Local developers Perry Lorenz and Larry Warshaw (responsible for many Eastside condo projects) and Rick Engel (co-owner of Austin Java) have a contract to buy the Shady Grove RV Park from Susan Toomey Frost, and plan to turn the area into ... wait for it ... condos! The nearby Pecan Grove and Mobile Manor trailer parks, though, are not yet scheduled for condification. The plan, shown above, would create two strips of condos perpendicular to Barton Springs Road. Hopefully, the road between them will be an actual road connecting Barton Springs Road to Toomey Road, instead of just a driveway for the condos. Austin Java would remain, fronting Barton Springs Road, and a new barbeque joint, also fronting Barton Springs Road, is planned.
In other news, the Chameleon Group LLC purchased Barton Court apartments at 2200 Dickson Drive and plan to turn the area into ... wait for it ... a trailer park. Oh, wait, that's not right. They're turning into condos. They've hired local designer extraordinaire Michael Hsu (of Uchi and Bess - IOHO, Uchi is substantially more extraordinaire than Bess, but we still like Hsu). According to the ABJ, the plan is to "create an urban oasis incorporating elements of exotic locales like the island of St. Barths," apparently in an effort to appeal to people who like piña coladas and taking walks in the rain. We tend to stay inside when it's raining. And when it's not raining. Which is why we live at home, with your momma. She wants to know what size sweatshirt your boyfriend wears, BTW.
Image from Boka Powell LLC
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If you want amusement and also to waste a lot of time, read the comments at the Statesman's "Talk of Austin" pseudoblog. The conversation has devolved nicely.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/talk/2006/12/02/shady_grove_rv_park.html#comments
It's funny how the city spends so much time and effort developing McMansion ordinances to maintain neighborhood "character" and then continually goes out of their way to grant variances for projects like this. Austin is definitely getting increasingly "dense".
This is horrible.
As much as I believe Austin needs to retain its character, I also believe we've got to increase central density. Of course part of increasing density involves getting people to ride buses, getting employers to locate near bus routes, getting business to located near bus routes. It's a bigger issue. I wish we could take a stand on making Austin's architecture weird though. That would help a lot.
We're those RV spots pretty pricey anyway? I thought those parks were the equivalent of high priced hotel suites for the Winnebago set. Maybe I'm wrong...
Tim:
I understand you have good intentions, but for anyone who knows Austin in the least bit knows for damn sure that:
CAPITAL METRO SUCKS ASS and SHOULD BE DISOLVED immediately.
It is the worst bus system in the United States, ranking near the very bottom in rider fee recovery (the people that ride Cap Metro pay less than 5% of the cost to run Capital Metro). The same study found that it would be cheaper to buy cars for every single Cap Metro rider in Austin than to maintain Capital Metro at its current state.
Excuse me if this sounds "Texan" but the people of Austin will never leave their cars. No matter how many flawed plans Capital Metro proposes and we end up paying for, the transportation problem won't be fixed.
Stew,
Cap Metro's low FRR is because hippies don't like high fares; not because ridership is low. On most metrics, it does very very well compared to other urban bus systems - about as well as it possibly can do given the financial and especially political environment in which it must operate.
And the study you quote is a useless sack of crap. Don't believe anything those lying weasels at the Travis County Libertarians write about transit until they start exploring the big fat subsidy you get to drive your car on the public roads every day.
As for Texans not leaving their cars - I suppose Dallas' wildly successful light rail system (matching what we would have, and should have, built had it passed here in 2000) and Houston's successful starter line are just figments of our imagination.
OK M1EK,
Believe everything you hear from Capital Metro, because they have never wronged us in the past.
And I'll concede with you that the riders in Dallas and Houston are happy with their rail systems/huge debt.
I do agree with Capital Metro's recent push for a fair hike that would change our archaic 50 cent fair, but I believe that got shot down.
Not just the RIDERS - the VOTERS are happy with the systems, Stew; further putting the nail in the coffin of the (always a load of crap) argument that "Texans will never get out of their cars". Both cities overwhelmingly passed huge expansions of their rail networks the last chance they got.
