For more than 40 years, there’s been a grocery store at 715 Exposition Boulevard in West Austin, sitting on a 2.6-acre piece of land owned by the University of Texas System. The building opened as a Safeway in 1977, briefly became an AppleTree Market (remember those?) in the late 1980s, and finally a Randalls in 1994. Earlier…
Six Reasons Austin Should Go Big On Small Apartments
Coming up on Thursday, the 2019 version of the Austin City Council will start deliberating on one of the biggest decisions of this year: where to go now that CodeNEXT is dead . City Manager Spencer Cronk asked for direction from City Council on five questions , including how much we should allow “missing middle” housing (think: small multi-unit buildings…
Two New Hotels Headed for East Avenue in the Rainey Street District
East Avenue, running parallel to Rainey Street on the southeastern edge of downtown Austin, gets a lot of attention from this site. That’s because despite its slightly lesser-known status compared to Rainey Street proper, it currently hosts many promising developments expanding the overall Rainey Street District. Everyone loves betting an on underdog, and it’s kinda started paying off —…
At Butler Shores, a New Life for Austin’s Dougherty Arts Center Takes Shape
In 2010, an architectural report prepared for Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department declared the facility housing the city’s Dougherty Arts Center had aged beyond its useful life — in fact, the much-loved community theater and gallery space near Butler Park at 1110 Barton Springs Road was “beyond repair,” according to the parks department’s own summary of the…
Don’t You Dare Park Here
After six-ish years working in urban planning and design, I can confidently say that nothing gets people more riled up than parking — not even traffic compares. This is especially true in Austin, as we frequently hash out the merits of parking-centric topics like parking minimums, parking podiums, event parking, and residential parking permits. The city’s Residential…
Getting to Know 44 East Avenue, Raising the Roof in the Rainey Street District
Although our first good look at the Block 185 office tower was obviously the hottest item at last week’s meeting of the City of Austin’s Design Commission, another topic of interest showed up on the agenda — 44 East Avenue, a downtown Austin condo project planned atop a roughly .68-acre plot in the Rainey Street District by Vancouver…