Candidate for Austin City Council Place 7, Morgan Witt, quoted in the Austin Monitor
The reality is that when we talk about preserving neighborhoods as they exist right now, that means we’re excluding people from those neighborhoods, If we don’t develop in these neighborhoods, people build outward. That means the people most vulnerable to being displaced because of lack of affordability, they have to move further out of the city; they have less access to resources, they have more transportation costs to get to work, but also we as a city have to spend more money in infrastructure to build out so that people can access the city.
While we think that not developing in these neighborhoods is protecting the environment, the reality is sprawl is a huge environmental issue. We really need to think about how can we be more inclusive as a city and allow more people and more diverse people to live in the neighborhoods that exist so that everybody gets the opportunity to live that Austin experience and share in that neighborhood character.
I wish her luck in her campaign.