A resolution passed earlier today by Austin City Council directs our beloved city staff to research how to gas up UNO. What’s UNO? Well, UNO is for you and me, and UNO’s building density. UNO keeps rents lower here than any district far or near! UNO stands for “University Neighborhood Overlay,” of course, but that’s not as fun to sing or…
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An Austin Holiday Tradition Goes Car-Free at the 37th Street Lights
The elaborate and offbeat displays of Christmas lights fashioned yearly by residents along West 37th Street in the city’s North University neighborhood are one of those “Keep Austin Weird” situations that actually lives up to our eclectic reputation. Though participation dipped in the 2000s after a group of neighbors first started the tradition in the mid-1980s, the 37th Street Lights came back strong in…
The Frio Apartments Preparing to Rise Against a Widening I-35
The planned redevelopment of the former Concordia University campus , a 22-acre site located just west of I-35 in the Hancock neighborhood of Central Austin, has taken 16 years to grow to its current crop of apartment, office, and retail buildings. That’s a bit longer than we expected when the city approved the Planned Unit Development (PUD) zoning for extra density at the…
Avoiding an Expanding Highway’s Gravitational Pull at the Frio Apartments
The redevelopment of the 22-acre former campus of Concordia University at the eastern edge of the Hancock neighborhood is one of Austin’s lesser examples of the planned unit development (PUD) process — “the deal so bad, a guy went to jail!” Although it’s taken a bit longer than we expected for this large collection of tracts just west of I-35 to build out since the approval of the…
Texas French Bread Seeks Partners to Rebuild Its Business ‘Better Than Ever’
When a fire destroyed Rio Grande Street bakery and restaurant Texas French Bread back in January, the future of this longtime local business didn’t seem particularly sunny . Owner Murph Willcott and his wife Carissa Ries, devastated at the loss of the nearly century-old building at this site occupied by their business since 1986, weren’t sure what a path forward for their…
Can Austin Take Back the Drag?
West Campus isn’t downtown Austin, but downtown Austin could learn a thing or two from West Campus. This student-populated neighborhood directly west of the University of Texas is sort of like the city’s own little laboratory for urban design, and though it’s generally outside this blog’s area of coverage, the vertical expansion of this district over the course of the last decade…