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Downtown Austin Plan Districts Town Hall Meeting on October 10, 2009

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(As sent from the DAA)

This Week in Downtown

“The City of Austin’s Downtown Austin Plan team invites you to participate in a town hall meeting on Saturday, October 10. Details below. We hope you will attend and share your thoughts on the key issues affecting downtown.

Dear Downtown Austin Plan Stakeholder,

Please join us at a “Town Hall” Meeting and share your vision and ideas about the nine districts in Downtown Austin. On Saturday October 10th, 2009, we will be meeting to share our preliminary thoughts and recommendations — and to get your input — on some key issues facing Downtown:

– Downtown District Goals and Priorities
– Downtown Transportation
– Live Music, Art, and “Creative Culture” Policies
– Historic Resources and Preservation Policies
– Land Use and Urban Design Regulations

These issues and more are being addressed by the “Downtown Austin Plan.” For more information about the Plan, please see the project website at:http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/downtown/downtownaustinplan.htm

The specifics of the meeting are as follows:

Event: Downtown Austin Plan — Town Hall Meeting
Date: Saturday October 10, 2009 Time: 9:00 a.m. to Noon
Place: Waller Creek Center, 625 E. 10th Street Room 104
Parking: At this time, we are unsure about the availability of off-street parking, but there is on-street parking in the area. Transit: For bus route information, please consult:http://www.capmetro.org/planner/.

Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any interested individual wishing to attend.

You may receive this invitation more than once as we may have you on multiple stakeholder lists so please excuse the redundancy. If you have any questions about this event, and to RSVP, please contact Jorge Rousselin atjorge.rousselin@ci.austin.tx.us or (512) 974-2975.

The Downtown Austin Plan Team”

The Challenges of Waterloo Park

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Headstone at Waterloo Park
Headstone at Waterloo Park

With vegetation, a natural creek bed, seclusion, and rolling hills, Waterloo Park has the “right stuff” to be the best park in Austin.  Flanked on the east and west by Red River Street and San Jacinto Blvd Trinity, respectively, Waterloo Park’s configuration runs north-south length wise between 15th and 12th streets, as Waller Creek meanders through it.

A couple weekends ago, we wanted to check out the “Birth of Cool” exhibit at the Blanton museum, and we decided to walk from our building (Sabine) along Waller Creek through Waterloo Park.

As we walked through Waterloo Park, we were overtaken with its beauty but disappointed in its care.  We found a littered creek, overgrown vegetation, and hazardous pathways.  One unmarked sinkhole in the middle of the pathway would have seriously injured anyone who didn’t notice it – easily three feet deep.

Waterloo Park sits in an industrial zone
Waterloo Park sits in an industrial zone

With all of its innate beauty, Waterloo Park is analogous to a gifted MVP baseball player, who somehow gets stuck playing for a losing team.

Waterloo Park sits underutilized inside an industrial zone of competing real estate interests: Travis County, State of Texas, University of Texas, and Brackenridge Hospital.

Tough location, eh?

Hospital parking garages to the east.  State of Texas parking garages to the west.  Social services and more parking garages to the north.  The neighborhood and urban fabric breaks down north of 11th Street.  Lack of coordination by the major real estate holders yields nothing of significant neighborhood value to draw a critical mass of pedestrians.

Waterloo Park is a great example of the results of poor urban planning and stakeholder coordination – the park is surrounded with parking garages (blight), is not integrated into the fabric of our neighborhood, and is often inhabited with drug addicts, drunks, and panhandlers.  As such, it remains a destination that few people care to visit.

Downtown Crime: the solution is not more light

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Krimelabb.com
Krimelabb.com

KVUE and FOX 7 news are reporting that the Public Safety Task Force is proposing to cut down on Downtown crime by… get ready for it… adding more light. 🙁

This is a misguided effort to thwart a much bigger problem.

There is a BIG elephant in the room, and it’s called the ARCH.  Drug dealers come from all over the city and prey on those with addiction and/or have mental illness.

According to the article, “Austin police call the area bordered by 8th, 6th, Red River and Trinity, a hotspot for crime.  Forty-two percent of all drug arrests in downtown happen here.” Adding more street lamps is only going to disperse the problem, and will make the understaffed police force’s job more difficult!

As I’ve said before, the ARCH doesn’t belong across from a major liquor store and a block from Austin’s biggest party – Sixth Street.    The way to cut down on crime in Downtown Austin is to: 1) expand the day-time uses of the historic Sixth street buildings, east of Neches St. 2) move the ARCH and its support services away from Sixth Street – though, NOT out of Downtown 3) Revitalize Waller Creek, because right now drug dealing and drug use is hidden from view below the banks of the creek.

Yes, the ARCH should remain Downtown.  Doing so relegates to ‘bunk’ status the argument which demands the ARCH remain centrally located, and the NIMBY-ism arguments against moving the ARCH at all.   Downtown Austin is a big place with plenty of under-utilized land and buildings.

Blight

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Downtown Austin - Parking Garage Nirvana
Downtown Austin - Parking Garage Nirvana

Blight: Something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions, or impedes progress and prosperity.

In Downtown Austin nothing kills hopes, dreams, ambitions, old ladies and little children like under-developed land.  According to DANA board member Roger Cauvin, in economic terms, blight can be considered an “externality,” which “are the indirect costs imposed on society by an economic activity. Pollution is an example of an externality.  If economic agents (e.g. developers) aren’t made to pay for the externalities, we are effectively subsidizing harmful behavior.”

In Downtown Austin, blight manifests itself in the primary forms of:
1) parking lots (or razed lots)
2) parking garages
3) chain link fence
4) perpetual disrepair

The Northeast quadrant of Downtown Austin takes the cake for parking garages.  The area is desolate and completely void of human interaction. Unimproved parking lots are scattered throughout Downtown.  It could easily be argued that Downtown Austin blight reaches it’s zenith on 6th Street.  (slideshow)  Broken doors, windows, tattered chain link fence, destroyed ATMs, it’s all there.

As I see it, the problem of blight is rooted with the owner of the property that is creating or hosting the blight.  The economic behavior of hoarding undeveloped property in the CBD is contrary to the density goals of Downtown Austin stake holders.  It is also contrary to the city’s and county’s goals of collecting ad valorem taxes.  Perhaps more importantly, razing your lot and wrapping it in chain link fence is contrary to the sense of community.

Over the past couple of months you’ve seen related topics discussed at Austin Contrarian.  According to Chris Bradford, “We badly need a mechanism for discouraging property owners from warehousing vacant lots downtown.  The solution is not to shut out all redevelopment to eliminate the risk of this kind of behavior.  What we need is a vacant-lot surcharge or something like it.  A surcharge calibrated to compensate the other downtown property owners, businesses and visitors for the very real cost of blighting a block.  This might encourage property owners/developers to leave existing buildings in place or  to fill in currently vacant lots, even if the structures are inexpensive and small.”

Well said.

-Jude

Tattered chain link fence along Waller Creek
Tattered chain link fence along Waller Creek