Qadri sets sights on closing ‘windowless-apartment loophole’

District 9 City Council Member Zo Qadri will sponsor a resolution “kick(ing) off the process to close the windowless-apartment loophole,” which in recent years has surfaced as a problem for students at the University of Texas at Austin and residents in West Campus. 

Qadri announced his plan during the Housing and Planning Committee’s meeting on Wednesday, citing advocacy by the Austin chapter of the American Institute of Architects and by UT students, including his sister. 

“Affordability is a major challenge in our city, and we should consider as many options that we have in our toolbox to get a handle on it,” he said. “However, we also need to strike a balance between affordability and quality of life.”

Qadri worried about the impact of windowless apartments on students amid a worsening youth mental health crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of mental health professionals.  

“Natural light should be a necessity and not a luxury,” he said. “And living without it affects mental health and induces feelings of isolation,” he said. 

Juan Miró, a principal at Miró Rivera Architects downtown and a professor at UT Austin’s School of Architecture, previously called on City Council to act during the committee’s June 13 meeting. 

“We have in Austin the problem that many cities discovered a hundred years ago, and they have passed laws to prevent windowless rooms,” he said. “Now, it’s happening (here) because we are building the density that all the (other) cities have dealt with many years before.” 

Miró submitted a letter to the editor to The Architect’s Newspaper, published last October, expounding on the problem.

“The depressing reality is that the city of Austin has been issuing building permits for several years to construct windowless rooms in West Campus,” he wrote. “For example, 44 percent (222 rooms) of the bedrooms in the Ion Austin building have no windows. Likewise, the Legacy on Rio has 115 bedrooms, or 22 percent, without windows.”

UT students also have sounded the alarm. 

Hrishabh “Roosh” Ranjit Bhosale recently submitted his thesis on “windowlessness and well-being” in off-campus housing at UT Austin. He found that “windowless bedrooms contribute to poor well-being and may contribute to mood disorders” and that “predatory leasing practices and windows that face interior hallways further contribute to the epidemic of windowless.”   

Qadri’s resolution directs city staff to draft an amendment to the city’s Land Development Code that “require(s) access to natural light for all sleeping rooms in new buildings,” with minimal impacts to affordability. 

Mayor Pro Tem Paige Ellis, who represents District 8, and Council Members Natasha Harper-Madison and José Velásquez, who represent District 1 and District 3, respectively, are co-sponsors. District 5 Council Member Ryan Alter, who serves on the Housing and Planning Committee, expressed interest in joining them on Wednesday.

District 7 Council Member Leslie Pool, another committee member, supported the measure.

“I know the students are given the option to choose a room without a window, but there’s probably also a lower price tag attached to that, so that’s not really a choice,” she said. “It’s pretty coercive.”

Pool also suggested there would be resistance to any proposed code amendment, requiring collaboration on and off the dais. 

“I think the Council is well positioned to try to do something about that, with the University of Texas,” she said. 

In a series of tweets on the topic, sociologist David Madden noted that the current discussion about windowless rooms taking place in New York and elsewhere was “surreal & ahistorical.”

“Windowless rooms were banned in NYC starting from (the) 1879 Tenement House Act (the ‘Old Law’) not because of aesthetics but because they helped spread pandemics & were extremely deadly in fires,” he wrote. “The risk of fire death in windowless rooms isn’t some nineteenth century problem solved by modern building methods. (Illegal) windowless rooms have been cited as contributing to death in fires in New York in the twenty-first century.”

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