All posts by tim

Why Variances Can Be Good

Politics

So there’s been a bit of talk lately about the Grayco Development along Lakeshore. Save Town Lake is against it because they believe that the 40′ height limit should be absolute. Chris Reilly (one of our new council members) has weighed in on why he supports it. His argument is that they are only asking for a height variance and they are offering a massive number of incentives to the city in return (public plazas, preserving trees, park improvements, sidewalks, etc).

I’ve become somewhat pessimistic about development in Austin. It seems that these initial offers are generally their best offer, and they tend to get to build what they want in the end. The Northcross debacle is just one of many where we were going to get something pretty nice from the developers, but in the end the city is quite a bit poorer and we’re getting a generic Walmart. As far as initial offers go, this is a great one, and is completely in keeping with the ideals of the new East Riverside plan. But while the pro/anti development track is a pretty common argument, I don’t really want to address it in this case.

I also don’t want to address it in the sense of ugly vs. nice developments. One of the things that being on a Neighborhood Association Board convinced me of is that you cannot create rules to avoid ugly. You can create rules for well-kept. You can create rules to effectively use space, but you can’t avoid ugly.

That said, I wanted to compare the two properties that are side by side. The Grayco Development and the Amli development next door. You can view a map at the Chronicle’s writeup on the issue. I want to compare them simply from a lakefront utilization perspective.

Here’s a view of the where the Grayco development will be from across the lake. It will be behind the second tree line (per the variance agreement those trees stay). There’s an existing two story apartment complex there. You’ll need to expand the picture and look very closely to see it.

Here’s a view of the area from the actual hike and bike trail. It’s taken from right next to the water fountain which is halfway between Lakeshore Boulevard and the closest the Hike and Bike trail gets to the water.

Next look at the Amli complex. This is a project that did not request a variance and is within waterfront overlay height limits:

That large concrete building is a parking garage. Don’t get me wrong. I actually like the Amili development. Looking at the way it integrates with Riverside you can imagine how Riverside is going to become a nice strollable boulevard of shops and apartments, rather than a bunch of run down strip malls:

But is “Save Town Lake” right to contend that the Grayco development is some sort of monstrosity that will destroy the spirit of the lake? That development is going to be behind the treeline. It’s going to have a lot of units, which means more people who can enjoy the lake, and it’s going to preserve the Hike and Bike trail (something the Amli development is not extending, you still get to run by it on the sidewalk). There will be a plaza to engage the public and bike routes and sidewalks through the development to make getting from Riverside to the Trail easier.

Is a parking garage really the best utilization of a waterfront view? Shouldn’t people be enjoying the view instead of a concrete wall? Shouldn’t we encourage developers to seek variances when following the rules would lead to something that is obviously not the best utilization of a site?

I think we need to take variances to get what we really want. Keep the views for the people. Keep density in the East Riverside area and bring in new commercial development to a historically under-served community.

Goodbye Affordable Housing in Austin

Ramblings

Check out the newest provision in the FHA guidelines. You know, the loans that make it easy for first time home buyers to buy affordable houses with little to no down payment. Julie and I bought our first house with one.

– Because of noise worries, FHA insurance will be unavailable when properties are within 1,000 feet of a highway, freeway, or heavily traveled road; 3,000 feet of a railroad; one mile of an airport; or five miles of a military airfield. Projects must take action to avoid or mitigate such conditions before completing the loan review process.

What does that leave? There are million dollar homes in Austin less than 3000′ from a railroad. Most of the affordable housing in Austin is that close. Have you looked at the affordable developments in South Austin? The ones that pretty much run along the tracks?

The major flaw in "No Child Left Behind"

Ramblings

So we went to a meeting about Becker, an elementary school in our neighborhood last night. We’re considering sending Stella there, due to the extreme overcrowding at our local elementary (> 120%, highest in AISD). Plus a lot of our friends are in the neighborhood. There was talk of a daul-language program, which was interesting, but one thing that struck me was their academically unacceptable rating and their small class size. Linder (the overcrowded school in our neighborhood) has been academically acceptable since the creation of “No Child Left Behind”. That seemed a bit odd to me. But first a word about averages.

