deep sigh.

Hurray for Allandale! Keeping poor, black, and brown people out and facilitating urban sprawl since 1959! God bless Austin.

A 2-story Wal-Mart with a parking garage near a big bus transfer center is slightly more urban in reality (not just pretext) than a single-story Wal-Mart in the middle of acres of surface parking. Imagine the walk from the bus to the store in both designs, for instance.

(Last night I picked up about $150 worth of presents for a bunch of kids at Terra Toys and looked back across the blasted landscape of surface parking all the way out to Anderson and cried a little tear, on the inside).

There's nothing less urban than a parking lot.

1954, here we come! Surely there can't be any downside to requiring low-density car-dependent sprawl. Oil is cheap, isn't it? Isn't it?

figment, everybody is being asked to put up something in the VMU vs. McMansion compromise. Allandale has been allowed to totally opt out of their responsibility, while other neighborhoods like Rosedale were marginally responsible, and a few, mostly south, actually pulled their weight.

The #3 is always going to run at relatively high frequencies and with relatively high passenger loads due to the medium density residential/employment on the other end of Allandale. Burnet is thus by my reckoning probably #2 in the most important potential VMU corridors in the city (the #1 bus corridor being #1; I tried to think of a corridor more important than Burnet so I could make the #3 #3 but it just didn't work).

figment, but the key is that if nothing's done, those existing $450/month apartments will go up in price too - and with less supply, we'll be worse off in the long-run.

Anybody who thinks really crappy apartments can't get really expensive when neighborhoods are allowed to run roughshod should look at what West Campus was like right before the cranes started knocking down the more dilapidated structures (at the end of the couple of decades in which the reactionaries of the ANC had forced a ridiculously low height and density limit on that area).

Man, you guys can think that and say that you THINK this is going to happen, but right now - I need a dirty ass old run down apartment complex to live in if I don't want to be homeless. Nobody is going to pay more than $450 for a place with holes in the wall and vermin and vagrant people living in the dumpster and drunks running over each other. We need slums because they are affordable and the people with money will not live there. So fuck all that speculation. I see things a different way and I'm with figment on this one.

LoudMouth, people pay more than 450 for apartments just like that in West Campus. But part of your comment does ring true - Allandale is buying themselves a ticket to slumtown sooner or later, with the way gas prices are going.

Also, given modern construction practices, plenty of the VMU apartments being built now will be affordable shitholes soon enough.

How did the Wal-Mart debate devolve into a pissing match about "affordable housing" and "density?" Those are separate issues.

I live in Crestview, about half-a-mile from Northcross, and I'll guaran-dang-tee you a 200,000 sq. ft. WallyWorld would increase traffic on Burnet & Anderson Ln. by a factor of 10. I also don't want someone tearing down the 3-BR house next to mine to build a 10-unit apt. complex.

I fail to see how those two positions make me a hypocrite or a "nut case."

Ahh, the "head in the sand" approach to dealing with growth. If we don't build it, maybe everyone will just poof go away. What's that old adage I once heard about shitting in one hand and hoping in the other?

Walmart never planned on building 2-stories or a parking garage. It was a negotiating tactic. They wanted a 100k sf store with parking lot the whole time. This is the old, 'ask for the stars, then compromise down to what you really want' trick.

Kudos to Allandale residents who fought valiantly against Walmart, purveyor of crap, employer of un-insured part-timers.

Seth

Kenneth, I'm guessing you haven't lived in Crestview very long? Were you there during the days when Northcross was a highly active mall? The streets around the mall were designed to accomodate large amounts of traffic and while it was busy, it was not overly burdened. A smaller sq. footage single store will not generate enough traffic to cause any strain on the current capacity. Face it, you know it's just the fact that its a Wal-Mart that makes you oppose it, if it were a Neiman Marcus or something similar you guys would be all over it and asking for more.

Also, do you guys take pride in trying to tell others what they can do with their private property? That's a great attribute, I hope you don't complain when the city comes in and tells you what siding you can have on your homes or what color paint you can have. You guys won't object to that right?

It has always been about the people WM stereotypically attracts and the fact that it's a Wal-Mart. Even RG4N members that I have come across said things like "we don't need anymore taco stands popping up" and crap like that. Please don't fool yourselves by thinking your cause was noble.

Oh yeah, and thanks for doing your part to keep parts of Austin narrow-minded and expensive for everyone. And thanks for opposing light rail back in the day. And continue to enjoy all those strip malls you have in your "neighborhood."

Also, in response to the vital corridors, I think Lamar is definitely the most important street in Austin, but Burnet isn't too important after it dead ends at 45th. I'd say Airport is more important than Burnet, but in south Austin, Congress and 1st are pretty important. I don't know south Austin well at all and I could be wrong about that.

Those areas are just examples. The root of what I'm saying is the same. Instead of knocking down old low-income apartments and replacing them with new high-income apartments, developers should be knocking down old no-income strip malls and replacing them with their high-income complexes.

The tract of land Loudmoth notes as being prime for housing at the corner of NorthLoop and Lamar is in the approval phases of development. It's commercail now and it has being proposed to the city for VMU zoning.

I live in the SE frontier of Brentwood (a community that, unlike our Allendale and Hyde Park neighbors, has actively embraced VMU development along its major transit corridors) and will be directly affected by this development as it abuts the backyards of my neighbors just a few houses down from mine: more high speed cut-through traffic, more noise and light pollution, more college kids throwing parties on Saturday night, higher property taxes (?) etc. But you know what Allendale? Guess what Hyde Park? It's good for Austin in so many more ways than it is bad for me, so we are in support of it.

For what it is worth, the representatives of this development project have been very active in meeting with us to keep us abreast of the process as well as to give us a forum through which we can collectively ask questions and voice concerns. Through these meetings, we have drafted a memorandum of understanding with our terms and conditions to be met by the project in exchange for our show of support to the greater Brentwood NA. This is in no way legally binding, so we'll see how it all pans out. But it's been an encouraging process thus far thanks in large part to the developer's transparency and availability to the community that will be most directly affected by their project.

I could care less about Walmart, but I'm glad Allandale stood their ground and won. I wish other neighborhoods in Austin had been fortunate enough to stem the tide of unnecessary VMU development. 78704 would still be a cool place to live if they had put up a better fight. Same with 78702.