Show Preview: Brackett & Co., Real Estate
J. Tillman at the Mohawk - Giveaway
According to the Statesman, the planned project includes 300 apartments and 45,000 sqft of retail on seven acres near the Broken Spoke. Presumably this means the one-story 1970's warehouses on either side of the Spoke will soon be gone. The strip mall to the north and the sprawl-style apartments to the South and East will remain, at least until the next densification boom, as will South Lamar's lack of pedestrian friendly cross streets. Still, street level retail fronting Lamar with residential space above and behind it is an improvement. Baby steps.
We don't spend much time at the Broken Spoke (although apparently they play both kinds of music), but it is nice to see developers working with established businesses to increase density while maintaining local flavor. Turning Austin into a consommé, as opposed to some kind of factory made, mass produced soup.
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What is this, development that's actually trying to keep local businesses intact!? Bravo!
Ha. This is good, but they should still be punished for sparing Mean-Eyed Cat.
A Blues Brothers reference is almost de rigeur when writing about the Broken Spoke.
Thanks for mentioning lack of pedestrian-friendly side streets, but you neglected to mention that S. Lamar itself is extremely pedestrian-hostile in that area. In several places you actually walk in a bar ditch, or along a muddy foot path blazed by peds from the 1970s.
I guess our fair city is too busy cashing all those property-tax checks from condo projects to bother with trivial things like sidewalks.
Bets on how long the apartments will go before complaining about the Spoke? Two months? Two weeks?
Place sidewalk blame appropriately, please. Lamar south of Barton Springs or so is the responsibility of our friends at TXDOT, who view sidewalks as a marginally better outcome than the Ebola Virus these days. To their credit, as recently as five years ago, they'd have chosen the virus.
South Lamar is going to be impossible to retrofit with good sidewalks. We tried for years - even using city money - it's just not gonna happen.
When you're walking back after drinking and dancing at the 'Spoke, it won't matter if there's sidewalks or not.
You're gonna be walking in the ditches no matter what. Unless, that is, you're crawling in the ditches.