Search Results for: w hotel

Colorado Tower scheduled for launch next month

Jude Galligan | May 28, 2013 |

Despite some ominous rumbling on the horizon that the project could be delayed indefinitely, I’m excited to share the news this week that Cousin’s magnificent Third & Colorado office tower is breaking ground next month.

Cousin’s issued a press release Thursday announcing that the 29-story, 371,000-square-foot office tower will break ground early next month. The building has been christened “Colorado Tower” and is scheduled for near completion by the end of 2014.

The Colorado Tower project has already signed two law firm tenants — Dubois Bryant & Campbell – which now offices in 700 Lavaca — and Scott Douglass & McConnico, which now offices in 600 Congress.

Earlier this year, Austin Towers picked up on the fact that this project was running behind schedule, after Cousins initially said it would break ground last year, due to among other things, a pending zoning change that council approved earlier this year.

A lot of people are forgetting that for the longest time the lot was supposed to be a hotel: an 18-story, 300-room Westin Hotel to be exact.

Who could have predicted back in 2008 when the hotel was first announced, on the foothills of the recession, that here we’d be in 2013 with almost a 90 percent downtown Austin office occupancy rate, a smorgasbord of hotel development and an urban residential market that is bright red hot (we’re talking lightsaber red).

(Conversely, I remember Will Wynn and Brewster McCracken – former Austin council members — hyping an upcoming urban rail election back then. Who would have also predicted that here we’d be in 2013 practically no closer to real mass transit, and being outdone handsomely Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.)

Enough about that, though. Check out these renderings of Colorado Tower!

First Phase of Green Water Construction Moving Forward?

Jude Galligan | May 15, 2013 |

Move over, Seaholm! The other massive redevelopment on Cesar Chavez, the Green Water Treatment Plant Redevelopment, is rumbling to life!

Adding to the seemingly endless list of construction occurring downtown, it looks the Green Water Treatment Plant construction could be getting underway very soon.

A site plan for a high-rise apartment on “Block 1” (110 San Antonio) – possibly climbing 38 stories – has been turned into City Hall for the lot just west of the Silicon Labs building. It’s another exciting moment for downtown Austin, and the culmination of years of “wait and see” from guys like me, who watched these project move at a glacial pace after the economy tanked in 2009.

2011 RENDERING OF VIEW FROM SEAHOLM INTAKE

It was way back in 2008 that Trammel Crow won the bidding process to redevelop the site, and another five years before it hammered out a deal with the city.

On May 25, 2012 the Austin City Council approved an agreement with a development team led by the Trammell Crow Company to redevelop the site with several buildings up to 30 stories tall. The project will have 1.75 million square feet of development, including 826 apartments, 456,000 sq. ft. of office space, a 200 room hotel and 82,000 sq. ft. of retail (most along an extension of the 2nd Street District).

GreenWater2 — 2011 RENDERING OF PROJECT SITE

The project hit another, unexpected, snag when a dust-up occurred over seven heritage trees that are on the site. There were some concerns that the city was applying double standards by not making the developer follow the Heritage Tree ordinance, which the city council enacted in 2010 after Trammel Crow had its plans, but before it inked a deal with the city.

In the end, Trammel Crow agreed to save the trees, but would have to sacrifice about 67,000 square feet of leasable area, and the city agreed to hand over $1.7 million to compensate them, according to the Austin Business Journal. [h/t Chris Bradford, see comments]

We have yet to see clearly how a reduction of almost 70,000 square feet will impact the scope of the development.

Back in 2012, the per block details were posted on the SkyscraperPage forum:

Block 23 Office
28 floors
566,074 gross square feet
524,143 usable square feet

Block 1 Residential (SITE PLAN FILED)
38 floors
682,120 gross square feet
531,700 usable square feet

  Block 185 Residential
39 floors
436,975 gross square feet
336,600 usable square feet

  Block 188 Hotel
19 floors
245,643 square feet

Downtown News and Rumor Round-up

Jude Galligan | May 7, 2013 |

Rainey Street District hotel breaking ground next month?

