The good & the bad from 2024

Let's start with the bad news.

Trump. The voters exchange a senile center-left institutionalist with a corrupt son for a senile right-wing authoritarian with a corrupt soul. Not a good trade. We could have done better, and I have to believe that we will do better in the coming years.

From the perspective of local government, Trump is probably not uniquely bad news. He's bad news for the same reason that a more conventional Republican president (DeSantis, Pence, Cruz) would have been bad news. And for the same reason that the reactionaries running Texas state government are bad news for the Lone Star State's big cities. These people have little interest in using the government to solve problems and they definitely have no interest in thinking critically about using the government to improve cities. American cities are facing an unprecedented homelessness crisis, its public transit systems are crumbling and the bill for decades of unsustainable sprawl is coming due. It would be great to have the full might of the federal government helping to address these issues. The Democrats haven't been great. But the Republicans just don't care at all. A lot of the money approved for transit, housing etc over the past four years probably can't be messed with, but to the extent that the new administration has discretion, it will not be in favor of cities. Get ready for more highway spending!

Police reform? It's not clear that anything has changed for the better at APD in the nearly five years since we were promised sweeping reforms in training and culture.

It's an open secret that the police academy has been a complete shit show. The department has implemented virtually none of the reforms aimed at making APD a little more nurturing and a little less noxious. Two key APD leaders tasked with overseeing the academy have left in a cloud of scandal in which both have accused each other of sexual assault. Meanwhile, the police association has turned former Officer Christopher Taylor, the guy who shot and killed two people under very dubious circumstances, into a martyr. And our new police chief has basically said that she agrees with them. Nobody at City Hall – certainly not the city manager or mayor –– has pushed back or said that Austinites should expect better than the brutish incompetence of Chris Taylor-style policing. That doesn't fill me with hope for the future of law enforcement in Austin.

Budget crunch. City Council approved an extremely generous police contract that includes unprecedented raises. This is supposed to improve morale at APD and increase recruitment & retention. It's not clear that it will do any of those things, but what is clear is that it puts a lot of pressure on the city's fiscal position and will probably translate into reduced spending on other programs that are an equally important part of the public safety equation (homelessness services, drug treatment, etc).

Even without the police contract, the city was eventually going to have to conduct a Tax Rate Election to exceed the 3.5% per-year revenue limit the legislature put in place five years ago. The police contract simply makes it more urgent.

My concern is that our local leaders, notably the mayor and city manager, have not really confronted this inevitability, at least not publicly. Now that Watson has won reelection, it is his duty to explain to the public that we are facing a fiscal crisis that will either require draconian cuts or a tax hike. If he can't get a TRE passed in the next four years, then he will leave city government in a worse place than he found it.

Slow progress on good infrastructure. This is sort of 2023 news, but it's not like Project Connect improved in 2024. If we ever get rail, it will still be a huge downgrade from what we were hoping for. I don't know to what extent that simply reflects America's inability to build stuff, particularly public transit, and to what extent it is Austin-specific incompetence, but it's very bad news nonetheless.

Cap Metro ridership has recovered since the pandemic, but it is now operating at a much higher cost per-passenger. It's not a good situation long-term.

Meanwhile, the city is way behind on all kinds of other infrastructure. The major corridor overhauls that voters approved $480M for in 2016 still haven't happened and some of them may never happen. Worse, the city officials who oversee these projects have gone to comical lengths to hide this failure from the public.

Rapid progress on bad infrastructure: The monumentally stupid I-35 expansion that Kirk Watson engineered as a legislator is coming to fruition, and City Council is poised to spend a ton of money on very dubious highway caps.

Now let's think about some good stuff.

Rent decreases! The big increase in housing supply that has led rents to drop is good news, obviously. Most of that supply likely has nothing to do with the pro-housing zoning reforms that Council approved at the beginning of the year, and too little of it was urban infill, but at least it shows that supply & demand is real! The entire political class has been supply-pilled, and that's a good thing long-term.

Zoning reforms! Council passed HOME in December '23 and a few months later approved a bunch of other land use reforms that will enable much more market-rate and income-restricted housing to be built in the urban core. This will help to keep rents lower and support public transit and walkability. Most of the new housing will come with tons of parking, but it's nice to know that it won't have quite as much parking due to Council's wise elimination of parking requirements the previous year.

YIMBYs win the elections: The new Council will only have one member who opposed zoning reforms. The attitude at City Hall has shifted decisively in favor of housing. More rule changes to make it easier to build missing-middle housing and reform the permitting process are hopefully coming.

Police oversight. The police contract may have cost a little too much, but at least it incorporates the police accountability and oversight measures that voters approved in May of '23. Former City Manager Jesus Garza and the city law department claimed for over a year that the city could not implement the oversight measures, but a ruling from a judge finally set the city straight. Some worry that the police association will figure out a way to undermine the oversight measures that it agreed to, but maybe they won't!

The affordable housing pipeline gears up: Fortunately, the hundreds of millions of dollars voters have approved for affordable housing is beginning to translate into homes for those who cannot afford market-rate housing. Let's keep it up!

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