I gave "takes telecommuting and flexible work hours seriously" as one of my reasons not to vote for Adler. Even in high-tech, most people don't have the option of either one, especially in the age where the agile/scrum fad has ruined everything.

Thanks for this. I hope that #4 refers to Austin's ill-fated rail project with: "Opposition by environmentalist or progressive transportation policy groups should be a yellow flag. Unlike the political right, these people really want measures they can vote yes on, so if they're voting no there is probably something wrong." and not with: "I don't mean, of course, to give every self-proclaimed transit advocate a veto. As in any business, some of them are crackpots." although as always, I am self-aware enough to view both as possible.

Ditto to Scotty's second paragraph. And it's not just highway guys who do that. One of the smarmsters from our local transit agency approvingly posted a link to this article, claiming that Austin's Project Connect followed this goal, which is nonsense; they, in fact, had a desired solution ahead of time, and then forced the process so it would spit out the plan they knew they wanted.

I go back and forth on this. Our best transit corridor is currently suffering a 16% decline in ridership because the (basically branding only) Rapid Bus service is so bad. Capital Metro would say it's bad because the city hasn't given them their own lane. I don't want the city to give them a lane unless it's for rail. (Otherwise, I don't believe it's worth the disruption). So who wins this one?

Form-based code is just activist flypaper. Without changes to height, it's meaningless (we have enough "get commercial fairly close to housing" options today with the infill options and VMU; that's NOT the problem)

The tech economy leads to more single people with more disposable income bidding up the price of apartments (including in the core), which leads some others to be outbid for those living arrangements and instead moved into the shared housing market. Since these neighborhoods were the prime actors in preventing more multifamily from coming to the market in the last few decades, it is difficult to take their claims now that they support true MF seriously. Or to care that the inevitable effects of fighting supply are coming home to roost.

What we have that most towns don't is a huge university AND non-university growth. The people who think Austin is a college town are crazy; the high tech corridor along 360 and 183 might as well be in Silicon Valley or Seattle or Boston for all the connection it has to UT. I went to another huge state school in a TRUE college town, and there, the primary issue would be kids ruining neighborhoods. But in Austin, a ton of the people in these so-called "stealth dorms" aren't even students.

You're assuming they're driving families with kids out of the urban core. Chris' data and Julio's data indicate otherwise. And, by the way, I learned the other day that neither of the duplex units across from Lee currently occupied are being rented to students; one is a professional couple and the other is a family with a kid(!) And at its simplest level, it's because the residents of the stealth dorms, if they're all students, are much more likely to use means of transportation other than the car than families with kids are. I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. And it makes financial sense too - when I have to pay one bus fare versus one parking bill, the bus wins; but when I have to pay four bus fares versus one parking bill, the car wins.

Ellie Hanlon from the pro-limits side threw this back in response: http://dallascityhall.com/committee_briefings/briefings1108/QOL_boardingHouseUpdate_11032008.pdf (referred to slide 24)

This is the kind of analysis that city staff should be doing more of, or should feel free from pressure to not publicize. Thanks for your service to the city.

Sounds like you need to be introduced to the twitter account JMVC_AWX

This Houston "monstrosity" is that way because of, not despite a lack of, laws in Houston that mandate suburban development. In this case, it's mandatory parking minimums, which are just as strict if not more in Houston. You've also got minimum lot size rules, street frontage rules, and other assorted bits and pieces which add up to, in most places, just as much of a suburban zoning code as you get in every other major city in this country. Imagine if the developer in Montrose had not had to provide N parking spaces (they might still have due to market preference, but I'm not as sure as others that they would have). Imagine a 4-story building instead, with people parking on the street (the horror!)

No, I don't want other neighborhoods to change according to my whim - I just recognize that we get better results in the long-run when neighborhoods are allowed to change as per the individual whims of their owners. That's how we ended up with most good neighborhoods - NOT through planning that bans everything but one common suburban form.

You've made this claim before but not provided details. There is no way I'm aware of to bypass McMansion by designating units as condos (in my understanding, any property which allows condominiums would have to have been zoned MF, to which McMansion doesn't apply). Can you clarify?

This betrays a misunderstanding of the key point. The nice central neighborhoods are illegal under current zoning, which mandates nothing but suburban design. The LDC is not about protecting freedom, or producing good neighborhoods; it's a Frankenstein which evolved over the years from originally mandating suburban sprawl to this thing which is also intended to keep certain central neighborhoods from ever changing (even if it's just the kind of change that happened for decades in other central neighborhoods and produced very good results).

Isn't the loopiness/turniness of some of these routes a somewhat inevitable unintended consequence of bragging for so many years about buses supposed flexibility?

It's really simple, Tom: For every 20 units that the market justified, you and your cronies at the ANC stopped 19 from being built. The remaining 1 unit that IS being built slows the growth of housing prices a bit, but nowhere near as well as the other 19 would have.

Yeah - it picks up at the Drag. Must be because of the 2-way. Couldn't be because it's right next to UT, and it couldn't be because south of there it's infested with tracts whose development has been stunted due to Capital View Corridors. I've walked up and down both Guadalupe and Lavaca, as well as Lamar, and the entire length of Guad/Lamar is preferable to the similar length of Lamar in roughly the same area. The first part of Lamar that got nice to walk on after redevelopment started in the 1990s was between 5th and 6th. By your logic, it must be because of the 1-way traffic, right?

If it were ever only that simple, it'd be worth trying just to prove it either way. But you know darn well it's not. Probably a million bucks just to change two streets - restripe, put up new traffic lights, change curb cuts in various places, etc. Your insistence that Lamar is a nicer place to walk than the 1-way streets downtown is charming. I don't know whether you really believe that or not, but it's just precious either way. Those here who might be tempted to believe him, please look on Google Streetview at Guadalupe and Lavaca around 2nd street (where Great Streets has been in play) versus Lamar at, say, 8th St. Again, if 2-way is the magic tonic, then we can attribute all those nice benches and buildings-up-to-the-sidewalk on G&L to 1-way, and we can blame all the driveways and surface parking on Lamar on 2-way, right?