Complete Communities Initiative
The first goal is to develop tools that will help Austin residents better understand and address local housing challenges
It has been a busy year for the Austin Justice Coalition. Beyond our efforts to implement criminal justice reforms on state and local levels, our policy team has continued to broaden its scope and consider the myriad structures that impact the lives of people of color in Austin. Policing and criminal justice, voting rights and representation, access to mental health, housing, and economic opportunities — all combine to apportion vastly disparate life chances to members of different racial groups. Our hope is that upcoming efforts can engage more effectively at the intersections of these systems.
Inspired by Houston’s initiative, and by the urgency of the local housing and affordability crisis, the Austin Justice Coalition decided to develop its own “Complete Communities Initiative,” tailored to the needs of our city.
The first goal is to create tools that will help Austin residents better understand local housing challenges and current land development code, along with the proposed changes or amendments to the code. We hope, by providing access to this information in a clear format, people will be able to make better-informed long-term choices, with increased awareness of the potential impacts that housing and zoning policies will have on their lives.
To this end, we applied to join the Impact Accelerator program hosted by Impact Hub Austin, a space we believe will provide us with crucial support, resources, and connections in this process. We are happy to announce that we have been chosen to participate, and proud to join a cohort committed to racial equity and structural change.
We believe that through coordinated community action around tangible, pragmatic goals we can build the kind of collective power needed for racial equity in Austin. It’s going to take work — the kind that is sometimes frustrating and rarely produces glamorous outcomes. Nonetheless, we choose to stay engaged and to embrace this process responsibly; we commit to coalition building and to listening to our local partners and allies.
Throughout this process, we will always place racial equity, inclusion, and justice at the center of our analysis and approach. We appreciate the importance of efforts informed by local history and value the legacies of struggle we have inherited; we value the wisdom of our elders. We want to collaborate and build power with people of color in Austin, for people of color in Austin. And, consequently, for Austin as a whole. In order to achieve this, our efforts cannot simply preserve the status quo. The status quo in Austin will continue to automatically displace people of color. We need to be proactive and creative on many overlapping fronts.
Ultimately, we believe it is Austin’s loss when people of color are forced to abandon the city.
- Complete communities value all of their members.
- Complete communities do not displace people in the interest of profit margins.
- Complete communities do not endorse policies that lead to generations of economic segregation.
- Complete communities allow people the freedom to choose where to live, but do not free them from responsibilities to their neighbors or to the communities they have moved into: a complete community values its legacies.
What does a complete community look like? (Think about it). It will be our task to dream this community together. And together, it will be our responsibility to build.
