The New Downtown Austin -- Operation: Density

The Resolution charges the City with creating and enforcing what will be known as the Downtown Austin Plan. In April, the City released its formal “Request for Qualifications” (RFQ) for “a consultant with extensive experience in urban downtown planning and financial modeling, to assist the City and the community in the creation of a vision for the development of downtown Austin for the next 20 years, and to develop an implementable strategy to achieve that vision.” At the moment, the City is reviewing several submitted proposals, and the choice will apparently be made by late July or August of this year. Whichever consultant’s proposal the City decides to select will very much determine the course of development in the downtown Austin area for years to come. Ultimately, it’s the City Council’s decision to make.

The publicly-stated goal here, as Mayor Wynn has emphasized repeatedly, is to pursue “smart growth” and ”population density” for the downtown area. This basically means preventing horizontal urban sprawl, common in cities like San Antonio and Houston, by encouraging growth to go vertical. Wynn and his supporters insist that, in order to preserve Austin’s unique character and personality while at the same time keeping downtown businesses thriving, the idea of population density is the key.

But none of this is new. For years, the City has been trying to spark an en masse migration of young businesspeople to the downtown residential scene with these same ideas in mind. Until now, the City has generally failed. The reason: despite the improvements in downtown infrastructure, the increase in attractive upscale housing, and the building of attractive, chic retail stores and eateries, it’s still too expensive for most people to live downtown.

But this time around, the City's plan includes a solution for the high costs of living in downtown Austin: The subsidization of residential construction projects. Several members of City Council have gone on record as suggesting that, as part of the Downtown Austin Plan, the City may actually “buy down” the price of developing residential towers so that the cost of renting or purchasing an urban flat wouldn't be so steep. Whether this will actually work depends on just how much disposable income the City can scare up to provide such subsidies to developers. Yet rest assured that if the City does pull off its subsidy plan, and affordable, state-of-the-art housing is finally constructed in the downtown area, we could see a total transformation of our city as we know it as thousands upon thousands of people begin moving to the area within MLK, Lamar, Town Lake, and I-35. Until the Downtown Plan is released, however, stay tuned.

For more information on future development in the Austin downtown area, as well as development across the rest of the city, here are some useful links:

• City of Austin Downtown Development information site
  
• City of Austin Zoning & Platting Commission
  
• City of Austin Downtown Commission
  
• Austin Neighborhoods Council
  
• Downtown Austin Neighborhood Assoc.
  
• Old West Austin Neighborhood Assoc.
  

* Photos from Austin Urban Living 2000.com