In a reflection of the rapidly worsening national affordable housing crisis, city councils across America are scrambling to put together strategic plans for coping.
What follows is an article highlighting a number of strategies that Austin, Texas is preparing to implement. Some of this bullet-point list of ideas expresses methods that have been implemented in other communities to help alleviate the problem of unaffordable housing. Others cover optimistic untried experiments.
One of the most heartening features on Austin’s agenda is the appearance of the once little-known method of semi-permanently or permanently removing land from the free market: land trusts. In the space of the two years, our survey of press stories has grown from a single historic reference to land trusts in a story about Bernie Sanders1 to regular mention. Land trusts can ensure that affordable housing does not evaporate after a few years as they do when public/private partnership agreements expire and the affordable units can return to the free market.
For more understanding on the nature of Land Trusts, try: How To Stop The Insane Upward Spiral Of Land Value? Affordable Housing Turns To Land Trusts
And for Austin’s hopeful laundry list for tackling an housing crisis, read more in: KERA NEWS: Four Big Plans Hope To Make Austin More Affordable. Here’s What They Would Do.