The huge debt is offset by paying for a lot less $2.20/gallon (or more) gas for large soul sucking SUVs. Taxes up, gas consumption down. Your wallet winds up about the same weight.
And, is that huge debt really such a concern when you consider the ramifications of the status quo? You're mortgaging the future for the short(er) term of lower property taxes.
We should have a competition to see what Texas city can be as shortsighted as possible (and this includes Austin with its ridiculous condo/road building and/or support of iconic buildings).
People tend to make choices that make sense. If driving is cheaper than taking a bus, including the value of the amount of time spent waiting in traffic compared to the amount of time spent walking to and waiting for the bus, then people will drive. If taking the bus is cheaper, people will take the bus. To me, the amount of time it takes is much more relevant to the decision than the cost of bus fare or gas (I drive to work now primarily because my commute would take 3-4 times as long if I took the bus).
If we want to encourage use of transit, then we should: (1) encourage dense development that makes it easy to put bus stops a short walk from a large number of potential riders and (2) make buses travel faster than cars.
It would take a lot to make buses travel faster than cars, given that they stop quite often to let people on and off. A dedicated bus lane on Barton Springs Road (and Congress and Lamar and pretty much every other road with two or more lanes in each direction in densely populated parts of the city) seems to me like the only way to make it happen, and thereby make mass use of public transportation a reality in Austin.
Shilli hit the ball out of the park with those thoughts.
Or, you just do the obvious thing and reserve a lane for light rail - which is the only way any US city has been able to get a non-trivial number of choice commuters to switch to public transportation since the post-WWII advent of subsidized automobile travel.
As long as you're reserving a lane for buses anyways, the extra capital costs for the rail are more than offset by the operating cost savings you get from the much more efficient trains.
Just tear it all fucking down. We don't need Flipnotics, they can relocate, put some condos with a view on that piece of property and do something with it. And what's up with all that space down the road? There is a lot of water front property on both the north and south sides of Barton Spings that could be used to set up several urban oasis' - Someone should get rid of those stupid little league fields on Toomey as well, talk about a great place for 50 single people to live in a 10 story bulding with a view.
Cross over Lamar and we can get rid of that stupid pitch and putt, the Peter Pan mini golf and Jack and Adam's. Prime reality that can surely support at least 5 new multi family complexes. And then there's the big piece of open land across Riverside from the Events Center. They don't even have concerts there anymore hardly. Build on it! Better yet, fuck Runtex too, those bastards are sitting on seriously cush land that they should give up for fair market value in to get some affordable housing in that area. Can you imagine if they actually built condos that they only sold for $300K, everyone could live downtown.
If you've read this you can now disregard, "they" will be here shortly to tell us that we are all wrong and to only cite studies that support their point of view.
"Condos for some, miniature American flags for others..."
Grape, you're such a jackass. Those places I'm sure will be allowed to move in to the retail spaces that those developments will have if they did build on all of them. And yes, I do think its a good idea to use land like Auditorium Shores for a project like this. no one really uses it anyway and I'm sure M1EK and Shili can provide examples of how it could be done. People need to realize that this city is changing and if you want to stay here, then get used to it and promote condo developments where ever they can fit and there are a lot of places they can fit in the downtown area.
Peter Pan is already going to be replaced by condominiums soon, sadly.
I live on S. 1st and love the independence my car has always given me. However, after taking a job downtown, I now take the bus because it's cheaper than parking downtown. Shilli's right -- it just makes more sense now.
I find Cap Metro to be pretty efficient in the downtown area. The trick is just learning the bus schedules, but the route planner on Cap Metro's website is very handy. You can enter your address and destination and hit "Go" and it'll tell you exactly which buses to take.
Say it ain't so about Peter Pan! I love that place. Of course I'm sure their tax bill is probably staggering.
As for: "It would take a lot to make buses travel faster than cars, given that they stop quite often to let people on and off." An interesting experiment is to get behind a bus at rush hour going down Manchaca. You'll find that due to the lack of left hand turn lanes it's actually often faster to follow the bus. Buses tend to become faster solutions as gridlock increases. And I know plenty of people who would ditch the bus for their commute if they had a convenient bus stop by their house and a convenient bus stop by their work. You miss the point here. We don't need people ditching their cars completely. If we could just get a small percentage to ditch them for rush hour we'd see significant change.
