Home > Affordable Housing: What we’re doing about it

Affordable Housing: What we’re doing about it

HousingWorks Austin is grateful for support from Community Partners, city leaders and passionate advocates across the city.

Building on the success of 2013 (including the overwhelming voter support for $65 million in affordable housing bonds!), we focused on the following efforts in 2014:

Advocacy. HousingWorks Austin authored Five Steps to Keeping Austin Affordable, a booklet highlighting 2013-2014 affordable housing achievements and looking at some of the challenges ahead.

Policy Research. HousingWorks developed timely research on our local jobs-housing balance and nationwide best practices in housing the hardest to serve. In addition, HousingWorks created a comprehensive preservation strategy that resulted in City Council adopting an ambitious goal of preserving 20,000 affordable rental units in the next 20 years.

Housing + Transit. New changes in federal regulations challenge our local community to better align housing and transportation policies. On April 4th, 2014, HousingWorks teamed up with the UT Opportunity Forum to hold an in-depth workshop, attended by more than 150 community leaders, focused on connecting affordable housing with transit.

10-1. The changing structure of Austin City Council represents a unique opportunity for affordable housing. HousingWorks developed district by district analysis of affordable housing challenges and opportunities, including poverty rates, homeless statistics, median income data, and median home costs.

Land Development Code Rewrite. The LDC Rewrite (CodeNEXT) is underway, and HousingWorks Austin is working to ensure affordability is part of the community discussion so that we can build creative affordability tools into the code.

Thank you for reading about the work that HousingWorks Austin does to make our city a place where all kinds of people can live in all parts of town. The people of HousingWorks Austin appreciate your support.