AUSTIN (KXAN) — The City of Austin could take another swing at its long-term comprehensive housing goals. The Housing Department applied for a $10 million federal grant to do it.
“An update to the blueprint is going to take a couple years so the housing department is already looking right now at how we can make sure that five years down the road we have an update ready to go,” said Austin City Council Member Ryan Alter.
In 2017, Austin City Council set forward lofty housing goals, called the Strategic Housing Blueprint. It was created to work alongside the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan.
“It measures every single district in terms of how much housing has each district produced in relation to how much the scorecard says it should. It also breaks down by income level,” Alter said. “And unfortunately we’re not doing very well on pretty much any of these metrics.”
We know that because every year HousingWorks Austin collects data to show how close the city is to meeting those goals, called the Strategic Housing Blueprint Scorecard.
The 2022 Strategic Housing Blueprint Scorecard — which is the most recent — marks the halfway point in the city’s comprehensive plan. Awais Azhar, deputy director at HousingWorks Austin, says he thinks the blueprint needs a revamp.
“The kind of goals that we had, and the kinds of projections that we had of where we wanted our population to be and how we were looking at our economy in 10 years starting in 2017, really don’t hold anymore, because 2020 really just changed the entire landscape. So in some ways, it’s become almost critical to look at those goals,” Azhar said.
The City’s Housing Department echoed that sentiment saying in part: “Some ways the city has changed include, the rising cost of living, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, adding a coordinated homeless strategy, and land development code legal challenges.”
Whether the City will get that federal grant or not hasn’t been announced, but Alter said this is a process he hopes will happen either way.
“I think it’s really important for us to have metrics that we can grade ourselves. Now unfortunately we’re not doing as well as we like, but we know that because we’re being graded on something,” he said.