Tim,
The bus will never, ever, ever be faster than a car travelling the same route. If nothing else, you could have just passed the bus during one of the times when the left lane wasn't blocked by a car waiting to turn. That's not true with a train - it is, in fact, very easy for a light rail train to beat a car in many of the systems built in this country over the last couple of decades.
No city in this country has ever gotten a non-trivial number of 'choice commuters' to switch by improving their BUS network; because there's only so much better it can get. Buses' advantages are as feeders (capillaries), where flexibility can actually buy you something. Speed and reliability are far more important for the main branches of a transit system.
Buses work when you have expensive of inconvenient parking, to a certain extent, but most of us don't have to pay to park; and even the sub-population that does is shrinking (every new building downtown lately has increased the supply of parking per-worker overall). Beyond that, there's little reason to ride the bus unless they get priority in the form of reserved lanes.
Go check out my crackplog (linked in the signature here). There's a whole category on this stuff waiting to be explored.
It's an RV park on a prime piece of downtown, privately owned, lakeside property.
This was not going to last forever.
If you could earn $50,000 a year at another job doing the same thing, would you stay at your current one for $25,000? If you had a piece of property that someone offered you $5 million for, would you rent it out for $5,000?
?
Peter Pan was built in 1948 and is owned by the Deismuke family. They apparently have absolutley zero interest in selling it to the highest-bidder, or so says a certain employee with whom I spoke today.
i wanna buy grape ape a drink of choice. level the whole city and build the biggest condo ever around campus; i guess we could split it up and make it half loft, half condos.
will wynn gets the dilznik.
Gee, it sure seems like we could use some more condo projects around these parts.
It's just sounds strange we Capital Metro riders are only paying 5-9% (if my numbers are correct) of the cost of running Capital Metro.
I was in Chile this summer and the riders were paying almost 100%.
Call me strange, but it felt better riding public transportation that I, the rider, was actually paying for.
It seems like Capital Metro has been doing things wrong for a while now. I'm not advocating getting rid of the bus system, but if Austin ever does move to rail etc. we should make sure to phase out the costly, ineffective Cap Metro buslines.
I live on S. 1st and love the independence my car has always given me.
Your car has never given you independence and anyone that thinks otherwise is blind to reality.
Your car has tied you to the depedence of oil.
Your car has tied you to a corrupt and unjust world order.
Your car has tied you to a style of living that is unnatural.
Your car has tied you to the worst asset allocation in the history of the world (millions of years of sun energy for 100 years of asphalt and petro products).
Your car has made you dependent on the status quo.
What independence has your car afforded you? The ability to unnaturally sit in traffic to and from your desk job in a cube for a software company? You're independent... to eat food you have no connection with grown, packaged, shipped, and served by workers who are beaten into the ground by the very system they claim is giving them independence.
I call bullshit that the car has afforded anyone any independence.
And, by "you" I also mean "me". "Us". Most of us are guilty and I envy those who are not.
You can't say that a car doesn't give you independence. Tell me how not having a vehicle could ever allow you to attend an inpromtu meeting across town or if you're mother was taken to the hospital and you needed to be there right away. Are you going to tell here you'll meet here there, but she's going to have to wait until the 3:15 picks you up. Sorry mom.
Seriously, while I agree there is an energy crisis and blah blah blah, the fact is that having a car allows you to independently do a lot of thing you otherwise couldn't. So if work tells you that you need to be in San Antonio at 10am this morning, how are you going to make that meeting? Are you gonna hop on your trusty two-wheeler and peddle it to the one meeting that could make or break your deal? I'll see you there, I'm your competitor that just passed you and got there early and took them out to breakfast, because I drove my car independently.
It would be nice to live in a world where everyone could walk, but unfortunately none of us live in that world and never will.
The fact that you feel obligated to go to San Antonio at 10am for work really shows your independence.
Stew,
You pay next to zero of the cost of driving through gasoline taxes. The bus rider actually pays a more direct user fee than you do, unless you're on a toll road.
Grape:
How on EARTH do business people ever get things done in cities like New York without the fabulous independence afforded by the private automobile? I guess there aren't any companies there or something.
