Image: Riverside / GDA / Nudge Design
An apartment project set to bring approximately 300 new residences to a drive-thru bank and adjacent parking lot of an office building on Burnet Road is preparing to take its first steps in the Allandale neighborhood of North Central Austin, with the site plan for the development at 7618 Burnet Road now approved by the city and a demolition permit prepping the site for construction now in review.
Located just south of the former Northcross Mall, the project by prolific local developers Riverside (formerly known as Riverside Resources, but the firm’s just going by the snappier mononym these days) is the sort of large-scale infill we’d expect to see a little closer to the center of town — the plan is taking over the multi-acre surface parking lot of the 7600 Burnet office tower, which contains a Chase Bank and several other tenants. Once built over the course of two phases, the apartments and their structured parking will essentially wrap around the existing office tower, a nice touch of density for a highly-paved part of town that’s growing a little slower than other booming stretches along the Burnet Road corridor.
A site plan for the 7600 Burnet Road apartment plan, showing its phasing and the layout of the new buildings around the existing office tower at the site — seen here in blue and helpfully marked with NO BUILD ZONE. Image: WGI / Riverside
The demolition permit now being sought by Riverside and its development team will clear a path for the apartment structures by tearing down the bank’s drive-thru kiosk at the western part of the roughly six-acre site. It’s a hefty chunk of asphalt, and once redeveloped will fit more than half of the plan’s new apartments — the remaining units will rise in a separate building on the northeast corner of the property, per the available plans for the project. Although renderings of the full developed site aren’t public yet, the one image provided by Riverside shows a handsome masonry-accented structure designed by the frequent flyers at Dallas-based firm GDA Architects, with landscape work from our friends at Nudge Design.
That’s a honkin’ big drive-thru, boss.
Although the city’s tireless anti-building activists have placed the affordable housing provided under the city’s VMU2 density bonus program in jeopardy, this project is being built under the less intense VMU1 zoning, which is still pretty good — by opting into the affordability requirements of this zoning program, the project will fully subsidize a total of 30 income-restricted apartments in the building for individuals or families earning no more than 80 percent of the regional Median Family Income. According to Riverside, the plan is set to break ground in the first half of 2024, with construction expected to last about 24 months. We’ll take all of that you got.
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