Austin voters will pick new mayor Tuesday night

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In a race defined by the city’s rampant unaffordability, Austin voters will pick a new mayor Tuesday night to guide the capital city over the next two years as the region deals with explosive growth.

The choice in the mayor’s race is between two Democrats: state Rep. Celia Israel and former state Sen. Kirk Watson. The race went to a runoff after neither candidate received more than 50% percent of the vote in the November election.

Whoever wins Tuesday night will be tasked with figuring out how to tamp down Austin’s housing affordability crisis, which has impacted residents throughout the city and played a central role in the race. Home prices and rents in Austin, which had already been climbing fast in the last decade, skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and record demand for homes in the region.

Check back below at 7 p.m. Central Time when vote counts will start to come in.

Israel, who would be Austin’s first openly gay and Latina mayor, and Watson, who served as the city’s mayor from 1997 to 2001, have each laid out extensive proposals for how to tackle the housing crisis and boost the city’s housing supply.

However, they have approached the issue in different tenors. Israel has called for aggressive action and said she’ll work closely with “pro-housing” advocates; Watson has promised a more diplomatic strategy that brings in more new housing without alienating neighborhoods that oppose it.

The victor will also have to deal with the state’s Republican leadership, which has grown increasingly hostile to Austin and Texas’ bluer urban areas. Within the past two years, Austin cut the city’s police spending in the wake of the George Floyd protests and rolled back a ban on homeless encampments in public areas — moves that Republican lawmakers in the Texas Legislature later rebuked by passing new laws reining in those measures and restricting other major Texas cities from following in Austin’s steps.

So far, turnout in the contentious race has been considerably low. Of the nearly 623,000 Travis County residents registered to vote in Austin elections, less than 71,000 voters — or about 11% — cast their ballots during early voting in the mayoral race and three Austin City Council runoffs. That’s less than a quarter of the 291,545 Travis County voters who cast ballots in the mayoral race during the November midterms. (Austin also stretches into Hays and Williamson counties.)

Whoever prevails Tuesday night will have to run again in two years, rather than four as Austin mayors normally do. That’s because Austin voters passed a ballot proposition last year to move the city’s mayoral elections from gubernatorial election years to presidential election years in a bid to increase voter turnout.