Austin Historic-age Housing Preservation

Report Summary: Through the course of the TAP, the panel recognized the challenges Austin faces with respect to its preservation and affordable housing goals. With a market that often wants more, bigger, and newer, and a host of neighborhoods seeking to preserve buildings, culture, and affordability, the City must take a strong stand in its approach to preserving housing, promoting housing affordability, and supporting displacement prevention initiatives. The following guiding principles and recommendations can help the City elect leadership and hire professional staff to navigate these, at times, competing agendas.

Guiding Principles:

• Preservation, both of buildings and culture, must be a part of Austin’s housing affordability toolkit.
• Preservation and affordability are community benefits.
• Preserving existing units and working to ensure longer-term affordability can help make Austin a more equitable place to live.
• There is no one way to solve the affordability question; there is no silver bullet.
• Many homeowners and renters need assistance in repairing, maintaining, and preserving their homes so that they remain safe and habitable today and into the future.
• Increase awareness of existing programs that can support current homeowners, especially low-income residents.
• Preserving buildings and maintaining affordability requires political will.
• Building trust is critical, especially with those who have been historically left out of the decision-making process.

Policy and Regulation Recommendations:

• Increase coordination and collaboration between City departments to support housing preservation, affordability, and displacement prevention efforts.
• Add flexibility to the current policies governing Austin’s ADUs.
• Allow land leases with the support of an education program led by the City or a third-party organization.
• Expand the use of community land trusts (CLTs) to support the City’s preservation toolkit.
• Make preserving historic-age homes as expedient and cost-efficient as new construction.
• Expand the tax benefits to further support preservations and long-term affordability.
• Actualize the preservation bonus, currently being drafted.
• Use the SMART program as a model to create a pilot program to support preservation efforts.
• Adopt a small lot amnesty policy that can be used to preserve houses in these smaller-than-minimum lots.

Process and Program Recommendations:

• Promote programs and the value of preservation by expanding the City’s messaging reach and leveraging trusted community organizations and entities like community and neighborhood development organizations.
• Improve information access by simplifying and streamlining digital platforms.
• Establish a one-point application approach to support preservation incentives.
• Co-develop incentive or bonus programs in collaboration with the development community to create programs with real practical applications.
• Hire an ombudsman to help with housing preservation applications.
• Support the creation of more neighborhood and place-based organizations like community development corporations (CDCs) can help educate, guide and mange development, and bring more flexible financing.
• Develop community land trusts (CLTs) with the support of community development corporations (CDCs).
• Establish life estates to help residents remain in their homes long after their ability to maintain their homes.
• Increase funding allocation to the existing home repair program.
• Create neighborhood resource centers whether as a stand-alone facilities or as a part of an existing public building to provide residents with easier access to information.
• Host regular training and home maintenance education sessions for home homeowners.
• Create a trade education paid apprenticeship program, like the one used in San Antonio.
• Support programs that specifically consider the maintenance needs of older homes.
• Identify a pilot property to demonstrate a tenant purchase program.

Regional Taxation Recommendations:

• Change reassessment procedures from an annual assessment cycle to once every four years.
• Consider providing tax abatement options based on property rental income.
• Promote the use of tax exemption for residents that are age 65 and older more actively; this tax benefit is currently underutilized.
• Revised the volunteer-in-lieu-of-tax-payment program to reflect current wage rates in the area.

Measuring Success:

• Create baseline metrics for the current reality, considering the number of historic-age homes and the percentage of affordable housing in both historic and more modern structures.
• Identify the data gaps in tracking preservation by conducting a citywide survey of existing affordable historic-age housing that includes information about building conditions, property values, and rents.
• Utilize data collection to support community discussion focused on displacement prevention within Austin’s neighborhoods.

Download the complete report and refer to page 25 for a chart of these recommendations and associated timelines.