Steve Crossland of the excellent Crossland Blog has often spoke about how useless averages are in real estate (and really in much of life). When someone asks you what the average home price is in Austin, you don’t actually tell them the average. You tell them the median. Thanks to the million dollar homes the average home price is probably around half a million. The median is probably in the high 100k’s. When we say average we generally mean median. And when we see averages we generally extrapolate them to the median in our head. When I was in school, if I saw an average grade of 75% in one of my classes, I would assume pretty much everyone got a C. Yet, depending on the size of the class it could have been 2 unprepared lunkheads who got no answers right, and the rest of the class aced the test. Averages tell you very little about individual performance.

With that in mind I decided to look at test scores in town. I decided to compare against 3rd grade, but the numbers are pretty consistent. Here’s Becker (all numbers are number of kids who failed the test):

Becker

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 12.8 4.1 4.22 3.2 3.07

I was shocked. So academically unacceptable in this case means that 3-4 kids failed the test in each class? That’s not so bad. And when you consider averages are at play here it’s possible that there are a few bad teachers dragging the rest down. So I decided to see what academically exemplary means. This is a school that does not have a lot of english profeciency problems, economic disadvantage, or section 8 housing:

Kiker

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 21 0.21 0.42 0.21 1.05

So the difference is 2-3 kids per class? Not as much difference as you would expect from the terms “exemplary” and “unacceptable”. I finally decided to look at Linder to see how it stacked up:

Linder

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 22.4 4.93 6.5 2.46 7.39

So, Linder, which is an academically “acceptable” school actually has more kids failing per class than Becker which is “unacceptable”. The law of averages at work. So this means that school districts are rewarded for having over-crowded schools. It explains why suburbs that can’t seem to build enough schools to keep up with demand don’t seem to have the same problems their inner-city counter parts do. And it shows me that realistically most of the schools in Austin are quite good and after meeting some teachers last night, I have to say they’re really dedicated to voluntarily go to meetings until 7pm on a work night. I’m looking forward to sending Stella.

Here’s my spreadsheet if you want to check my work.

A Neighborly Conversation

Politics

Just listened to “A Neighborly Conversation” on KOOP. A discussion between Jeff Jacks and Chris Bradford (Austin Contrarian). Not a lot of new ground. Jeff Jacks does appear to be absolutely against new development in neighborhoods which is interesting. I wouldn’t have thought he’d put it quite that strongly. But he did bring up that we’re not pushing for density in the new development in Austin that’s not in existing neighborhoods. South Park Meadows is suburban sprawl. West Austin is nothing but sprawl. 969 is sprawl. That’s a real failure. While we can’t change what Round Rock, Cedar Park, or Buda are doing, we can change what we’re doing as a city. We really need to view the entire City of Austin as being “downtown”. Because it will be shortly. The fact that all of our new construction within the city limits isn’t at least as dense as Mueller (which isn’t very dense) is a real failing on our part.

What do you think the solution is to getting more people into Austin without sprawl?

The Real Problem with Republicans

Politics

No room for your dumb ass

I was reading the Alcalde this morning. The Alcalde is UTs Alumni magazine. They recently did a profile on the lack of alumni engagement from those alumni who went to UT in the 1980s. Letters came in this month and a lot of people mentioned that the reason they didn’t get involved was that their kids were going to another school thanks to the 10% rule. One letter in particular said he blamed UT’s political correctness more than the legislature for creating the problem. Which is really the problem here.

So Republicans hate the 10% rule? A rule that was enacted because affirmative action was unfair. A law that was needed thanks to a court case pursued to the supreme court by Republicans. A case that was pursued to end political correctness in admissions at UT. A law created in response to that decision by a Republican legislature, signed by a Republican governor. Yeah, you’re right. It’s those politically correct liberals at UT who are keeping your kid from getting in.

