Watson Wire: Not A Valentine’s Day Card

We’re just weeks away from Valentine’s Day, a day that many use to send cards declaring their love and appreciation for others. Now that I’ve reminded a bunch of you, get after making your plans. No excuses.?

Austin is sending a lavender-colored piece of mail to property owners all over town. It’s our love language. The mailer, which is hitting mailboxes about now, is to tell folks about upcoming public hearings on proposed changes to the Land Development Code. Yeah, not the most heart-warming topic, I admit.

We initiated this sort of sweeping notification two years ago to make sure people were getting good notice of the things being discussed at City Hall that affect their property. This round of notification relates, in part, to regulation of short-term rentals (STRs), a hot-button issue in a lot of neighborhoods. While the code changes will apply to properties all over town, the substance of the change is largely administrative and aims to align our regulations with recent court decisions.

The Austin City Council enacted regulations in 2012 and 2016 that were designed to ensure short-term rental properties were compatible with neighborhoods and to protect houses for, well, housing. The city also wanted to recover the hotel-occupancy tax dollars collected from visitors staying in short-term rentals. The regulations were baked into the Land Development Code and focused on the use of property as a short-term rental.

That approach didn’t fly in the courts, which invalidated some of the City’s regulations, so we’re going to try a different approach in a different section of code that applies to business regulation. The first step is moving most regulations out of the Land Development Code, and doing so requires specific public hearings and notice to comply with state law. Welcome to the weeds of municipal policymaking.

The goal is to wipe the slate clean so we start again with common-sense regulations that are both workable for the property owners and enforceable by the city. We’ll also consider regulations for the platforms that list short-term rentals to improve the tax collections and encourage them to remove illegal listings.

Even with these changes, there’s still a lot of legal uncertainty over short-term rental regulation given ongoing litigation from other Texas cities. And, of course, the Texas Legislature is back in town. But for now, this is a good step forward on short-term rentals.

Encouraging home preservation

We’re also following through on a home preservation issue that arose during our adoption of the first phase of the HOME Initiative, which allowed for up to three housing units per lot. Folks raised valid concerns that, in our efforts to foster more and different housing, the policy changes could hasten demolition of older existing homes. The proposed “preservation bonus” increase allows a property owner to build a little more in exchange for preserving an existing structure.?

We’ll take up that issue in April.