Steck Office Park Rezoning Moves Forward in Northwest Austin

Image: OakPoint Real Estate

The rezoning application for a Northwest Austin office park containing three separate buildings and a parking structure on a site spanning more than 12 acres at the northwest corner of Steck Avenue and the MoPac Expressway frontage road is moving forward this week. The request for vertical mixed-use zoning at the property under the city’s new DB90 bonus program by Nashville-based real estate firm OakPoint, which owns the two adjacent office parks known as The Park and Park North respectively located at 8300 and 8200 North MoPac, received a recommendation from Austin’s Zoning and Platting Commission at its meeting earlier this week.

The zoning item will now head to City Council for approval, and is not expected to face any controversy along the way — like Austin’s endless lineup of aging strip malls, the redevelopment of legacy office parks is one of the city’s easiest approaches to adding infill density on formerly sprawling tracts of land with lots of surface parking. Plans by OakPoint for the future of the Park complex aren’t obvious yet, but the application for rezoning indicates that the owners hope to pursue a phased redevelopment of the property’s large surface parking lots and office uses, with new residential, office, and retail space in mind. There’s no timeline for this redevelopment at the moment, but obtaining the vertical mixed-use zoning now allows for future flexibility.

Northwest Austin Office Park Site Seeks 12-Acre Residential Rezoning

Rezoning the property under the DB90 program would allow the site’s owners to participate in its optional density bonus requirements for denser redevelopment of the site, which would allow a project here to rise to a maximum height of 90 feet in exchange for on-site affordable housing — either 12% of its rental units offered to households earning no more than 60% of the area’s Median Family Income, or 10% of units at the more deeply affordable rate of 50% MFI or less. Considering the size of the property in question, these requirements could yield more than 100 fully subsidized income-restricted rental homes once the site is completely built out.