growing fast enough and anyone who’s been through the airport in the past year knows it. We need another terminal. We need a third runway (to enable direct flights to South America and Asia). We need backup generators.

Austin should employ an Airport Authority to manage the airport, enabling them to make quicker decisions and attract private capital, just as every major European Airport has and other domestic airports like DFW, Bush International and Hartsfield-Jackson all do. City Council micromanages the airport and that’s why it took more than a year to pass the desperately needed construction of the fuel barn. Without a public-private partnership, we risk our airport falling behind the growth curve just as San Antonio’s has.

On transportation we should demand that every city pothole be fixed within six months and that an increased road maintenance budget follow that work. We should also mandate that Guadalupe Street and Congress Avenue never become pedestrian only (as is currently envisioned).

Finally, Austin taxpayers have no idea where their tax dollars go or what we are getting for that spending. Voters were asked in 2016 through Prop K to conduct an outside audit of the entire city budget and that was rejected. Instead, we should require outside audits of the worst offenders: Homeless spending since 2019, Austin Water, Austin Energy, Capital Metro, Project Connect / Austin Transit Partnership and all bonds passed in the past decade (to ensure due diligence was conducted and ensure projects were on time and on budget).

We can make Austin more affordable. We can make Austin safer. We can directly address homelessness with both compassion and respect for taxpayers. We can improve transportation, reduce congestion and plan for future growth. And we can track our tax dollars better.

By doing these things, we can make Austin a world class city. Join us.

Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek are Austin residents and co-founders of nonpartisan Save Austin Now PAC. Mackowiak is president of Potomac Strategy Group. Petricek is a community activist who is raising her child with her husband and has worked as a social worker and a probation officer.