We really need a new party so we can have honest discussions between the informed adults left in this country. And we can leave the Republican party to attract all the morons. It really sucks that politics is about winning votes and you have to appeal to these jackenapes.

Now I’ve Got To See It

Ramblings

Just finished this article on Salon about Inglorious Basterds, Quinten Tarrantino’s new movie. It has some really fascinating statements. About this movie:

Pitt and Roth’s characters “behave like butt-ugly sadists,” Wells writes, while the German soldier, despite cursing out his tormentors as “Jew dogs,” behaves like “a man of honor,” accepting a brutal and painful death rather than ratting out his comrades. In Sammel’s brief performance, Wells says, he depicts the German as “a man of intelligence and perception” with “a certain regular-Joe decency,” while Raine and Donowitz come off as unhinged horror-movie villains.

This is fascinating because it seems taboo to say. But yet. There are Jews who behaved horribly. And German’s who behaved decently. And both Jews and Germans who behaved like angels after behaving like monsters. We like to frame the Holocaust in these expressionistic black-and-white terms, but human beings are never black and white.

Hollywood scholar Neal Gabler to ask why Tarantino “conventionalizes Jews, puts them in the same revenge motif as everyone else.” Doesn’t that risk creating audience sympathy for their Nazi victims? (One should of course say “German victims”; it’s intellectually lazy and historically inaccurate to assume that German soldiers are all Nazis, but that level of ambiguity does not register in the Tarantino universe.)

How fascinating that anyone would assume that Jews could somehow avoid conventional revenge narratives. Why? Because there’s a certain threshold where revenge becomes acceptable? A really good read unrelated to the movie. I think it lays bare a lot of attitudes, and explains why for some people the phrase “never again” does not apply to say Rawanda or Srebernica.

Redeveloping the Warehouse District

Updates

Ahh… feels like junior high.

“Downtown Austin” wrote a post about the battle to redevelop the warehouse district.

I think there’s a lot of nostalgia about the area, but what’s left to be nostalgic about? Aside from the gay clubs it’s become increasingly an area with a ton of chain restaurants and bars that are a pain to walk to. Waterloo’s gone. Ginger Man was a chain. It’s going, if not gone. The Spaghetti Warehouse will be fine I’m sure. There will still be a place to take a date with horrible food and piss-poor atmosphere. Never you fear. If this had been proposed in the nineties, I might have complained, but now? I think land owners trying to make money on their underdeveloped properties have already caused a lot of damage to the area.

If I’m going to dress up and go out drinking I’m going to West 6th or Second Street now. Thanks in large part to the fact that I don’t have to worry about getting hit by a car, or Julie wearing heels and falling down a flight of stairs with no handrail.

I think that you could probably come up with a design for that neighborhood that would be more “warehousey”, but that had actual walkable sidewalks. I’m interested though, is there anything anyone thinks is left in the warehouse district that they’d be sad to see go?

Prolicide

Scripts

I submited this to for the Muses project. I just got the final list of playwrights, so I guess it was rejected. In any case, I really liked it. It comes out of all the horrible worries I have to push out of my mind every night as I try to go to sleep. Being a parent definitely introduces a new level of worry into your life (or a level of worry at all in my case). Dramatic liberties have been taken. This is not autobiographical.

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Prolocide

(FATHER is washing his hands in the sink. He uses a nail brush. Meticulous. He finishes, and dries his hands)

FATHER

When I was in college, I was a professional house sitter. I loved it. I loved the first time you opened up a house. There were signs of the past everywhere. Generally they were clean. Immaculate. Awaiting their owner’s return. Perhaps a cereal bowl in the bottom of the sink. A wet towel on the bathroom floor, but otherwise clean.

