It’s finally here. After years of research, reports, and work the first draft of CodeNEXT has been released and was officially be revealed to the public on Wednesday. Since the draft itself is hundreds of pages long, there hasn’t been much of a response from the public yet, as many people are still taking the time to look it over.

However, in his State of the City Address, Mayor Steve Adler called on the public to embrace a compromise (which he has dubbed the Austin Bargain) when considering CodeNEXT.

The bargain essentially asks all Austinites to agree to two things:

• Not to force density in the middle of neighborhoods…
• …And in exchange, adopt a code rewrite that will give us the housing supply we need by focusing along our major corridors like Lamar, Burnet, and Airport Boulevard and our major activity centers like the area around the Domain, Mueller, and downtown.

Of course, Adler said this still means that we’ll have to make hard decisions about the transition areas between neighborhoods and activity centers… “but an Austin Bargain would mean that we would begin the code revision process with agreement on as many as 95 percent of all properties in the city.” This, he said, would be a very good starting place.

If you’d like to join in on the conversation, you can look through the new draft land development code and begin to make comments online. The city will also be hosting many community events over the coming months that will allow you to actually dive into particular aspects of the code and interact with some of the code experts. We’ll keep you posted as those opportunities arise.