Austin, Texas
With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund, a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing, was born. Now known as the Texas Housing Conservancy, the fund became the nation’s first to combine a nonprofit investment manager, Affordable Central Texas, with an open-end private equity fund.
At the 2024 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference, panelists discussed the topic of “Innovative Partnerships to Leverage Land for More Housing,” including strategies to add to local housing supplies by leveraging underutilized land owned by houses of worship and school districts.
Land use is local, and so are many housing policy opportunities. In the 2024 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference session, “A Look Back on the Latest State and Local Housing Policy Innovations,” moderator Michael Wilt, senior manager of external relations for the Texas State Affordable Housing Corporation, asked the panelists: “The dynamics and conversations around housing are changing a lot. What is going to net the greatest benefits?”
This was the resounding conclusion from two Homeless to Housed (H2H)-hosted programs during Urban Land Institute (ULI) springtime meetings. Furthermore, former Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton echoed this call to action in her ULI Spring Meeting plenary presentation during which she advocated for New York City to create more affordable housing immediately to sustain its vitality as a world-class city for all people.
AUSTIN—Despite rumblings to the contrary, the American dream of homeownership is not a fading relic from the nation’s Post World War II era. In fact, homeownership remains a key lever to elevate families from generational poverty to the middle class, according to two of the nation’s top leaders in the housing industry.
AUSTIN—Austin, a tech hub that has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, has grown wider, longer, taller, and denser. And there’s hope that it may become more closely knitted together via an upcoming massive transportation project that could bring more cohesion between affluent areas and traditionally underserved neighborhoods.
At a ULI Austin event, speakers said that government, nonprofit, and business initiatives are tackling Austin’s homelessness predicament by, among other things, proposing temporary structures known as Sprung shelters and seeking to convert motels into longer-term housing.
Austin, Texas, sits at the pinnacle of the U.S. commercial real estate sector right now, according to Emerging Trends in Real Estate® 2020. But recent economic wins like the planned $1 billion campus for Apple and the new headquarters of the U.S. Army’s modernization initiative should keep the city standing tall for years to come, said panelists speaking at a ULI Austin event in October.
Amid rising venue rents, housing affordability woes, and ever-present construction cranes in Austin, local music venues—and, therefore, local musicians—fear extinction.
