If you’re looking to get around Austin without a car for business or pleasure, you’ll notice a relative lack of sidewalks pretty fast once you venture outside of downtown — it’s a longstanding issue, with the city estimating in 2019 that our pedestrian network was roughly only half connected, though we’ve added quite a lot since the approval of a new sidewalk…
streetscapes
Turning a Corner at 415 Colorado
Demolition is scheduled to begin this week at the southeast corner of West Fifth and Colorado Streets in downtown Austin, clearing several buildings for the construction of a 47-floor residential and office tower developed by Texas private equity firm Stonelake Capital Partners. The project, at the moment known simply by its address at 415 Colorado, will…
One Real Estate Company Now Owns More Than 30 Properties on East Sixth
As part of our longstanding beef with the mismanagement of Austin’s numerous historic properties on East Sixth Street, we’ve often complained that one of the reasons this entertainment district’s conga line of seedy shot bars remain so similar to one another in character is that they’re mostly owned by the same handful of people, who for years have had a…
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…
This Downtown Austin Tower Isn’t Real, but We Like It Anyway
One thing you’ll notice reading this site is that we like the tower plans that never get built almost as much as the ones that do. Each unrealized concept for downtown Austin represents a sort of self-contained alternate universe for the direction of the city’s skyline, especially some of the more ambitious and far-fetched designs…
To Build a Better East Sixth Street, Consider the Night Market
A recent push by the City of Austin to study public safety improvements for downtown’s East Sixth Street entertainment district following a string of shootings already has lots of ideas on the table — including a wider variety of cultural activities on the street, rezoning for additional commercial or even residential development, and encouraging more diverse uses for the area’s many historic storefronts beyond the near-identical string of…