I loved looking at the past. The furniture. The books. The photos. I loved imagining the future. Would they ever be able to make it through that case of fiber supplements? Would they finish the 7 pound book, marked 135 pages in, currently languishing on their bedside table? And what of the large pile of bricks just outside their French doors?

(FATHER contemplates a box of macaroni and cheese)

But when I was house sitting, it was as though time had stopped. There were the mementos of the past. And there was the potential for the future. But the house had been stopped in time. And I had walked out of time and into this twilight.

(he gets out the pot, and fills it with water, he puts it on the stove and turns on the burner, then considers the box once more)

I guess I must have thought about the future too much when I was young. That’s the reason I should never have kids. I can’t handle the suspense. You know the statistics. You know all the statistics. You know that the world has never been safer. That there is very little to fear. But too much of my youth was spend idling about in the future.

I am- was- married.

(he gets out a calculator and pen and paper from a kitchen drawer. He reads the box and reduces the amounts down to one person)

I got married. I was in love. I am in love. I don’t know how it’s possible to get out of that once you’re truly in it. Once you have love, you have all this past that will forever contain the person you love. Your history will always contain them, and that love. I could maybe love another woman. Maybe. But I don’t think that could ever change the past. But sometimes even if we love someone we do things that make them not love us back. Things that we think they won’t ever understand. And they won’t understand. One of the reasons I should never have kids. How could you ever see them fall in love, and know the risk they’re taking. Think of their hearts. Know the highs, but also know the lows. Know the days and months of anxiety. The constant fear that it’s all slowly unraveling, and the feeling of having your stomach in your throat for months as the drama unfolds. And the legal events unfold. And the couch unfolds.

(he fills a cup with

Vegetarianism not good reaction to McDonalds

Recipes

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been encountering a lot more vegetarians lately. It’s probably not so much that I’m encountering more, as I’m not driving them off as quickly. In the past I was an asshole if you were a vegetarian. Something along the lines of, “But we are omnivores, you’re just depriving your body.” Also, “Plants have feelings too.”

But as part of my laziness new cooking regiment, I’ve been using epicurious.com’s weekly meal planners to plan my meals for the week. They pretty much always do a vegetarian meal or two. Something that at first I just left out. Or filled in with something meatier. Like hanger steaks and fries.

But recently I’ve started cooking them. And Julie and Stella have been enjoying them. Mostly. The meals are hit and miss. Often the things that sound horrible are quite good, and the things that sound good are completely horribly foul. We had a side dish composed almost entirely of zucchini and I liked it. I didn’t like it for zucchini. I really liked it.

I even cooked tofu last week. And last night. Which still gives me a bit of a weird feeling. Because I’d rather cook an animal, than an animal substitute. I actually like tofu. But I’d prefer to cook it as tofu. This really cool vegetable product. Rather than tofu, “I can’t believe it’s not chicken”!

I’ve noticed a trend. There are a lot of vegetarians I’ve encountered who don’t really eat vegetables. This is supposed to be a diet about health. Or politics. Or both. But I’m seeing a lot of people who just eat McDonalds fries. And Annie’s Mac and Cheese. And Mission cheese burritos. Which seems like it’s defeating the point. Vegetarianism has become big business. The business being providing calories without requiring the actual consumption of vegetables.

It’s the same bad diet that is making most of America obese, but without the benefit of getting second-hand vitamins and minerals from animals that have already predigested those noxious vegetables for us.

I’m still learning to love vegetables. But we’re working through this together.  Stella’s my mascot. She’ll eat pretty much anything raw, but once I cook it she becomes uninterested. Potatoes. Zucchini. Red peppers. Garlic. Ginger.

Julie would prefer that I not give her raw garlic.

Maybe I should join the raw foods movement.

Joking.

Sunstroke 5k #12

Running

28:03, 9:03/mi. I really pushed myself. I’m hoping it was the heat, because that’s just a middle of the road score for me.

Well, I’m back to running every day, so there’s always next year. I’ll chalk up this year’s poor performance to having a newborn.