development

Downtown Austin Retail Space

Jude Galligan | July 22, 2009 |

One of the better trends in urban design is to include retail space below residential buildings. I see downtown Austin’s retail offerings as overly homogeneous: salon, boutique, restaurant, or bar. Feedback from DANA members, and urban-Austinites in general, is the desire to see more practical stores to serve the many thousands of people that live and work here.

After the jump are a few examples of the ground floor retail space currently available below some of downtown Austin’s luxury buildings. You’ll see that space below these buildings is not cheap and ranges from $30-36 per foot plus NNN. This could yield a monthly lease payment of $3,500-4,000 per month per 1,000 feet of retail space.

The Downtown Austin Alliance has a great list of retail vacancies you should check out, too.

1/2 City Block For Sale

Jude Galligan | May 15, 2009 |

The ABJ is reporting that the Whitely Paper Co. building, which was the original site for the downtown Austin 21c Museum & hotel, is back on the market for $3.8MM.

Map

Travis House

Jude Galligan | April 28, 2009 |

Austinist is reporting that Travis House could be replaced soon. I haven’t seen plans for what could replace it, but the owners believe it needs to be razed to do whatever it is they might do. Eric Van Hyfte of BOKA Powell architects appealed to the Historic Landmark Commission last night (detail pdf).

The structure currently known as Travis House is sort of downtown Austin obscurity. The building has been vacant for years and was victim of a fire in January. In past this building has served as a YWCA and also the Guadalupe Hotel. Before 1946 the site was the location of a Southwestern Bell garage. I recall while at UT, the building was a halfway house.

Interestingly, directly across the street at the burned out Guadalupe Arts Center, 1705 Guadalupe and 1715 Guadalupe have jointly obtained entitlements for 350 foot height and a 12:1 FAR which translates into a 30 story tower.

It’s my understanding that historic landmarks do nothing to preserve the ‘history’ of a building, only to prevent it from being torn down. If anyone has more information please email me or share in the comments.

-Jude

image links to pdf

Thanks to DANA’s Roger Cauvin for the heads up on this Daily Texan article!

Interesting Quote

AG | April 20, 2009 |

I’m a little behind on my reading, I’ll admit. But I find Sundays are a great day to catch up on many of the things that pass you by…..all while enjoying a mimosa or glass of wine. Anyway, last night, wine in hand, I was reading through Austin Monthly‘s March 2009 Issue (the Music Issue) and an interview with Andy Langer piqued my interest. Andy Langer is not only an Austin music journalism institution, as he’s covered the scene for years and years and lived in Austin for quite sometime, but he’s a national contributor to magazines like Esquire, and has traveled seemingly everywhere to see shows and meet bands.

Anyway, the interview was essentially just a bunch of quotes from Mr. Langer, and one sort of popped out as not only a strong sentiment, but also as being particularly relevant to this blog:

“Find me a place that doesn’t have cranes in the sky building expensive condos and you’ll find me a place that’s seriously depressed and probably a place where I can’t have The New York Times delivered on my doorstep. And I think that’s probably not a place that I wanna live.”

Andy’s credentials don’t necessarily qualify him as a real estate expert, but he’s arguably got a pretty good background in social culture and the issues surrounding Austin’s social scene. And it kind of sounds like he’s saying that the cities that aren’t building and that aren’t building projects in a way that embraces urban density and development are the cities that probably don’t have or won’t have the cultural reach/appeal that most of us generally recognize being an enhancement to our quality of life.

Source: Austin Monthly, March 2009 Issue, “Things I’ve Learned” with Andy Langer, by Paul Carruba.

Federal Courthouse Gets Stimulated

Jude Galligan | April 1, 2009 |

This is everywhere today, so I won’t rehash the details, but according to KXAN, $116MM of stimulus funds are going to build what we’ve been hoping would just go away – the Federal Courthouse. Eek! The design of the proposed federal courthouse is postmodern brutalism. Previous discussion over at Austin Contrarian.

-Jude