Meet Katie Kam.
The Candidate for District 9.

M1Musical — Defending the Live Music Capital

Austin’s identity as the Live Music Capital of the World has been eroding for years. Venue closures, rent escalation in entertainment districts, and noise complaints from luxury infill housing all threaten the cultural ecosystem that working musicians depend on.

Katie supports defending and expanding the Music Venue Preservation Fund, working to ensure noise rules don’t weaponize new development against existing venues, and treating live-music infrastructure as essential cultural infrastructure — not as an afterthought to real-estate development.

M2Memorable — Stopping “Anywhere, USA”

Many of the streets, neighborhoods, and small-business pockets that gave Austin its character are being replaced wholesale. Generic mid-rises, formula chains in once-distinctive corners of town, and the homogenization of the streetscape are all visible in District 9.

Katie’s position: zoning, design review, and incentive tools should reward outcomes that preserve and extend Austin’s distinctive character rather than dilute it. The historic heart of the city should be allowed to grow without being scrubbed of what made it worth growing into.

M3Moving — Mobility Without Highway Expansions

As a civil engineer with a Ph.D. focused on transportation, Katie comes to mobility from the technical side. Her position is unambiguous: no highway expansions. Decades of data show induced demand — widening highways generates more traffic, not less.

Instead: safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists, real bus and rail investment, and expanded infrastructure for low-speed electric vehicles — golf carts, electric trikes, micro-mobility — which solve last-mile and intra-district trips at a fraction of the cost of road widening.

M4Magical — Fiscal Responsibility

The city budget has ballooned and Council has approved enormous capital projects without commensurate transparency or resident buy-in. The clearest example is the multi-billion-dollar convention center expansion that Katie spent 4,000 signatures fighting before deciding to run.

Her standard: don’t spend like a city trying to impress a developer. Spend like a city that loves itself — on parks, libraries, music infrastructure, basic services, and the kind of small civic improvements that compound over decades. Stop the convention-center boondoggle.

+Bonus — Science & Innovation

Katie’s BioBQ work and her testimony against the lab-grown-meat ban demonstrate a stance on science policy: Austin should be a city where tomorrow’s Texas industries can be invented and tested, not one that defers to incumbents trying to legislate the future out of existence. That same principle applies to clean energy, biotech, transportation tech, and the kind of small experimental businesses Austin has historically incubated.