A view of the 2700 Gracy Farms Lane site, located directly north of the Domain. Image: Google Earth
There are very few aspects of Austin’s ongoing process of urban development more personally satisfying to me than the slow densification of the north side of town, which is where I spent most of my time growing up. That scene in Office Space where Peter and his coworkers walk across an empty retention pond between parking lots on their way back from lunch is the most accurate depiction of North Austin ever filmed.
Although plenty of the region north of 183 still looks like this, we’ve seen a lot of growth around the Domain and Q2 Stadium, helped along by the generous height and density allowances of the North Burnet / Gateway Regulating Plan — a special zoning district adopted by the city back in 2009 and updated many times since in the hopes that new development in this neighborhood could eventually create something you might plausibly and not cornily describe as Austin’s “second downtown.”
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Sure, it’s a work in progress, but even as the city at large sees a general development slowdown thanks to a tougher financing environment, a lot of projects are still cooking behind the scenes in “Da NBG Z0ne.” Case in point, just last night the rezoning of a roughly three-acre tract directly north of the Domain at 2700 Gracy Farms Lane sailed through the Planning Commission without any trouble, with the property’s former neighborhood residential zoning category now recommended for an update to a commercial mixed-use category under the NBG plan’s new Midway subdistrict — once you slice through all that jargon, what we’re getting here is a maximum bonus height limit on this site going from 60 feet to 350 feet, or possibly more than 30 floors.
The property is currently occupied by a former Extended Stay America hotel that sold last year and rebranded to something called “Studio Domain,” which now offers the building’s 136 rooms as furnished studio apartment rentals. The new owner, an LLC associated with Houston-based real estate investor Laxmi Mehta, is looking for this zoning change in preparation for a mixed-use redevelopment of the site described as including 350 multifamily residences, 210 hotel rooms, and approximately 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail use. Although the height of the project isn’t stated, that new 350-foot limit ought to give the developers plenty of elbow room, with the rezoning application stating the project is currently planned for completion in 2027.
This view of the Gracy Farms tract in context shows its close proximity to the Cap Metro Red Line — hey, aren’t we building a trail down that thing? Image: City of Austin
What’s important to note here is that the building planned at this site can’t just build this tall automatically under its new zoning. To reach that 350-foot limit, the developers have to participate in the NBG zoning area’s density bonus program, which unlocks the incentive of extra height and density in exchange for public benefits in the building like affordable housing and infrastructure improvements. If properly calibrated, these bonuses ultimately create better neighborhoods, and the sprawled-out land use of this region could really use some help. I’ve heard from behind the scenes that the gurus at the City of Austin’s Planning Department are currently cooking up a new density bonus scheme for this area to work in concert with its increasingly relaxed height limits — that way, we’ll be ready to bring some superior buildings to good ol’ North Austin whenever the city’s next boom kicks off.
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