On a brisk Saturday morning in November, a group of two dozen cyclists pauses in front of a four-story apartment complex in East Austin. The Terrace at Oak Springs, run by the nonprofit Integral Care, opened in September to provide housing for the formerly chronically homeless. But when the 50-unit facility was planned, “they had to create parking for each and every one of those units, despite the fact that only 10 percent of their clients have cars,” Greg Anderson, the cyclists’ group leader, explains to the others, who peer inside—most of the ground floor is parking. Devoting so much room to cars, he says, means less space and more money spent to house people.
“Our land development code cares deeply about automobile storage,” Anderson says. “You will never go homeless in the city of Austin—if you’re a car.”
Although this bike tour is intended to spotlight innovative affordable housing projects, traversing East Austin offers a study in unaffordability. Cyclers pass Fourth&, a three-story complex where a two-bedroom, 1,071-square-foot condo is selling for $485,000. Around the corner, a single-story home is advertised as a tear-down for $700,000—the dirt underneath the house worth more than the average Austinite will earn in a decade.
