What neighborhood contributes more to the overall fiscal health of Austin? One of Austin's most historically wealthy neighborhoods boasting multi-million dollar mansions or a mixed-income, mixed-use development? To answer this question we turn to data. Roughly speaking, fiscal responsibility is revenue less expenses. Or expressed as an equation “fiscal responsibility” = “tax revenue” - “expenses from public services”. Public services here refer to roads, water, gas, sewer, fire, EMS, etc.
TLDR; Exclusionary zoning is a bad deal for the average taxpayer, both in terms of reduced tax revenue and higher cost of public services.
Figure 1, below, shows a side-by-side comparison of the “tax revenue” for Mueller and west Austin. As mentioned in my previous blog, the master-planned Meuller neighborhood brings in much higher tax revenue per sqft than compared to West Austin neighborhoods. The main reason is that Mueller is denser, having secured exceptions to exclusionary zoning such as reducing set-backs, easing parking requirements, and allowing for row houses.
Figure 1
But how do public services cost compare between Mueller and West Austin? Estimating the cost of services to each neighborhood is difficult. It probably could be done given an in-depth understanding of city budgets and maintenance costs of various infrastructure. However, there is a simpler way. This way comes from realizing that the closer people are together the more people share the same amount of infrastructure. For instance, with houses closer together you need fewer roads to support the same number of houses, fewer fire stations, fewer sewer lines, and fewer everything. All this adds up to more bang for the taxpayer.. So what does the data say? As shown in the middle panel on the right of figure 2 Mueller is much denser than West Austin (anywhere between 10-100x as dense), and thus much cheaper for the taxpayer. All you need to do to confirm this is to drive around both neighborhoods.
Figure 2
Affordability
All this talk about fiscal responsibility is great but money isn’t everything. Affordability of housing is a basic public need and optimizing for fiscal responsibility alone doesn’t necessarily serve the public interest. Ideally, we would be optimizing for fiscal responsibility and for affordability. One way to accomplish this is by mandating affordable housing in return for easing zoning restrictions. As a part of the deal with the city, the Mueller development set aside a certain number of units to be affordable housing. To visualize what this looks like I plotted the appraised value per resident of each lot. That can be seen on the bottom row. Though there are red (more expensive) areas in Mueller there are indeed a good number of yellow and orange (more affordable) options, especially when compared to West Austin.
Methods
The appraised property value was downloaded from the Travis county appraisal district website
https://stage.travis.prodigycad.com/property-search . This data was collected manually by searching by zip code and downloading the data 1k records at a time. We assume a flat property tax rate of 2.22%
Property square footage was taken from Austin's open city data https://data.austintexas.gov/Locations-and-Maps/Land-Use-Inventory-Detailed/fj9m-h5qy .
The number of residents on a given lot:
To estimate the number of residents on a given lot we used the zoning map by address from
We assume that the maximum number of units is built on a lot given the zoning according to rules laid out in https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Planning/zoning_guide.pdf. Each housing unit is assumed to house 2.5 people on average.
The various sources of information were joined within Tableau. Maps are generated in Tableau.
Why are you missing values for certain properties and areas?
Downloading property data manually was annoying. The Travis County search website is pretty good at blocking bots. Either that or I'm bad at web scraping. Meh. Also, When joining the zoning table with the other tables, I joined by address as there was no common id in the two tables, that I could see. Not all addresses matched. Maybe I’ll figure out a cleaner join some other day.
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