Austin’s not sleeping on its new zoning tool, DB90. The City Council in late August overrode neighborhood objections to grant the zoning to a property at 3020 East Cesar Chavez Street, the Austin Monitor reported.
DB90 zoning allows mixed-use buildings of up to 90 feet tall if a minimum of 12 percent of any rental units are reserved for households earning 60 percent of the area median family income or a minimum of 10 percent of units are affordable for households earning 50 percent of MFI.
Affordable units must be available on those terms for 40 years. Crucially, a developer may contribute the cost of the affordable units as a fee-in-lieu to the Housing Trust Fund instead of building them on the property granted the zoning. The council’s move will allow Eastside Partners’ James Eustace to redevelop the site, where a one-story office building now stands, with a 90-foot-tall mixed-use building with residences on the upper floors.
Leah Bojo of the Drenner Group represented Eustace at the meeting, where Council members approved the change on all three readings.
A number of longtime East Austin advocates, including former City Council Member Raul Alvarez and activist Daniel Llanes, wrote letters protesting the project. “The community has been blindsided by DB90 because, for many years, [a Mixed Use or Vertical Mixed Use] zoning change typically meant 60 feet in height,” Alvarez wrote. He also noted that "VMU2 (the category that DB90 is replacing and which it most closely mirrors) was limited to certain corridors."
Both Alvarez and Llanes, chair of the Govalle/Johnston Terrace Neighborhood Contact Team, wrote that a number additional cases are seeking the DB90 zoning in East Austin, with Llanes noting that a number of them are going before the Planning Commission without developers consulting with the neighborhood contact team first.
The item was approved without comment from the council, with Council Member Alison Alter off the dais and Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison absent.
