A lot of money is being spent on downtown development — more than $2 billion in condo projects alone at last count. And while it is technically outside of downtown, it seems another $750 million mixed use development is about to break ground. The project will develop 2.75 million square feet across 22 prime central acres near downtown Austin.
The project, East Avenue, will be on the former campus of Concordia University just North of the University of Texas on the West side of I-35. The goal is a new mixed-use “downtown” with residential, commercial, retail, parks, and a hotel. Here is the summary from the Austin Business Journal:
With a three to five-year build-out timeframe, the project will eventually include 1,450 residential units, 600,000 square feet of office space, 325,000 square feet of retail and a 250-room luxury hotel. Pocket parks, public spaces and an interconnected network of walkways will also be included in the layout of East Avenue, which developer Andy Sarwal hopes will become an entertainment and shopping hub, providing a dense, urban-living alternative to downtown.
As we have asked before, how many downtowns does one city need? It’s hard to tell what is happening: the optimistic view is that responsible developers are working hard to create model mini-communities that represent a new sort of urbanism. I hope this is true — and that Austin is becoming a leader in a new sort of urban or quasi-urban growth. Clearly, it’s too early to know how these projects will fare — my sense with all of these (the Domain, The Triangle, etc.) is that they don’t really become interesting until after a few phases of development when they reach a scale that provides a critical mass for people to live, work, shop, and have fun. So far, only the Domain seems on track to reach this objective.
The following images, courtesy of East Avenue, show the site and renderings of the new neighborhood:
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