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Special edition · May 2026 · Austin Development Watch
DB-90 at Two Years
What 123 hearings on 76 cases tell us about Austin's density bonus experiment — what worked, what didn't, and what's replacing it.
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The headline numbers
76
distinct DB-90 cases — 123 Commission hearings — across the program's first two years
32
Drenner Group DB-90 hearings (on 21 cases) — 26% of hearings, the single largest share
14 days
Multi-hearing median time to clearance — markedly faster than the general pipeline
Inside the report
The DB-90 retrospective the city did not publish — a structured, end-to-end read on the density-bonus program's first two years. Seven sections:
- How the pipeline filled — the program's intake curve.
- Who's filing — Drenner Group (32 hearings / 21 cases, 26%), Thrower Design (28 / 13), Armbrust & Brown under Michael Whellan (22 / 16), and DuBois Bryant & Campbell under David Hartman (17 / 11, including the 7-tract Airport & Koenig cluster).
- Where the cases sit — geographic distribution.
- How the cases resolve — outcome distribution.
- Velocity — why DB-90 cases clear faster than the general pipeline.
- The cases worth watching — and a closing section on what the data does not say.
What this is — and is not
Is: a structured retrospective built entirely from publicly available Commission minutes and the ADW tracked record.
Is not: legal advice, file-specific recommendations, or based on interviews, internal firm sources, or confidential information. Methodology disclosed in the document.
Austin Development Watch · Special edition · May 2026
Author: Michael Msebenzi ·
[email protected]
Data source: ADW Cases database, parsed from public City of Austin meeting minutes.