30-Story Multifamily Tower Headed to 11th & Sabine Block

The view of the Capitol from the site at 11th and Sabine. Photo by James Rambin.

We’ve heard rumors about a tower planned for the Texas Trucking Association site at 700 East 11th Street for a while now, but recent city filings are finally filling out some of the details. Trammel Crow Residential and Stantec are involved with the address, applying for Central Business District rezoning and combining the site’s three lots into one all within the last few months.

A utility filing with the city back in March gave us a hint via some drawings of the planned development’s ground floor, but a new consolidated site plan filed today reveals more, describing a 30 story multifamily tower with 270 residential units, 11,600 square feet of office space, and a parking garage for the .81 acre plot. 

We still don’t have full plans or renderings, but here’s how a 30-story tower might compare with its surroundings:

TOWERS’ very crude massing of the 11th & Sabine project’s height.  Capitol View Corridors are overlaid in red.  Photo courtesy of Google Maps.

A view of the current Capitol View Corridors over the 11th and Sabine block, highlighted in red. I-35 is at the bottom of the image. The only portion of the site where the proposed point tower component can fit is in the top left corner of the block. Photo courtesy of Google Maps.

Keep in mind, a significant portion of this site lies in the path of our old friend the Capitol View Corridor, allowing only part of the building to go vertical as a point tower. The massing above doesn’t reflect the actual footprint of the tower, which you’ll see on the drawing below.

The most interesting wrinkle to the project is its solution to the diagonal approach of the CVC, by cutting a slight angle into the building’s north side — the outline of the tower’s footprint is visible as the dotted line on this ground floor drawing from the utilities commission filing a few months back. It lines up with the site info we’ve received today, so there’s no reason to think its design has changed significantly since then.

Plans for the ground floor of a multipurpose development at 11th and Sabine Streets. The dotted line indicates the geometry of the building’s vertical component. Photo courtesy of Stantec.

There’s also a distinct possibility that any vertical component of this development could be impacted if the additional view corridors introduced in city council this year go into effect. The proposed Texas State Cemetery corridor would take an even larger bite out of the lot than before, so it’s unclear if development could proceed as planned if that happens.

Regardless, it’s certainly an interesting project, and in a part of downtown that isn’t the hottest on the block at the moment. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.