Image: Endeavor Real Estate Group
The future of a roughly 10-acre former rail yard between East Fourth and East Fifth Streets will emerge as part of East Austin’s “new normal” within a few short months. Formerly known as Plaza Saltillo after its nearby MetroRail station, but now shortened to the snappier and slightly less confusing Saltillo, this ambitious project by local developers Endeavor Real Estate Group is best described with many hyphens — master-planned, transit-oriented, mixed-use — not to mention long-awaited, being essentially the product of city planning efforts and assorted real estate speculation dating back about two decades, give or take.
Construction at the Saltillo site in late 2017. Photo by James Rambin.
Keeping that in mind, after more than two years of construction since its official groundbreaking in June 2017, we’re ready for Saltillo to get over the finish line already — and we imagine the folks at Endeavor feel the same way, since they provided us with a few nice points of data explaining just how close we are.
Construction at the Saltillo site in late 2018. Photo by James Rambin.
“Saltillo experienced a great amount of progress in 2019 and should come to full fruition in early 2020. It’s gratifying, humbling and amazing to see the community’s vision take full shape and form.”
— Jason Thumlert, Principal, Endeavor Real Estate Group
An aerial view of the nearly-finished Saltillo site now, in late 2019. Image: Endeavor Real Estate Group
As of December 2019, residents of Saltillo have moved into three of its four residential blocks, with occupants soon expected at the apartment block closest to I-35 — together, the four residential blocks contain approximately 800 total apartment units. Three of its retail stores are already open for business — shoutout to the new JuiceLand over there — with five more retail openings expected this month. Another five businesses should open at Saltillo by early 2020, per Endeavor, and that doesn’t even count the big-name tenants: Target and Whole Foods, both of which began finishing out their respective spaces in the development earlier this fall.
Image: Endeavor Real Estate Group
The opening dates for those larger stores aren’t set for the moment, but sometime in 2020 seems like a good bet. Even with all these big names, the elephant in the room at Saltillo is its single office tenant, a tech company and eyeglass manufacturer called “Google,” which announced earlier this year it would take down 100 percent of the development’s approximately 150,000 square feet of office space contained within the seven-story blue glass building you can see in the photos above. Frankly, we think the entire development should be as tall as that office building, but don’t get us started.
As the largest master-planned development this close to the city’s downtown core, there are high hopes resting on the success of Saltillo as a new urban node for East Austin — a center around which more well-designed, transit-accessible projects should rise if all goes well, incentivized by both the literal bonuses of the area’s transit-oriented development plan, and the more squishy human benefits of dense, walkable, and attractive public environments. Other promising growth in the district seems to imply that Saltillo’s already doing its job, but we’ll find out soon enough.
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