Newsflash! Austin is not NYC and never will be.
Why is that you are absoltely right and everyone else is wrong? Seriously, are we all idiots for not embracing condo development in Zilker Park or on the banks of Barton Springs Pool? Are all of the people I know, including eleceted officials and other respected people in this city, just idiots as well if they don't support your view. Who are you to determine what is right for Austin and who are you to tell other people that their opinions are incorrect?
Grape,
Keep shifting the goalposts. Good work. You're a really swell individual, I tell you what.
What makes me think I'm right and you're wrong is the same thing that makes you think you're right and every other commenter here is wrong. Oh, and the fact that I also can learn from other cities' experiences. But that's irrelevant; there's nothing Austin can learn from anybody else. Except for cities which don't like public transportation, like San Antonio, I mean. We can learn from them, because they agree with Grape Ape.
You're right.
San Antonio actually did the smart thing and made their highway loops actual highway loops. Loop 1 aka MoPac is the worst "loop" ever. All of the major thoroughfares to go south of Austin or north of Austin go directly through Austin.
You are wrong Stew, just let it go. M1EK will be here shortly.
I guess he got stuck in traffic...
San Antonio is friggin' paradise. Thanks to all those highway loops; and of course, the rampant unchecked suburban sprawl to the north and northwest, and the complete absence of downtown and close-in densification, San Antonio is clearly a much better place to live than Austin.
What the hell were we all thinking?
PS: Houston's even better!
Lol. You got owned by the traffic comment and this is all you can come up with? Weak. Please enlighten us as to how "loops" that only run through a city are better than "loops" that go around a city? This should be good.
Loops that run around a city may sometimes be necessary, but are more directly correlated with shitty cities than with great ones, son. That's what it means.
San Antonio doesn't just have loops - it also has several highways that run directly through downtown. Traffic and sprawl in San Antonio are both worse than they are in Austin, and the massive highway system there is the primary reason.
Austin really already has an inner loop - it is composed of 360, 183 and 290 instead of having a single name, but it forms a loop around the city just the same. Highway lovers will be pleased to find that the various toll-roads currently under construction in Austin (130 and 45) complete three quarters of the outer loop. I doubt it will take long for the SW portion to be added.
http://www.txtag.org/centex.html
We are well on our way to becoming a sprawling metropolis, just like every other large city in Texas. The fact that we didn't have "loops" was saving us, not hurting us. Losing that is a major nail in the coffin. If that meant we could eliminate the parts of MoPac and I-35 inside the inner loop, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff. I think it is more likely that building all these new highways will increase the pressure to add lanes to MoPac and I-35.
We stand corrected. As usual you two are 100% right and the rest of us remain in awe of your omniscient ways. Come to think of it, I think the loopp in Austin is Actually Red River, MLK, Barton Springs and Lamar. Oh wait, you were talking about a differnt loop. By their logic Stew, I guess there are actually hundreds of loops in Austin. Stupid us.
Grape, what part of my comment are you saying is wrong? Does San Antonio not have major highways through downtown? Do the highways I mentioned not form a loop around Austin? Do the new toll roads not form a larger loop of highways around that? Do you really think regular roads are relevant to a discussion about highways, or are you just arguing without reason?
At least there's two of us that are always right now. For guys who like to throw that complaint around, Grape and stew sure argue a lot. It's almost like they think they're right and everybody else is wrong, isn't it?
There is a distinct difference between voicing opinion and being so self involved that each statement you make is an assertion of your importance and undeniable correctness.
GrapeApe, you're sure always right on that one right there. Can't get any more righter than that. Right right right right right.
I got it: maybe, like certain unidentified fruity individuals, I should start shooting my mouth off about topics I _don't_ know anything about - because then I could be RONG enough times that I wouldn't always be right! ROCK!
Lol. Damn you're an easy target. It's a blog, do you take everything this seriously? I love having so much free time that I can get people like you so worried about what people are posting or what others may be posting about them. This has been really fun, but I'm bored of you now.
By the way. I am a "pro-growther" and my apologies for using you as idle amusement for when I was bored. At least you can still argue with Stew.
I'm lost, y'all are lame.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.