The South Lamarization of East Riverside Is Coming Soon

South Shore Highline will bring apartments and retail to a former vacant lot at 2435 East Riverside Drive. Image: Urban Genesis

South Lamar Boulevard and East Riverside Drive have a lot in common. They’re both what the city considers “core transit corridors,” and that means they’re ideal for dense multi-story development often in the form of vertical mixed-use (VMU) buildings, which in theory enhance the street-level pedestrian environment along the corridor by improving sidewalks and adding ground-floor retail space alongside more apartment units than you could fit in a shorter building.

These buildings often span full blocks, and though their design isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, they’re an effective approach for adding density and reducing the number of cars on the street in areas not zoned for downtown-style height. Needless to say, South Lamar Boulevard has quite a few of them. You won’t find the “canyon effect” everywhere just yet, but when existing projects like Lamar Union and Post South Lamar are joined by several new plans already in the early stages of development, that’s the vibe we’ll have down there — so when we say East Riverside Drive is about to receive its own “South Lamarization,” that’s what we mean.

Vertical mixed-use density abounds on South Lamar Boulevard.

As the East Riverside Corridor gentrifies with the arrival of companies like Oracle and the controversial 97-acre mixed-use project formerly known as Catalyst, your best crystal ball for the future of the region can be found in the area’s Regulating Plan — a big city document nobody will read if I link it here. All you really need to know is that it handily provides us a color-coded map of exactly how tall new construction along the corridor can go without seeking any additional density bonuses.

If you look at the dark purple lots on the map below, you’ll see that the vast majority of properties directly fronting East Riverside Drive can go up to at least 60 feet, or about 5 floors, without going through the ERC’s Density Bonus Program:

Image: City of Austin

You’ll notice tracking east down East Riverside Drive that the 60-foot height limit follows the corridor all the way from I-35 to Pleasant Valley Road, then gets downgraded for a bit before springing back up to full height around Montopolis Drive. Coincidentally, some of the upcoming projects we’re looking at today are located near one or the other of these intersections.

Anyway, think about what this map could foreshadow about the possible future of the area if projects along the corridor were built to these specifications, or even exceeded these heights by participating in the area’s Density Bonus Program — looks a lot like South Lamar Boulevard to us. Here’s a taste:

1919 East Riverside Drive

The American Bingo hall at 1919 East Riverside Drive, eventually set to be demolished to make way for an apartment project. Photo by James Rambin.

We’ve taken a look at this mixed-use residential and retail project by Dallas real estate giants Trammell Crow Residential before, but now we’ve got a little more info about what’s replacing the American Bingo hall at 1919 East Riverside Drive. The development, also described with the address 1400 Royal Crest Drive, is a seven-story, 310-unit multifamily community — almost certainly apartments, going by the existing portfolio of the developer — with three floors of parking, one underground.

Plans for the building show 41 efficiency units, 206 one-bedroom units, and 63 two-bedroom units. Despite the project’s roughly 3,600 square feet of retail area facing East Riverside Drive, which is labeled as containing a coffee shop and some kind of co-working space, more of the building actually faces Royal Crest Drive:

A landscape plan for the 1919 building gives us a pretty good idea of its footprint, with the retail frontage on East Riverside Drive and the larger face of the building facing Royal Crest Drive. Rosita’s Al Pastor appears unaffected for now, by the way. Image: Stantec / City of Austin

What’s particularly interesting about this project is that it’s exceeding the area’s 60-foot height limit by participating in the East Riverside Corridor’s Density Bonus Program, which allows for extra height and density if a project meets certain neighborhood benefit requirements. The 1919 building will rise 79 feet, and in return it’s providing 11,438 square feet of affordable housing, among other improvements like larger public common space. It’s unclear how many affordable units that square footage would create, but it’s still something considering how many projects in this area don’t even seek the density bonus.

Illustrations of the 1919 East Riverside residential building. You’ll notice the narrower portion of the building is the one facing East Riverside Drive. Image: Stantec / City of Austin

One more thing — those of us who enjoy Rosita’s Al Pastor, the taco shop in the same shopping center as the ill-fated bingo hall falling to make way for this building, won’t have to worry about losing that restaurant for now. There’s always the possibility of a second phase of expansion, but the site plans for the 1919 project clearly show only the eastern half of the shopping center occupied by the bingo hall converting to apartments, with the Rosita’s area remaining as far as we can tell. Stay safe, Rosita’s.

South Shore Highline – 2435 East Riverside Drive

A nighttime view of the South Shore Highline project from East Riverside Drive. It appears there’s a second sidewalk here for retail access completely separated from the road itself, likely for safety purposes. Image: Urban Genesis

Hey, this project’s really coming along! The details don’t appear to have changed much since we covered it two years ago, but the new rendering above gives us another look at what we’re getting: a 112-unit, four-story mixed-use building with retail facing East Riverside Drive, by Houston-based developers Urban Genesis. 

An aerial photo of progress on the South Shore Highline project from back in May — it’s even further along now, but this view is great. Image: Crimson Building Company

5700 East Riverside Drive

This drainage map from the 5700 project’s site plan gives us a pretty good idea of the building’s footprint. Image: Walker Partners

This extremely large residential project is really what we’re talking about when we talk about South Lamarization, for better and for worse — more on the “worse” part in a second. On a roughly three-acre tract at the northwest corner of East Riverside Drive and County Club Road, an entity connected with New Jersey development group the Michaels Organization plans a 442-unit apartment building that will stretch more than 600 feet down East Riverside Drive between Penick Drive and Country Club Road — that’s how you start getting the “canyon effect.”

Here’s a southern-facing illustration of the 5700 apartment plan, meaning this is the side of the building facing East Riverside Drive — it’s big! Image: Walker Partners / City of Austin

Unfortunately, this project throws out the whole mixed-use part of vertical mixed-use by having no street-level retail, as far as we can tell. On the bright side, it will contain 39 affordable units as part of the development bonus getting it up to 65 feet in height, but it’s still not a very inspiring design for one of the largest residential buildings headed to this part of town.

To be fair, there isn’t a lot of other retail in this area, but it would be nice if the building set a trend — and for what it’s worth, the upcoming Urban East project, located even farther east than the 5700 site, includes 20,000 square feet of retail. That’s the kind of South Lamarization we can get behind.

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