Austin Metric

A New Balance for Austin Transportation Policy

[This post is intended to serve as background reading for my portion of the upcoming transportation session of the 2014 Leadership Austin Engage Series. For best results, please review "Austin Transportation in 20 Slides" before diving into this post. And remember, these are my views, not those of the fine …

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The Problem with Austin NIMBYnomics

One of the more exasperating aspects of debating Austin's housing supply is the confused economic assumptions of Austin NIMBYnomics. Specifically, there is a troubling blindspot about the economic reasoning that guides the humans that build and refurbish housing.

Often, developers are described as ‘greedy’ (which is a way of saying …

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The Limits of Occupancy Limits

This Thursday, the Austin City Council will be voting on lowering occupancy limits across the city from six unrelated individuals per house to four. If the measure succeeds, it should serve as a concise example of the basic confusion about economics, innumeracy, and hypocrisy about affordability that mark current Austin …

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Preferences versus predictions

Dan Keshet slogged through the Project Connect (PC) data and found that if (1) West Campus is restored to the Lamar sub-corridor and (2) the future-focused criteria points are removed then Lamar and East Riverside achieve the highest scores.

Tomorrow, PC staff will be holding a 'data dig' to explain …

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Highland Score

The inclusion of the Highland sub-corridor in Project Connect’s (PC) initial recommendation to the Central Corridor Advisory Group (CCAG) made me curious about it.

After examining the released data and documentation, it is clear that Highland’s score is the result of speculative assumptions about the nature of development …

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