If you’ve been around downtown Austin since 2006, you’ve been hearing about the Hotel Van Zandt.

It was a sister development to the Shore Condos, sharing the northern end of the site. Hotel Van Zandt was initially planned to be a $100 million, 29-story hotel and condo tower. The scope has been reduced to 16 stories and will include just the hotel component.

We’ve heard all of this before. Developers are now telling the Statesman they plan to get going next month. This is the same thing they told the ABJ in March, which is a sign that it is indeed ready to roll.

Hotel Van Zandt was initially planned to be a $100 million, 29-story hotel and condo tower. The scope has been reduced to 16 stories and will include just the hotel component.

Statesman has more

New Travis County courthouse up for debate

The ongoing debate for whether or not Travis County will enter into a deal for a public-private partnership to build a new courthouse downtown could be coming to a head.

Recently, the Statesman profiled some of the issues associated with the project, and on Tuesday the Commissioner Court talked to the finalists for the deal: URS and Broaddus and Associates.

The court did not take a vote when it discussed it at a hearing this past Tuesday, but is taking the issue back up this Tuesday.

The new courthouse could rise 17 stories next to Republic Square. Earlier this year, commissioners decided they will hold a bond election to finance the courthouse, but no date is certain.

If the deal ever falls through, or the public does not approve the bonds, it would put a lot that is not encumbered by capitol view limits back into the private market.

Statesman has more

Austin is a finalist to host the X Games

ESPN announced that Austin is one of four finalists to host the 2014, 2015 and 2016 X Games. The games would be held at the Circuit of the Americas, but without a doubt, we can expect something related downtown. If – of course – Austin ends up taking the cake.

For the record, I think it will.

Austin is competing with Chicago, Detroit, and Charlotte, N.C. I think both COTA and Gov. Perry will roll out the red carpet and offer just as competative package of any tax breaks the other cities and states can offer. From a ticketing and marketing perspective, the folks at ESPN must know that Austin is going to have the best draw among the kids and also know that marketing machines like Nike and Samsung already have the ground troops and past experience to tackle Austin from a marketing perspective, due to SXSW.

ESPN is sending envoys here next month and expects to pick a winner this summer.

KXAN has more

The saga of an expensive parking garage coming to a close?

For you readers who are devotees of downtown palace intrigue, the saga of Whittington v. City of Austin could finally be coming to a close.

The case started almost a decade ago, in relation to the public-private partnership the city got into to build the Hilton next to the convention center. The city seized Harry’s downtown lot and he sued them for it.

After a series of trials, the case made it all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court, which sided with the city.

Got to give it to the man, he knows how to dig in and raise hell. Although, he must have asked himself several times over the past few years: What would that lot have been worth today if the city hadn’t tied it up in litigation 10 years ago?

Maybe now, they will put all of that vacant retail space, which wraps the ground level of the garage, to good use.

ABJ has more

Big News for Rainey Street District

Jude Galligan | May 3, 2013 |

By now you might have read the breaking news that the Sutton Co. is proposing to build a three-tower complex (including a 65 story tower!) across the street from Iron Works BBQ, with a tower that would be taller than the Austonian.

What you may not realize yet is that Rainey Center, the dual tower project that was supposed to encompass up to 50 stories each, and include up to 1,000 apartments and condos, next door to the Lustre Pearl in Rainey Street, is dead as envisioned… BUT will be replaced by a new concept.

Wally Scott and Mac Pike – aka the Sutton Co. – have sold the 2-acre site to subsidiary of the Houston-based Dinerstein Companies. This information was buried in the last paragraph in a blockbuster story the Statesman published about a larger than life deal around the block.

