Last week, we asked our readers for some thoughtful takes on the future of Zilker, and how the park might best accommodate Austin’s ongoing growth now that the vision planning process has hit a dead end. After all the vitriol spread over the last year about how the plan spelled the end of the park as we know it, the hundreds of responses we received to last…
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What’s Next for Downtown Austin’s Silliest Capitol View Corridors?
The Capitol View Corridors protecting various perspectives of the Capitol dome throughout the central city are an effective metaphor for Austin itself, each an invisible monument to the decades-long spiritual battle between past and future defining so many aspects of our local culture. The CVCs shape the city’s built environment by projecting what are essentially dozens of invisible force fields limiting the…
Wanna Unlock More Housing Across Austin? Start Thinking Small
Would you rather live in a small building or a big one? In Austin, you often don’t get a choice, but that could change soon. Recent tweaks proposed for Austin’s land development code by City Council earlier this summer hope to unlock multifamily projects on smaller properties across the city, joining other efforts to incentivize the construction of more affordable…
What’s Next for Zilker Park?
The unceremonious shelving of the Zilker Vision Plan announced earlier this week after years of work doesn’t really inspire much confidence in Austin’s civic process. In fact, it’s evidence that the city’s current leadership is capable of being swayed towards inaction by threats, conspiracies, and the same entrenched local interests that obstructed progress on zoning reform a few years back — and we’ve seen over…
Downtown’s Defunct HealthSouth Redevelopment Prepares Its Comeback
The failure of the agreement between private developers Aspen Heights Partners and the City of Austin’s Economic Development Department to construct two residential towers containing hundreds of market-rate and affordable housing units on 1.73 acres of city-owned downtown land formerly occupied by the HealthSouth rehab hospital at 1215 Red River Street was one of the more quietly depressing…
Gosh, That Building Sure Is Blue
Do you think this heat wave is making everyone in Austin feel stupid? Me personally, I’m wearing a big dunce cap and wandering around Waterloo Park telling everyone to look at the blue building, remarking on how blue it is, asking concerned bystanders if they’ve ever seen a building that blue, and so on. It’s starting to…