Through the Eyes of a Journalist: Megan Kimble Reflects on Covering Food Systems, Zoning Changes, and Highway Projects in the Southwest

Austin, Texas, is feeling the pressures of intense growth and lack of affordable housing. This has impacted land development, transportation, food systems, and fair housing efforts. Megan Kimble has been on the front lines, chronicling these efforts and unearthing the linkages among them since relocating to Austin from Tucson in 2017.

“The best part about being a journalist is you get to inhabit other people’s professions and worlds, and once you get tired of them you can move onto another topic,” said Kimble.

Kimble’s 2015 book Unprocessed unearthed the underbelly of our food systems. From that perspective, she began to understand how access to opportunities in cities was predicated on where people lived.

“A lot of attention was paid to physical access to food,” Kimble told The Planning Commission Podcast. “That’s really important but I started covering transportation because, if you drive, then you can have access to all the things that you need. If you rely on public transportation, you are much more dependent on the resources that are around you in your neighborhood.”

This also ties into zoning policies, as Kimble has learned in covering the $10 million, decade-long effort by the City of Austin to update its land development code.

Kimble outlines what is occurring in Austin related to the code update. “The biggest thing that has prevented a new land development code is NIMBY opposition,” she said. Protest rights, which are also rooted in racism and segregation, are granted under Texas law and have played a major role in stalling the effort in the courts.

“It’s largely white, wealthy homeowners who have an enormous amount of power by state law and that has gummed up the whole process such that city leaders have not been able to get anything done,” said Kimble.  

The sprawl stemming from the City of Austin’s inability to grow at higher densities has led Texas DOT to plan for wider highways around and through Austin.

“What TxDOT is doing is fairly rational” due to the demand created by the sprawl, said Kimble. That's doesn't mean they aren't skirting environmental laws and ignoring the lessons learned after 60 years of highway building and expansion with little effect on reducing congestion.

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