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Austin city officials stripped key affordable-housing protections from its Density Bonus 90 (DB90) ordinance in 2024 just as top industry lobbyists complained to city officials that those “replacement requirements” were too costly, according to documents recently obtained by the Austin Free Press.
The documents are part of an ongoing Austin Free Press investigation into the city’s controversial DB90 ordinance, which grants developers entitlements to build taller apartment buildings than zoning rules otherwise allow — up to 90 feet — in exchange for community benefits, such as affordable housing.
As initially drafted, the ordinance aimed to protect affordable housing by requiring developers to offer a one-to-one replacement of any affordable units that they demolished to redevelop a site. As that draft ordinance moved to city council, however, the one-to-one replacement directive was removed.
Image credit: Acacia Cliffs Apartments.
City council members have acknowledged that, as a result, DB90 has been used for redevelopments that offer fewer affordable units than previously existed on those sites. In June, for example, the council approved such a demolition over the objections of numerous residents of Northwest Austin’s deeply affordable Acacia Cliffs apartments.
Newly released documents shed more light on the events leading up to the revised DB90 ordinance passed by the city council last year, including emails that developer lobbyists sent to the offices of Mayor Kirk Watson and District 4 Council Member José “Chito” Vela.
Two Drenner Group real estate lobbyists wrote Watson and Vela aides on Feb. 27, 2024, saying that the proposed DB90 ordinance, as then written, was prohibitively expensive for developers. Specifically, they complained about the rules that would have required developers to replace any affordable housing units that they destroyed with an equal number of affordable units.
“DB-90 with replacement requirement…does not pencil without (a) subsidy,” Drenner Group Director of Entitlement and Policy Amanda Swor wrote the council aides on behalf of one of her unnamed clients. The email from her colleague, Drenner Director of Land Use and Entitlements Leah Bojo, used similar words about another client project.
Two days later, on Feb. 29, the Austin City Council — with one dissent and one abstention — approved the DB90 ordinance without any one-to-one affordable-housing replacement requirements.
“Does not pencil”
On Feb. 27, 2024 Swor wrote Watson and Vela aides Alexis Garcia and Timothy Bray, respectively, about an unnamed Drenner client who sought to demolish 74 existing affordable apartments to build a larger apartment building. Under “DB-90 with (the) replacement requirement,” Swor wrote, her client could build 320 new units and would have to replace the 74 demolished units with 74 new affordable ones.
Arguing that it was too expensive to provide so many affordable apartments, Swor wrote that her “client could not develop under DB90.” Instead, the client would abandon DB90 to build a 60-feet-tall building with 200 units – just 20 of which would be affordable. This would result in a loss of 66 market-priced units and 54 affordable ones.
In a separate email to the same Watson and Vela aides that morning, Drenner’s Bojo described another unnamed client seeking to redevelop 27 affordable apartments. Citing the one-to-one replacement requirement, Bojo wrote that her client also would opt out of DB90, again resulting in fewer market-rate and affordable apartments getting built.
“Appearance of impropriety”
In late 2024, the city’s then-staff liaison to the Austin Planning Commission, Andrew Rivera, filed a city complaint with the city alleging that city Zoning Officer Joi Harden had improperly cozy relationships with several city lobbyists, including Bojo. Rivera’s complaint said that he texted Harden about her whereabouts after she left a 2020 Planning Commission early. Rivera said that Harden texted back that she was at the nearby Taverna restaurant and bar with Bojo, whose firm had business before the commission that day.
Harden told the outside attorneys hired by the city to investigate the allegations that she got to know Bojo when they both worked for city council members (Harden worked for former Council Member Kathie Tovo and Bojo for the late Council Member Chris Riley), according to a May 2025 report that the Lloyd Gosselink law firm wrote about the allegations.
The report said, “Harden did not remember telling anyone she was at (the) Taverna with Bojo.” It did, however, verify portions of Rivera’s account and pointed out that while not illegal, Harden’s conduct does present a perception of a conflict on interest.
“The evidence supports that Harden has interacted with individuals with active zoning applications outside of work hours and outside ongoing Planning Commission meetings,” the Lloyd Gosselink report concluded. “While this could give an appearance of impropriety, it is not substantiated as a violation of City policy.”
City responses
Responding to Austin Free Press questions this month, the city issued a written statement that said the council adopted DB90 after a local court struck down a predecessor policy called Vertical Mixed Use 2” (VMU2). That statement said the city removed DB90 tenant protections “to ensure full consistency with the approach taken under VMU2.”
The city’s written response also said the city must balance tenant protections against market realities. Affordable-housing protections in DB90 “could lead to development of a new project that replaces the affordable units, could prevent redevelopment by making a project unfeasible, or could incentivize a property owner to pursue a redevelopment pathway that does not provide any required affordability, such as redeveloping under the entitlements of their base zoning,” the statement said.
In their Feb. 27 email to the council aides, the Drenner lobbyists said that their clients would choose that last scenario. As they sent those emails, city planner Andrea Bates simultaneously was briefing a city council work session on the city’s sudden decision to abandon DB90’s affordable-housing protections, according to time stamps on their emails and on a video of the council work session. In her presentation, Bates cited the VMU2-consistency argument and added that “many stakeholders were surprised by the inclusion of the replacements.”
Community activists say that the DB90 protections were taken out to save developers money.
“Real estate interests have the biggest voice” at City Hall, said Halima Foster, an activist with Community Powered ATX. “What concerns me is the special interests having so much input because they are the main campaign contributors.”
A statement that the group released to Austin Free Press last month asserted that DB90 does more harm than good. “The affordability levels of the existing units are typically lower than the affordability levels of newly developed units,” it said.
A local developer who asked not to be named assessed the Drenner memos in an email to Austin Free Press.
“I think Drenner was correct,” he wrote. He added that the city’s “pursuit of density in the name of affordability” is based on a “fallacy.” City officials, he said, fail to understand how costs rise as a building’s height increases. In part this reflects the need to dedicate more space to stairs, elevators, and parking as heights escalate.
“There may be other reasons for density, but the taller the building the more it cost to build, meaning higher rents,” he wrote. “And more density makes demolition of older, lower-rent projects more feasible. It’s not an answer for affordability.”
“When politicians talk about ‘affordability’ they really mean keeping market-rate rents in check,” he added. “They don’t mean rents for low-income households.”
Adam Haynes, who worked on DB90 when he was a member of the Austin Planning Commission in 2024, told Austin Free Press that developers constantly cried wolf to the city, saying their projects “wouldn’t pencil out,” even though they often built the projects anyway. He joked that to keep them honest all developers should be required “to use the same brand of pencil” when penciling out projects.
Haynes said the DB90 protections got stripped because “the developers didn’t want it, just pure, simple, period, full stop.” Asked if developers had the clout to kill DB90’s replacement requirements, Haynes said, “Absolutely.”
Andrew Wheat is the managing editor of the Austin Free Press.
