Old apartments and new plans: reconciling planning and housing goals in two Texas cities

Increasingly, cities in rapidly growing regions are promoting redevelopment to achieve denser, mixed use patterns thought crucial to environmental sustainability. Redevelopment often threatens older apartments, built in the 1970s and early 1980s during a building boom fostered by federal tax incentives. While often these aging apartments are a poor fit for the family households who inhabit them, they have become the largest stock of rental housing affordable to very low income residents. Replacing this stock of centrally located, transit accessible affordable housing would be extraordinarily expensive. City planners view these complexes as the opposite of the mixed use, pedestrian-friendly development needed in cities. Affordable housing agencies are concerned with preserving existing subsidized housing. Yet arguably, both planners and housers should be concerned about the loss of these aging apartments. Displacement of large numbers of low-income transit dependent residents from the central core of cities works against planners' environmental goals and adds to the number of households in need of subsidized housing. It also undermines existing low-income communities. This paper examines the prospects for preservation of older, affordable apartments in Dallas and Austin, chosen to contrast the role that comprehensive planning might play in bridging housing and planning goals.