The Texas State Capitol Building in downtown Austin, Texas. Austin’s various housing reforms set up an unflattering comparison with similarly-sized Boston. iStock photo
Boston and Austin have lots in common: progressive university towns with thriving arts and culture scenes that have become major tech and innovation hubs.
But the two cities could not be more different in how they have dealt with the crushing cost of housing, the biggest challenge facing both cities and increasingly the entire country.
Austin, Texas has emerged as a beacon of hope, passing multiple reforms that have unleashed a tidal wave of new housing construction, even as Boston in particular, and Massachusetts as a whole, have struggled to pass and put into action things the Texas capital did years ago.
That’s the gist of online startup publication Read Uncut’s scathing tale of two cities, which contrasts Austin’s successful approach to beating back rising prices and rents with Boston’s failure. The piece has struck a real chord with local real estate types for summarizing a lot of what frustrates anyone who cares about building housing in our corner of the United States.
Saying What Can’t Be Said
Writing under the pen name of James, the author claims to be a former AI executive now devoted to spilling the beans on how the world really works, from the halls of corporate power to debates over housing proposals in local city and town halls.
Cynics at Boston City Hall suggest that the whole piece is the work of AI, noting errors in the article’s description of some of our local permitting reforms.
And yes, that is the danger and impracticality of attempting to write under a pen name in the brave new world of AI. We now all have technology at our fingertips that, in a second or two, can generate a reasonably well-written essay on something as specific as housing policy in Austin versus Boston.
Yet it is also understandable that someone who has operated in the business world, and who may now be working as a consultant, would not want to go public with a critical piece about elected leaders in a major city and state.
Certainly, many local executives are reluctant to go on the record with a reporter if the story may be critical of sundry local pols, fearing retaliation in the form of a lost contract, bidding opportunity or any number of other ways they might be able to put their fingers on the scale.
But the questions raised by the pseudonymous author also demonstrate how actual journalism – where you put your name on a story and take responsibility for the reporting, writing and facts – is even more valuable in the age of AI, not less.
Austin’s Big Ideas Worked
All that aside, the author, whether man or machine or some hybrid, gets some important things right by seeing Austin as Boston’s peer.
Austin began methodically reforming what has been a cumbersome system for new housing more than a decade ago, slashing permitting times and minimum parking requirements, doling out density bonuses for including affordable housing, and allowing a single staircase, rather than the standard double, in mid-rise buildings to make smaller lots buildable.
Home to the University of Texas, Austin also now allows up to 3 units to be built on a single lot by right, up from just one before, and shrank minimum lot sizes.
And Austin began loosening ADU regulations a decade ago, something that Boston is just starting to think about.
The Texas city added an incredible 120,000 new housing units from 2015 to 2024 – expanding its housing stock by nearly a third, according to Pew Research Center.
And guess what? Rents fell by 19 percent in the 2020s, even as the city added another 18,000 residents, per Pew.
The most telling stat in the story, however, may be the comparison of the financial situation of the average Austin renter compared to his or her counterpart in Boston.
Median income of renters in both cities is around $63,000, but in Austin, the median rent, at $1,357, is less than half of Boston’s $3,300.
At the end of the month, after other expenses are accounted for, the Austin renter still has $1,565 left over, compared to Boston, where the same renter is $400 in the hole, the Read Uncut piece notes.
Austin Idea Gets the Brush-Off
Maybe the most damning example the story dredges up is the visit of a delegation of top Austin officials to Boston and Cambridge back in 2024.
A number of Boston City Council members showed the visitors from Austin around and took copious notes on all that the Texas city had done to boost housing development and bring down costs.
But nearly 18 months later, out of all of those big Austin ideas that have worked so well, Boston politicians have only floated one: reducing parking minimums.
And that proposal has yet to pass, despite some confusion in the Read Uncut piece to the contrary.
In fact, when Councilor Sharon Durkan, Boston’s chief advocate for parking reform, pushed city planning czar Kairos Shen about the idea at a budget hearing last week, he gave what Durkan clearly interpreted as a brush-off.
“I think ultimately it’s something that we will arrive at, but it’s something that we will do only with the community with us,” he said.
He then referred to the researchers who’ve assembled a mountain of evidence that high parking requirements are raising building costs here by up to 17 percent as “so-called experts not engaged in the daily lives of people living in these [neighborhoods].”
Durkan cut him off, claiming that “over half your staff agree with me, so I’ll be talking to them.”
Scott Van Voorhis
Our ‘Performative Governance’ Problem
The author, whoever he, she or it happens to be, sees the 2024 meeting with Austin officials as just another part of the kind of performative governance “that Boston has elevated to an art form over the years.”
“The pattern of studying solutions without implementing them is the governance equivalent of what happens inside companies after layoffs, where surviving employees learn to perform engagement without risking the pushback that might actually change something,” the piece notes.
The Read Uncut piece also has tough things to say about our state-level reforms, noting that cities and towns have figured out how to game the MBTA Communities Act to stay in compliance while also making it hard if not impossible in some cases, to actually build new housing.
So yes, it is certainly a harsh critique, and you can see why it’s got people in the housing scene around here talking. The best thing that can be said of Boston and the Bay State’s efforts to rein in rising rents and prices is that we are still early in the game.
After all, it took Austin a decade of passing reforms and slashing red tape to see the benefits, so it’s way too early to throw in the towel.
That said, now that Austin has shown the way, it’s time for our local and state leaders to get cracking.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
