Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 3, Issue 3

179 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 TAYLOR , TEXAS in conjunction with the school district to help train students for jobs available in the city. “Taylor Independent School District and Temple College are important partners for education infrastructure and workforce development and will become increasingly more important as Samsung starts training new employees for their new facility,” says Stacey Osborne, Communications Director for the City of Taylor. In addition to Samsung, the city has created even more industrial growth through its new RCR Taylor Logistics Park, a master-planned logistics and industrial park that is served by Union Pacific and BNSF Railway. “The developer constructed a rail spur off the main Union Pacific rail line into the property and it is a major improvement that will allow for businesses that need access to rail to be able to utilize that rail as a place for loading and unloading rail cargo,” Yantis says. “They are leasing and selling portions of the property to other businesses that are needing access to the rail line on a permanent basis.” The first building on the site will be a 350,000 square foot rail-served distribution building . In the future, the 750-acre park will be able to accommodate buildings anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million square feet. With all these new employment opportunities available, as well as the city’s close proximity to nearby Austin (a mere 29 miles), Taylor is projecting huge growth in its future. And that means a need for more housing. The city has several housing projects in the works right now, having issued 260 single family residential permits in 2021. That number is up from an average of 50-60 permits per year in previous years. Like most communities in the country, Taylor is facing a shortage of affordable and mid-range housing. To combat that, the city has updated its comprehensive plan to focus on the issue and come up with solutions. “The median household income is not keeping pace with the median home prices in Taylor and the Austin region,” Yantis notes. “One of the big goals in the plan is to diversify housing production in the community to create more types of housing products to try to address this affordability gap. We are in the early stages of implementing the tools to try to achieve that through rewriting our zoning and subdivision regulations to ensure that the new neighborhoods include a variety of housing product types. To make sure we’ve got things that are affordable across the income spectrum.”