According to information posted over at the SkyscraperPage forum, alleged to be taken from city records, Dinerstein is scrapping the dual tower concept for an eight-story mixed use building with an internal parking garage.

That’s a major let down, IMO. Austin has no shortage of squat beige buildings. Hopefully the new proposal will retain some ‘wow’ factor.

Maybe it just didn’t make sense from a traffic management standpoint to have that much of a draw right off the Cesar Chavez and I-35 access road, and in any case enables Sutton Co. to get capital for an even more inspiring, legacy project.

Still, once people start absorbing this information, it could instill a sense of skepticism about the Sutton Co.’s latest proposal. It wasn’t long ago – after all – that the Statesman broke news about the Rainey Center project (now Dinerstein is reducing the scope), just like it is doing now with the Waller Center project. Even the Statesman’s Shonda Novak — perennial cheerleader of Austin development — put a caveat in the first line her story about Waller Center of “if it happens”.

The details on the Waller Center project are as follows:

$500 million project
3 acres at East Cesar Chavez and Red River streets near Waller Creek.
Condos/Hotel tower – 65 floors
Apartment tower – 35 to 45 floors
Office tower – 17 to 20 floors
Proposed groundbreaking – mid to late 2014.

We’d love to see this one happen and reflect the vision below. It would be a huge boon to downtown, specifically the Waller Creek District. Cheers to ambitious thinking.

Austin is king city of downtown jobs

Jude Galligan | April 18, 2013 |

I have heard off and on over the years that the urban core of Austin holds about 30 percent of the jobs in the Austin region. It’s a mantra often repeated, especially as it relates to transportation discussions. But, as I thought about it, no one has ever been really able to say how or where that sound bite came from.

Thankfully, we now have a bonafide source, The Brookings Institution, who says it is about 25 percent (if we count “downtown” as the three-mile zone surrounding it and not the ~~bureaucratic~~ political boundaries City Hall assigns to “downtown” as the 78701 and part of 78703 zip codes).

The Austin American-Statesman just posted a story on downtown Austin job growth, based on a report by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

You can read the whole Brookings report here, or download the Austin snapshot here.

If you’ve followed us at the Downtown Austin Blog for a while, you’ll know that from time to time, we like to dive into data around condo sales. This time, I’m diving into these job numbers.

Report on the report

The Brookings report puts into numbers what we all already know intuitively: downtown Austin keeps adding jobs. What we don’t always realize is how exceptional that fact is, relative to other cities.

Between 2007 and 2010 – the years of the Great Recession – downtown Austin was one of only FOUR of the major cities across the entire country where the number of absolute jobs in the urban core *WENT UP*. Amazing.

Austin joined Charleston, Cincinnati and New Orleans in this distinction, but Austin was the only one that did not lose jobs overall during this time period. (I’m not smart enough about this, but does that mean Austin never had a recession??)

If we count on the number of office developments, and hotels underway now in downtown, it’s safe to assume downtown Austin will continue to lead the country in adding jobs.

Food for thought

One might think that this puts Austin in a magic realm of urban development and new urban development. Well, it does, in a way, but paradoxically, the share of jobs in downtown Austin, relative to the jobs in the metro area actually fell from 2000 to 2010 by about 3 percent.

Why? Because even though Austin added about 6,000 jobs downtown from 2000 to **2010** – which in and of itself is remarkable – in the zone that is 10-35 miles from the Central Business District, the city added a staggering 74,000 jobs.

It is interesting to me because, if you look at other American cities especially in the past three decades, most of the cities that had surges of jobs surged in the suburbs, while downtowns languished. This means, matter of fact, downtown Austin is special.

So rather than opening up a debate on whether downtown is “the economic engine” of the region, this new report confirms that downtown is definitely a pumping piston in the engine. As a downtown lover, I’ll cheers to that.

If you are curious about what 3, 10 and 35 miles looks like, here ya go:

35 miles from downtown

10 miles from downtown

3 miles from downtown