Shaking the Dust Off on West Fifth Street With 120 Feet of Housing

On your left, we see an office building and parking lot dating back to 1985 that could soon be redeveloped with about 10 floors of multifamily residential. On the right, there is a giant storage facility for some reason. That’s West Fifth, baby! Image: Google Maps

One of the long-term goals of this site is the ongoing coverage of projects slowly rising along West Fifth Street west of North Lamar Boulevard, a not-quite-downtown region that lots of people just call Clarksville out of convenience but is actually inside the bounds of the Old West Austin neighborhood. This area currently sits in urban limbo, with block-sized storage facilities, car dealerships, and parking lots separating the few existing pockets of street-facing retail enough to prevent the formation of any cohesive district. The kids, with their TikTok and whatnot, call this type of thing a “liminal space” — that’s a term you’d once only find in critical theory circles, but now its popular definition is something like an airport, a “space between spaces” best understood as a place of transition lacking an identity of its own. West Fifth isn’t exactly downtown, not quite West Austin, and certainly not Clarksville. It’s liminal!

Here’s a First Look at the Fifth & Walsh Offices, Rising West of Downtown Austin

But hey, the best way to shake that off is by creating a larger population in the area — more residents with skin in the game around here will support a larger retail presence along this part of West Fifth Street. That’s why we’re pleased to see a rezoning application filed late last month for a nearly half-acre property containing a three-story office building and parking lot at 1209 West Fifth Street. The property’s owners at law firm Rivers McNamara, which also occupies much of the building’s office space, are seeking a zoning change from the city authorizing a Planned Development Area combining district use for the 0.46-acre property, which would allow the construction of a multifamily residential building rising up to 120 feet.

That’s about 10 floors of housing, and although it’s too early in the process for us to even know whether the project planned here will contain ground-level retail, it’s still a good move for the immediate area — the site is directly next door to the booming combination of Better Half Coffee & Cocktails and Hold Out Brewing, which together constitute the area’s only real entertainment destination at the moment and should be well served by more residents next door. You live here, you can go downstairs and get your coffee and your breakfast sandwich, almost like a real city!

An Office Breaks New Ground for Infill on a Densifying West Fifth Street

Although the rezoning application for this site is still pending and should appear before the Planning Commission later this year, we don’t see the case running into too much trouble — one of the nice things about being a liminal space is that fewer people are around to get up in arms about what you’re building over here.