It’s been a long time coming for the $500MM Green Water Treatment Plant redevelopment, situated along Cesar Chavez, bounded to the west by Shoal Creek, and to the east by Silicon Labs. We’ve stumbled upon good reason to be excited that development could begin soon.
Back in May, when a site plan application was submitted to the city, we shared with you that the first phase of the new Green Water development – a residential highrise known simply as Block 1 – was moving from possibility to reality.
But I, along with nearly everyone else, was kind of confused about what exactly was being planned and how close the Green Water vision was going to match the original vision after a tree preservation snafu at City Council. This has been resolved and the plan is to incorporate the trees into the design.
Updated elevation drawings were submitted to the city which show a building that steps back from Cesar Chavez.
We can expect that the first phase will be a 38 40-story mixed use building with a total of 446 units. Majority one-bedroom, but included efficiencies, two-bedrooms and three-bedrooms, ranging from about 450 square feet to 2,000. It is anticipated these will be apartments (for rent).
At street level, we should see 14,000 square feet of retail, 15,000 square feet of restaurant space, and another 23,000 of office space.
The project is being developed by Trammell Crow and designed by Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB), an award winning architecture, interior design and planning firm with offices in Chicago and San Francisco, who has some very classy buildings all over the world.
If you spend some time perusing SCB’s design portfolio, I think you can start to feel some excited anticipation for this on the Austin skyline. No doubt, numerous tourists and passers by of what has become a fenced off lawn have wondered just what is going there.
While we can now see the profile the development, we eagerly anticipate some updated renderings.
Just FYI, the 2nd St. District is not being expanded west of San Antonio, just as it wasn’t expanded eastward when the Austonian and Ashton went up. The formal “2nd St. District” is a designated five-block area, and in terms of its retail spaces, the City of Austin — which owns all of the land underneath the District — retained leasing rights for ground-level space in each of the four buildings put up there, and then subleased those rights to AMLI. That turned out to be a mistake of monumental proportions, given AMLI’s complete lack of experience managing any sort of retail area; only three locally owned retail stores, out of well over 100 that have been housed there since it opened in 2005, have managed to survive, mostly due to AMLI’s own incompetence in marketing the District. The restaurants there have generally done quite well, but the retail casualty rate for the District is startlingly high, with most individual spaces housing at least their second or third tenant by now (and some on their fourth or even fifth).
Anyway, the addition to Second Street, the street, has nothing to do with any addition to Second Street, the shopping district — which is almost certainly for the best. (Also FYI, the W Hotel/ACL Live complex isn’t formally part of the District, either. Stratus Development remains in control of that block, and they are the ones responsible for bringing Urban Outfitters to the area.)
Any word on when this will be starting? It’s supposed to be this year, right?
Also, they’ll have to do the roads first, I would think; the 2nd St. and Nueces St. extensions. That will be really cool.
It looks good. It’ll also be good to extend 2nd street. As nice as that area is, it’s barely big enough to be the kind of shopping/entertainment district that they want it to be. Once this opens it should finally cement the area into something solid.
Love those elevations.