The apartment project planned for the Grant Plaza offices at 611 East Sixth Street would be the first major residential development built inside downtown Austin’s infamous Sixth Street entertainment district in a generation — and even before a certain sense of uncertainty struck our local real estate market, the proposal first surfaced in 2022 by New York-based investment firm Empire Square Group and national developers Ryan…
historic preservation
Transforming the Sprawl and Saving the Pink Gorilla at Anderson Square
Anderson Square is the official name for the 16-acre ocean of asphalt located at the southwest corner of the interchange between Highway 183, West Anderson Lane, and North Lamar Boulevard in Central Austin; a sleepy yet humongous shopping center anchored by a Hobby Lobby, Planet Fitness, and one of the city’s most consistently underused parking lots. Aside…
In Austin, ‘More Housing’ Doesn’t Scare People Quite Like It Used To
The transformative land use changes passed by Austin City Council last week didn’t come out of nowhere, although the possibility of their adoption felt like wild fantasy only a few short years ago. The speed of Austin’s changing local attitude towards density and zoning reform makes a bit more sense in the face of rising housing costs — by 2020, even relatively high earners started experiencing the effects of our local…
The City’s Barton Springs Road Safety Project Works. Where Should It Go Next?
After a history of serious car crashes and a particularly dramatic accident in 2022 injuring 10 people, the yearlong safety pilot implemented on Barton Springs Road by the City of Austin’s Transportation and Public Works Department was a welcome intervention on one of the city’s most popular streets for pedestrians and cyclists at the gateway to Zilker Park — by reducing the road to one car…
Rainey Street’s Opening a Temporary Pocket Park This Summer
As cranes and towers rise in tandem over the Rainey Street District, the fate of a small 0.27-acre parcel at the corner of Rainey and River Streets is a more subtle topic of ongoing discussion in this downtown Austin neighborhood — owned by the City of Austin since 2003, the corner tract of city-owned land at 64 Rainey Street was…
Here’s How South Austin’s Twin Oaks Shopping Center Could Redevelop
We were pretty tickled to dig up the news last year that Dallas-based developers Trammell Crow Company and its subsidiary High Street Residential were planning a mixed-use redevelopment of South Austin’s largely vacant Twin Oaks Shopping Center at 2315 South Congress Avenue on behalf of the 10-acre center’s owners at H-E-B. Although the finer details of the plan remained a little…