Wilson Tower’s Downsized Downtown Austin Apartment Plan Moves Forward

Image: Wilson Capital / HKS

Back in April, we learned that the formerly record-setting plan for a supertall residential building in downtown Austin known as Wilson Tower had been scaled back by its developers at local firm Wilson Capital, with the firm’s president Taylor Wilson citing changing market conditions for the tower’s roughly 50 percent reduction in height from 1,035 feet to approximately 515 feet, or from 80 to an estimated 44 floors.

A comparison between the original supertall version of Wilson Tower announced in 2022 and its shortened update from earlier this year. Images: Wilson Capital / HKS

Construction costs and interest rates are both higher now than they were when we originally designed the project. We believe this new design is more appropriate to provide an activated ground floor while remaining feasible in today’s environment.

— Taylor Wilson, Wilson Capital

Although we think the overall look of the tower planned at 410 East Fifth Street by global architecture firm HKS suffers a bit in the translation to a smaller scale, the project seems to preserve most of its interesting design features and will still bring hundreds of new apartments online downtown — plus, unlike a lot of the more ambitious (and office-heavy) plans we saw announced between 2020 and 2022, it’s looking like Wilson Tower is actually planning to clear its site and break ground soon, which you can’t really take for granted anymore.

Image: Wilson Capital / HKS

A number of development-related permits for the project have shown promising signs of progress in the last few days, with city approval of the project’s site plan moving forward earlier this week — not to mention that a demolition permit application for the Avenue Lofts building currently occupying the property and a license agreement for the assembly of a tower crane at the site were both submitted yesterday. The collective takeaway here is that someone is pretty serious about getting this project towards an official groundbreaking, and it’s more progress than we can report for many of the tower plans we’ve seen announced downtown in the last few years.

A view of Wilson Tower looking northwest, with the Hilton Austin in the foreground. Image: Wilson Capital / HKS

Considering the current degree of market uncertainty, Wilson Tower might be one of the last major towers to start construction in downtown Austin for at least a while — and although we’ve noted some public disappointment about its scaled-back size, it’s helpful to put the tower plan in perspective. At 515 feet, the project will rise to roughly the same height as the Frost Bank Tower, which was Austin’s tallest building until 2008. Fifteen years later there’s a little more variety downtown, with a genuine supertall under construction a few blocks away, but if you’ve lived here a while you’ll appreciate how fast those goalposts shift. In the end, we’re of the opinion that the best tower design is one you actually build. Can we get an amen?