Colleagues,
I want to flag a concern over Item 86 where we’ve learned that AFD has serious concerns, where potential changes to fire suppression code standards will mean fires have a much greater chance of spreading to adjacent structures and neighborhoods. Our Chief Building Official believes the same goal the IFC is trying to work towards could instead be reached through a more typical administrative change and the IFC will significantly increase risk of widespread property damage. The Building and Fire Commission members actually broke quorum today to end their meeting prematurely rather than take up this issue, believing that the item was being advanced without adequate deliberation. I also understand City legal plans to send an email speaking to a postponement, and at the request of AFD and ADS, that they indicate the Fire Marshall’s office agrees.
I’m reluctant to pull the item tomorrow for discussion since we have an extremely long day with an even longer list of speakers signed up. I’m hoping we can take sworn and civilian staff’s suggestion and agree to postpone to sometime in August - and I suspect there may be a solution that could be developed in a couple of weeks to address the majority of concerns. But if we can’t, I plan to pull the item because we’re dealing with life safety issues and we’ll have to have this discussion with staff on a very full day.
-Marc
Item 86 Concern - Postpone or Pull
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Marc Duchen
- Posts: 33
- Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2025 5:40 pm
Item 86 Concern - Postpone or Pull
Council Member, District 10
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Krista Laine
- Posts: 27
- Joined: Wed Jan 08, 2025 2:39 pm
Re: Item 86 Concern
Council Member Duchen, I appreciate your raising this, and in the interests of time during an exceptionally full meeting, I will share additional information related to each of your concerns via Message Board.
Item 86 is a resolution directing the City Manager to begin the process of expanding the scope of the International Residential Code (IRC) to cover small buildings of two to four units. The goal is simple: the housing types, which Missing Middle zoning and other Council-approved policies already intend to allow, should be able to get built at a residential cost and scale, rather than being treated as commercial construction. Case studies from other cities put the added cost of IBC treatment at 8-10% of total construction cost for buildings in this size range. In at least one documented case, it nearly doubled a project's cost relative to its original estimate.
This change supports our builders. Local small practitioners are not licensed to build IBC, so requiring commercial-scale engineering and permitting for a four-unit building effectively locks them out of this market entirely, handing it instead to a narrower pool of commercial developers equipped for that process. This resolution keeps that work in the hands of the local residential builders, rather than restricting Missing Middle housing production to the large, national firms that can absorb the added engineering and licensing burden.
I have seen this firsthand in my own district. The Peace Family Housing Project (four units for families experiencing homelessness) was comparable in scale and scope to a single-family IRC house of the same size. A residential builder originally quoted it under $1 million. Because IBC applied, the project absorbed higher-cost subcontractors, additional engineering and design work, extra site work, a required Council vote, and price escalation over a multi-year permitting and review timeline. The cost nearly doubled - costing dollars that would otherwise have gone to housing families and children living in Austin without shelter.
I disagree with the characterization that this resolution creates materially greater risk. This resolution establishes a life-safety floor that includes sprinklers. We are talking about sprinklered, hardened buildings, at least as safe as the unsprinklered single-family homes we permit every day at far larger square footage. The resolution says so directly, directing staff to:
"Identify any aspects of three- to four-unit Houseplexes that pose a greater risk profile than un-sprinklered single-family and two-family dwellings of equivalent size with respect to building resilience and life safety, and establish reasonable criteria to address those aspects."
The precedent here is extensive, and Austin's approach is more conservative than the practices of most peer cities. North Carolina enacted House Bill 488 in August 2023, raising the statewide IRC threshold to four units. Memphis moved earlier still, adopting reforms in 2021 that allow up to six units under the IRC as part of a broader package of missing-middle, non-zoning changes, developed through close collaboration between the city's planning department and local builders and informed by national research on fire protection. In Texas, Dallas approved an IRC-based framework permitting buildings of up to eight units. Austin would be entering well-mapped territory, more cautiously than most.
On the suggestion that the same goal could be reached through a more typical administrative change: I have had those conversations with Fire and have found that an administrative workaround does not resolve the underlying differences in how the two codes handle design, licensing, and classification, and it does not provide the consistency that projects planned a year out require. The practice that has worked across the country is the IRC path.
