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Should Building Taller Be Much, Much Easier? - Design
In early December, the city council of Austin, Texas, adopted an exhaustive downtown plan that will guide every element of the neighborhood's transformation over the next 25 years, from its historic preservation policies to investments in workforce housing to parking and transit infrastructure. Amid all of those potentially touchy topics, though, the loudest row grew out of one program sketched on just five pages of the full 183-page document.
It is the city's new Bonus Density Program. With it, downtown Austin could become both a residential and economic epicenter of the city, a dense and diverse 21st century neighborhood with renewed parks, new businesses and more affordable housing – all if the community will just let developers there build taller buildings.
"It by far drew the most discussion and angst and tension of any element of the downtown plan," says Jim Robertson, one of the plan's co-project managers. "In some ways, that's because of this fundamental question: If a community on the one hand places a high priority on becoming compact and dense and tall and vibrant, but on the other hand, has either restrictions in place or believes some restrictions are appropriate, how do you reconcile those two?"
Density is supposed to be the answer to a whole range of urban challenges, to how cities can become more prosperous, more environmentally sustainable, more livable and more productive. In a denser urban world, people will walk to work, clearing up traffic congestion. That time commuters spent in their cars they can instead spend with their families. Now they're happier. And with all these happy people living in such close proximity to each other, dense communities can support more retail, more restaurants, more transit, more tax base, all of which serves to attract yet more people and businesses.
But how do you grow denser if you can't grow up? At a certain point – whether it's in downtown Austin or near a suburban Boston transit station – communities will exhaust the real estate that exists below building height limits imposed years ago for safety, continuity or aesthetics. And then what? Will people let go of these rules?
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As with many of today's urban quandaries, we can blame this one at least in part on urban renewal, a moment in city planning history best associated with hideous mega-block, super-tower public housing projects.
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