Why Austin is unaffordable: major obstacles to building    Headline stories and political polls all validate the obvious — Austin is expensive. Much of the affordability problem is associated with housing. After all, housing costs are the largest single budget item for all but the most elite.   
Not that long ago, Austin was one of the most affordable communities in the country. Today, it is the most expensive major city in Texas.   
“Why?”   Our answer: “The City of Austin’s hostile attitudes toward building or remodeling homes and apartments. It is hard to build single-family homes. It is unimaginably difficult to build an apartment project.”   
Consider the process to build a home. Start with an empty plot of land. In most Texas cities it would take six months to convert that small tract to 100 lots. In Austin, this is a two-year, very expensive process.   
In most communities, rules are straight-forward. Austin has voluminous ordinances and supplemental rules contained in eight, very large books of legalese that change every three months. As one example of the complexity, Austin currently has over 400 zoning permutations.    Virtually all south central Texas cities have online plan submittals. Reviewers can forward plans, make notes, receive updates and collect payment electronically. Austin? Sorry.   
Anyone who deals with the city of Austin has experienced the culture of “no.” If you are a homeowner wanting to make an addition or renovate, be ready to discover that any past work may be deemed incomplete, that you may need new public safety inspection, that your plans may “penetrate a vertical easement” or you busted “impervious cover” limits. The wait for plan approval is more than a month for a remodel or custom home. That is down from a three-month wait more than a year ago. Austin policymakers seemingly enact whatever restrictions come along without regard to the impacts on average citizens or the difficulties in administering them.    Last year alone, the city added more than $10,000 to the cost of building a home in East Austin. An added $650 plan review fee, exceeding what most cities charge to both review and inspect; $5,600 in new water and wastewater connection fees; $2,000 in electrician work practices (prohibited journeymen subcontractors); and $2,000 mandating that all new homes provide handicap ramps and a no step entry. Soon, the electric utility will enact a new line extension fee, adding another $2,000 per home.   
Few people realize how many layers of fees are involved in building and remodeling: subdivision fees, plat fiscal guarantees, subdivision construction plan, inspection fees, connection fees, sidewalk fees and tree fees. One recent townhouse project with only trash trees had $200,000 in tree mitigation. Did we mention mandatory sidewalks to nowhere? Few people realize is those costs come back in the form of higher rents or mortgages.   
In the end, renters and owners alike pay escalating property taxes. Less recognized are utility bills that raise rates for conserving and subsidize taxes — a hidden tax in their own right. Also on the utility bill are storm water fees, litter fees and transportation fees — all costs levied in the most regressive manner possible without regard to ability to pay. Little wonder that the total cost of housing is increasing so rapidly.   
The city has limited the supply of housing, thereby increasing your costs to purchase your home. Then overt costs in high taxes and utility fees “pile on.” Policy makers have shown little regard for the impact on tenants or owners — be it a single-family home with a yard or a multifamily, high-density unit.   
No wonder we are the most expensive city in Texas.   
HARRY SAVIO IS VICE PRESIDENT OF PUBLIC POLICY FOR THE HOME BUILDERS ASSOCIATION OF GREATERAUSTIN.

Austin Energy criticizes renewable goals’ costs Utility warns of impact on users while council awaits task force plan.
By Lilly Rockwell LROCKWELL@STATESMAN.COM     
Austin Energy is fearful of one thing: becoming the next Germany.  
The European country set an ambitious goal in 2010 of producing 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, by 2050. German rooftops were blanketed with solar panels. Germany built solar and wind farms. And it decided to shut down its nuclear plants by 2025, motivated in part by concerns about nuclear safety.   
But Germany’s quick embrace of renewable energy has been disastrous for the country, causing utility rates to skyrocket and still leaving a reliance on carbon-producing gas and coal plants during high-demand times. The Daily Telegraph reported that Germany released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2012 than in 2011.   
“They have a new term — energy poverty,” said Khalil Shalabi, the vice president of energy market operations and resource planning for Austin Energy. “Forget rent. They can’t pay their electric bill.”   
Austin Energy officials worry about becoming the next cautionary tale of energy policy as the Austin City Council is poised to consider a new plan for ramping up how much of the utility’s power generation comes from green energy. A report by a city-appointed task force issued this week called for a Germany-style goal of going carbon-free by 2030.   
The report by the Generation Resource Planning task force also calls for a heavier reliance on solar energy, to shut down the natural gas-powered Decker Power Plant by 2016, and to change the ownership of the city’s share in the Fayette coal-fired power plant to make it easier to sell or shut down.   
Though the recommendations haven’t been formally presented to the council yet, Austin Energy has already begun a campaign against the report. The utility pushed back against many of its conclusions, saying too much renewable energy too quickly can be prohibitively costly for ratepayers.   
The City Council had previously set a goal of generating 35 percent of the utility’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. But Austin Energy is on track to reach that goal early in 2016. So the City Council set a new goal of becoming carbon-free by 2050, and it created a task force to study what the utility’s renewable goals should be.   
But the utility hopes to persuade the council to back off the hard deadlines, and it is presenting its own plan in September for future power generation.   
“It’s important what Austin Energy thinks,” said Michael Osborne, the chair of the Generation Resource Planning Task Force and a former Austin Energy executive. “But it’s the City Council that sets the policy.”   
And the City Council is facing pressure from renewable energy advocates and environmentalists to reduce the utility’s dependence on its coal, gas and even nuclear-powered plants, which make up 79 percent of the utility’s power generation.   
“When we have acted in the past as first-movers, with the biomass plant and Webberville solar plant, we are locked into long-term contracts at above-market cost, and it’s not entirely clear what the value of those investments was,” said Mark Dreyfus, the director of regulatory and government affairs at Austin Energy.   
The Webberville solar farm, just east of Austin, was approved in 2009, and it costs the utility 16.5 cents-per-kilowatt-hour, vs. a new solar energy contract the utility just inked for around 5 cents-per-kilowatt hour.   
Proponents of renewable energy, however, are deeply skeptical of Austin Energy’s conclusions.   
Task force members interviewed by the Statesman said they don’t buy Austin Energy’s argument that investing heavily in renewable energy would be more expensive than so-called “brown” energy sources like coal or natural gas.   
Osborne said information provided by Austin Energy about the cost of its gas generation shows it is nearly twice as much per megawatt-hour as solar energy.   
“Any fool can see looking at these numbers provided by Austin Energy that (renewable) is cheaper than gas or coal for energy in the future,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, the state director of watchdog group Public Citizen.   
Smith said the utility isn’t making price comparisons based on the future cost of renewables and brown power.   
“The thing that Austin Energy is ignoring, and that City Council has directed them to do, is to take every step they can to reduce their carbon emissions because of the greater risk to our community of global warming,” Smith said. “It’s time for Austin Energy to grow up and act responsible for their emissions.”