If you’ve tuned in over the last few weeks, you’ll see we’ve been mulling the topic of Brodie Oaksification around here — the crackpot fantasy of instantly transforming another one of Austin’s sprawled-out shopping centers into a new mixed-use development just like what’s currently planned at Brodie Oaks, a project increasing the housing and commercial space of its land with the help of dense construction…
Baker School Building Seeks National Historic Status in Hyde Park
A former public school building in the heart of Austin’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood is now seeking inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, with an application for the Baker School site at 3908 Avenue B on the agenda of the Texas Historical Commission’s next State Board of Review meeting on May 13. Dating back to 1911…
Downtown Austin’s Next Hotel Takes on Red River’s Most Eligible Parking Lots
Last week, we noted the second possible demolition of an Extended Stay America hotel in the central city to make room for taller growth, but that doesn’t mean the mid-tier extended stay hotel is obsolete in downtown Austin — ha ha, au contraire! City permit filings from this month indicate plans for the development of a 166-room TownePlace Suites…
Hotel Rezoning Could Bring New Height to Austin’s South Central Waterfront
Committed readers of this blog might recall the 2019 demolition of the widely-disliked Extended Stay America hotel at 600 Guadalupe Street in downtown Austin was the first step toward the development of the Sixth and Guadalupe tower that’s currently the tallest building in the city — and at the risk of looking like we have some kind of beef with this completely…
Whoops, We Accidentally Named This Tower on Rainey Street
Maybe you’ve heard that the 48-story downtown Austin apartment tower now under construction at 80 Rainey Street is going by the name Paseo. What you didn’t hear, since we weren’t sure how to talk about it without sounding insanely full of ourselves, is that we came up with that name. No, really! Here’s the word straight from the tower’s developers…
Meet Austin’s Top 3 Shopping Centers Begging for the Brodie Oaks Treatment
Last month, we introduced the thought experiment of the Brodie Oaksifyer, a sort of sci-fi laser cannon capable of instantly converting one of Austin’s many sprawled-out shopping centers into a Brodie Oaks-style redevelopment — we’re talking denser and more walkable urban design, new housing, and green space reclaiming underused parking lots, among other perks. Since then, we’ve received hundreds of…