Northwest Austin Office Park Site Seeks 12-Acre Residential Rezoning

A view of the Park office building’s main entrance at 8300 North MoPac. Image: OakPoint Real Estate

The owners of two adjacent office parks along the MoPac frontage road containing three buildings and a parking garage are now seeking a 12.26-acre rezoning for a mixed-use redevelopment that could build more than half a million square feet near Steck Avenue in Northwest Austin. The Park and Park North office complexes, respectively dating back to 1981 and 1999, are located at 8300 and 8200 North MoPac and both owned by Austin and Nashville-based real estate firm OakPoint. Both sites are now seeking a rezoning under the City of Austin’s new DB90 zoning program, approved back in February as a replacement for the VMU2 zoning category after the whole program was invalidated by a lawsuit from Austin’s usual NIMBY rogues’ gallery.

DB90, just like VMU2 before it, is an optional density bonus program allowing developers to build mixed-use residential projects rising up to 90 feet on major corridors, rather than the previous height limit of 60 feet, assuming they provide 10 to 12 percent of the on-site residential units as affordable housing. You may have noticed — I mean, if you’re enough of a goofball to follow this stuff closely yourself, and the point of our little ol’ website is kinda that you shouldn’t have to — a large number of properties formerly seeking development under the old program are now scrambling to secure the new DB90 zoning designation, which should allow their owners to build projects previously planned under VMU2 without much trouble.

The entrance of one of the Park North office buildings. Image: OakPoint Real Estate

That’s actually not the case at this site, which is simply jumping straight from an office and commercial zoning category to DB90, with the application filed late last month stating few details beyond that the property owners plan a phased mixed-use redevelopment that includes residential, office, and retail uses. You might consider this another bad luck planet in today’s horoscope for the Austin office market, in the sense that the owners would rather demolish a collection of existing Class A office buildings and build apartments on the rubble — but keep in mind that a future development on such a large site could include hundreds of affordable units if built under the DB90 program’s requirements, so we’re not mad at it! Anyway, the rezoning application doesn’t rule out some of that existing office space sticking around, with the property’s large quantity of surface parking also ripe for infill construction:

The purpose of this proposed rezoning application is to allow for a phased development of the existing surface parking and office uses. The intent is to support residential, office, and retail uses, and allow for participation in the DB90 program.

— 8300 and 8200 North MoPac Rezoning Application

No timeline is available for this potential redevelopment at the moment, and as far as we can tell the building is still offering office space for lease. But along with the apartment building bound for the former Luby’s site just across Steck Avenue from these properties, not to mention nearby plans for additional residential density planned just across MoPac, the current sprawled-out asphalt land use regime in this pocket of the city seems ripe for a lot of projects just like this. Fine by me, man.