How Austin’s Mayoral Race Is Shaping Up So Far

Austin’s announced and/or presumed mayoral candidates: (l-r) Kathie Tovo, Kirk Watson, and Carmen Llanes Pulido (photos courtesy of the candidates’ campaigns)

The Nov. 5 election has two more candidates for Austin voters to consider: Kathie Tovo and Carmen Llanes Pulido, both of whom have announced their intent to run for mayor.

The candidates will serve as an interesting contrast to the incumbent, Mayor Kirk Watson, who will run but is unlikely to officially launch his campaign for another month. Both are women, Llanes Pulido younger and a woman of color – a demographic that tends to perform well with Austin’s progressive electorate.

Between the two challengers, Tovo will be the more familiar name to voters, having concluded a 12-year run as a City Council member in 2023. First elected in 2011, Tovo served on the last at-large Council before winning a second election in 2014 as the first representative of Council District 9. As a CM, she was skeptical of market-based solutions to the city’s housing challenges that would loosen zoning restrictions throughout the city to allow for more rapid and widespread housing development. Her preferred approach was slower and more deliberate: require private developers to subsidize rent or sale prices in residential developments in exchange for increased entitlements, work on neighborhood plans, and utilize publicly owned land for affordable housing as much as possible.

Throughout her decade-plus on the dais, Tovo became a master at pursuing these strategies. She sought to wring as much income-restricted housing as she could from every major rezoning case or large-scale development deal that came before Council; she pushed the use of density bonus programs which can achieve the same goal of offering more entitlement for affordable housing; and she tried to push the city toward adopting small area plans over comprehensive zoning reform – that is, a more measured approach to changing land-use rules in smaller portions of the city at one time rather than changing the rules for every part of the city all at once.

But it appears that the political winds around Tovo’s approach to housing have shifted. The Home Options for Middle-Income Empowerment (HOME) initiative adopted by Council late last year is decidedly market-based, but Tovo still thinks it would be a mistake to go too far in that direction as city leaders continue to search for solutions to the housing affordability problem.

“It seems pretty clear that the market does not produce affordable housing,” Tovo told the Chronicle. “We have a need for affordable housing. ... When we have an opportunity to build in requirements for affordable housing, we have to do that.” Especially on publicly owned land, which she feels represents the greatest opportunity for the city to produce affordable housing (the city’s handling of the sale of a tract of land in Southeast Austin to Oracle was one of the reasons she made up her mind to enter the mayor’s race). She also wants to pursue the same kind of ideas she advocated for as a CM: small area planning, housing density along transportation corridors, and anti-displacement measures.

There won’t be much daylight between Tovo and Llanes Pulido on most issues. On housing – likely to remain one of the more salient issues in the 2024 campaign as the city continues to confront housing affordability challenges – the two candidates share values and policy preferences. Llanes Pulido, who is best known among politically engaged Austinites for her advocacy on land use issues, was appointed to the Planning Commission by Tovo in 2019.

Llanes Pulido would push for the same kind of policy solutions. “It’s important that we realize we have an affordability crisis, and to call it a purely supply crisis with no analysis of affordability is not solving our problem,” Llanes Pulido told us. “Our job is to intervene and say how can we preserve the housing we have that’s affordable and incentivize more affordable housing, because we have more than enough high-end housing coming online.”

Llanes Pulido has spent years volunteering her time advocating around local issues, but her day job for the past nine years has been executive director of Go Austin/Vamos Austin (GAVA), a nonprofit that helps create health equity and build climate resilience, and that fights to preserve older, already affordable housing in Austin’s Eastside neighborhoods. Llanes Pulido says it is this work that will be the key difference between herself and Tovo. “Day in day out I am leveraging seven- and eight-figure dollar amounts” from the state and federal government “to get [projects] done in our community.” As confronting climate change becomes an increasingly critical priority for the city – and one that will require increasing federal support – Llanes Pulido says her on-the-ground experience will be vital.

Both challengers are also united in another way – their dissatisfaction with the way Watson has run city government as mayor. Both feel that decisions made behind closed doors, with little to no input from Council members, and an overall resistance to transparency is not in the public’s best interest.

“I really understand how valuable our district-based system of representation is,” Tovo said, “and I know how a mayor can and should be leveraging the expertise, the wisdom, and the knowledge of those colleagues around the table to really talk about and respond to issues.”

“What I’m not seeing from Watson this time as mayor is any curiosity,” Llanes Pulido said. “Where is his reflection on how the kinds of policies he pursued two decades ago, and is pursuing again, impacted people? We need to bring directly impacted people and front-line actors working to solve community problems to the table, which he is not doing, but which would be a priority for me.”