A City’s Push for Development it’s Banned

-Rendering Pflugerville's New City Hall in Downtown East

Pflugerville is a city that’s been fundamentally transformed by the housing demand in and around Austin, with single-family homes sprawling into our rural neighbors. This development pattern creates low-density neighborhoods that require extensive infrastructure maintenance, without also creating the necessary tax revenue to fund those costs. Over time this financial gap stretches the budget thin, affecting services and maintenance on infrastructure citywide. Pflugerville’s city council seems to have noticed that Pflugerville is encountering this financial gap and has pushed for the Downtown East development project, promising a transformative, higher-density, mixed-use development, starkly different from the surrounding city. 

But this project isn’t a real fix for suburban sprawl. 

This project is one isolated development led by the city, and nothing about the project includes altering the regulations preventing this kind of development elsewhere in Pflugerville. While Downtown East is an example of the type of development that needs to start happening on a broad scale here in Pflugerville, a true fix for our development pattern would be a revamp of our Unified Development Code.

Luckily for us, a revamp is already underway.

What’s In Place And Why Is It Not Working?

Currently, the UDC outlines zoning codes, building and form codes, and limits on where businesses can operate. With current regulations, our restrictive zoning and parking minimums are the main culprit for sprawling development, a shortage of affordable homes, car dependency and social isolation, a lack of locally owned businesses, and growing maintenance costs for an already budget strained city. But those aren’t the only two regulations that contribute to these problems. 

With these current regulations in place a good question to ask is:

What Should a Healthy City Look Like?

Let’s try to imagine a future for Pflugerville that is healthy for the economy and local businesses, the people that live here, and the local ecology. The future that you’re thinking of probably doesn’t involve skyscrapers or bulldozing entire suburban neighborhoods to restore the prairie and densify the city. And you’d be right. 

An actually healthy city wouldn’t need to do anything drastic to our current built environment. Instead of building new subdivisions out into the farmland, the current suburban subdivisions would fill in with small backyard cottages and additions to already built houses. Your neighbor might open a small cafe out of what once was their garage, and the city would add bicycle lanes to major thoroughfares to allow residents to use active transportation modes to get to work or to school without worrying for their safety. 

New medium-density developments wouldn’t be massive apartment blocks but instead small buildings in neighborhoods that blend in with surrounding housing types, and this increased density in neighborhoods would make local bus routes more feasible, allowing residents who wish to get around car free a chance to get off the roads, decreasing traffic for everyone.

This future is not only something we can dream up here together, but something that is feasible in our very own city with just some regulatory tweaks. 

-Aerial view of Highland Park Neighborhood

A Progressive Development Code: On Housing

Now that we’ve established what we’re aiming for when we talk about development code reform, let’s talk about the regulations that need to be tweaked or even removed entirely to allow this strong, healthy city to emerge.

When we talk about adding backyard cottages and additions to existing homes, we’re really talking about what are known as additional dwelling units or ADUs. ADUs are a very simple, flexible way to provide more small-scale, naturally affordable housing for a community. ADUs should be incredibly easy to build on your property, with pre-approved plans and streamlined permitting processes so any homeowner can add to local housing stock.  Fast, predictable approvals lower costs for homeowners and builders. ADUs should also not be limited in who they can house. Currently it’s limited to “owner occupier,” meaning only the property owner can live in them, severely limiting potential housing stock. 

In addition to ADUs, we need to allow “Gentle Density” by right in all residential zones. Duplexes, Triplexes, and Cottage Courts are small units that don’t affect neighborhood character but can expand our housing supply, making our city more affordable for younger and lower income families.

Another way the city could add an enormous amount of housing stock, without building large apartment blocks would be to adopt what is known as “single-stair reform.” Single-stair reform would allow the city to permit small, efficient apartment buildings with lower construction costs and greater architectural flexibility. Single stair apartments are less impactful to neighborhood character and naturally more affordable because of their small size.

We need to reduce regulatory barriers to small scale housing, by eliminating or significantly reducing minimum lot size requirements. Smaller lot sizes allow efficient land use and create more affordable housing options without subsidies.

We also need to seriously consider implementing a “form-based” zoning code rather than our current “use-based” code. Taylor, Tx is a phenomenal local example of implementing a form-based code on a broad, city-wide scale. Their code has allowed new development to come into their historic downtown, encouraging adaptive reuse in old buildings, and new buildings aren’t being built at the detriment of the surrounding neighborhoods, but instead complimenting what came before.

 A form-based zoning code, instead of a use-based code, would allow for greater flexibility in new development, focusing on preserving character while allowing a unique mixture of uses in neighborhoods. We’re talking small community shops, local offices, and different forms of residential all within one neighborhood.

A form-based code also allows the city to easily designate areas (after community feedback, of course) where they want a higher density of homes and workplaces, so projects like Downtown East won’t need to be planned at the city’s, and by extension, the taxpayer’s expense.

-Local Strip mall on Railroad Ave. and Pecan St.