Riverside Place Could Be Austin’s Next Big Strip Mall Redevelopment

Image: Bridgepoint Real Estate

A demolition permit filed with the city earlier this month could point to a redevelopment of the Riverside Place shopping center in Southeast Austin. Located at 2410 East Riverside Drive near the intersection with South Pleasant Valley Road, the approximately 10-acre strip mall was purchased in 2019 by an LLC associated with local development firm Endeavor Real Estate Group, and the demolition permit for the shopping center filed earlier this June by engineering company GarzaEMC was billed to Endeavor — considering the firm’s ongoing portfolio of large-scale mixed-use redevelopments around town, including sites like the Statesman headquarters, Saltillo, and the Borden Dairy Plant, it’s not hard to imagine what Endeavor might have in mind for the future of this property.

In fact, the Riverside Place site is remarkably similar to the Twin Oaks Shopping Center in South Austin, where we uncovered another mixed-use redevelopment plan earlier this week — both shopping centers are roughly 10 acres in size, located a stone’s throw from a major H-E-B, and set to be next door to a light rail station from Project Connect. That makes Riverside Place an equally attractive location for a transit-oriented development, and although we don’t know major details of what Endeavor has in mind for the site, there are a few interesting clues floating around.

An aerial view of the Riverside Place shopping center. Current plans for Project Connect show a light rail station built in the grassy median of Riverside Drive, directly south of the shopping center site. Image: HFF

For instance, if you look at the online portfolio of local landscape architecture studio Blacksmith Collaborative, which is currently working with Endeavor on its Fifth & Walsh office project, you’ll see a hand-drawn plan for a mixed-use project that looks suspiciously fitting for the site — and if that’s too much intrigue for you, the file name of the image is “2020-10-22_RiversidePlace_clr2.jpg:”

Image: Blacksmith Collaborative

Considering it’s nearly three years old by now, it’s probably safe to treat this drawing as more of a concept than a precise statement of how the potential redevelopment will look, but it’s still hitting all the typical mixed-use high notes — apartments with ground-floor retail, office space, a hotel, live-work townhomes, and so on. If nothing else, it’s a good example of just how much stuff you can fit in one of these strip mall-style sites when you’re not dedicating a majority of its land to surface parking, with any redevelopment here likely to include hundreds of homes on a transit-rich corridor. Although “demolition permit” might spook some people, there’s no indication of a timeline in place at the moment, and it’s unclear exactly how long Endeavor will have to wait before any remaining leases for the center’s tenants expire.