I'll also note that AFD, Development Services, and the Law Department have already engaged with our office as we drafted this item, and they will continue to be active partners in the development of recommendations that will later come to Council. This item simply initiates and formalizes inter-departmental work by city staff, at the direction of our City Manager. In speaking with Law again this morning; their only concern was timing, not the substance of the item. With regards to the commission, my understanding is that the item had been placed on the agenda for discussion but before the discussion could begin, quorum was lost after three members left the meeting, and the discussion was therefore unable to proceed.
Finally, this is an initiating resolution, not an ordinance. Working through these concerns is what the review process is for, and we welcome the opportunity for Fire to bring data on fire safety risk into these conversations.
Krista
Item 86 is a resolution directing the City Manager to begin the process of expanding the scope of the International Residential Code (IRC) to cover small buildings of two to four units. The goal is simple: the housing types, which Missing Middle zoning and other Council-approved policies already intend to allow, should be able to get built at a residential cost and scale, rather than being treated as commercial construction. Case studies from other cities put the added cost of IBC treatment at 8-10% of total construction cost for buildings in this size range. In at least one documented case, it nearly doubled a project's cost relative to its original estimate.
This change supports our builders. Local small practitioners are not licensed to build IBC, so requiring commercial-scale engineering and permitting for a four-unit building effectively locks them out of this market entirely, handing it instead to a narrower pool of commercial developers equipped for that process. This resolution keeps that work in the hands of the local residential builders, rather than restricting Missing Middle housing production to the large, national firms that can absorb the added engineering and licensing burden.
I have seen this firsthand in my own district. The Peace Family Housing Project (four units for families experiencing homelessness) was comparable in scale and scope to a single-family IRC house of the same size. A residential builder originally quoted it under $1 million. Because IBC applied, the project absorbed higher-cost subcontractors, additional engineering and design work, extra site work, a required Council vote, and price escalation over a multi-year permitting and review timeline. The cost nearly doubled - costing dollars that would otherwise have gone to housing families and children living in Austin without shelter.
I disagree with the characterization that this resolution creates materially greater risk. This resolution establishes a life-safety floor that includes sprinklers. We are talking about sprinklered, hardened buildings, at least as safe as the unsprinklered single-family homes we permit every day at far larger square footage. The resolution says so directly, directing staff to:
"Identify any aspects of three- to four-unit Houseplexes that pose a greater risk profile than un-sprinklered single-family and two-family dwellings of equivalent size with respect to building resilience and life safety, and establish reasonable criteria to address those aspects."
The precedent here is extensive, and Austin's approach is more conservative than the practices of most peer cities. North Carolina enacted House Bill 488 in August 2023, raising the statewide IRC threshold to four units. Memphis moved earlier still, adopting reforms in 2021 that allow up to six units under the IRC as part of a broader package of missing-middle, non-zoning changes, developed through close collaboration between the city's planning department and local builders and informed by national research on fire protection. In Texas, Dallas approved an IRC-based framework permitting buildings of up to eight units. Austin would be entering well-mapped territory, more cautiously than most.
On the suggestion that the same goal could be reached through a more typical administrative change: I have had those conversations with Fire and have found that an administrative workaround does not resolve the underlying differences in how the two codes handle design, licensing, and classification, and it does not provide the consistency that projects planned a year out require. The practice that has worked across the country is the IRC path.
I'll also note that AFD, Development Services, and the Law Department have already engaged with our office as we drafted this item, and they will continue to be active partners in the development of recommendations that will later come to Council. This item simply initiates and formalizes inter-departmental work by city staff, at the direction of our City Manager. In speaking with Law again this morning; their only concern was timing, not the substance of the item. With regards to the commission, my understanding is that the item had been placed on the agenda for discussion but before the discussion could begin, quorum was lost after three members left the meeting, and the discussion was therefore unable to proceed.
Finally, this is an initiating resolution, not an ordinance. Working through these concerns is what the review process is for, and we welcome the opportunity for Fire to bring data on fire safety risk into these conversations.
Krista
Krista Laine
Council Member, District 6
Council Member, District 6