Allandale = Suburban 4eva!

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.

LoudMouth, as far as VMU goes, if the corridor isn't on a bus route that goes into downtown from a long ways out, it's not that important. Extra points given for density on the other end - like how the #3 goes to the Arboretum and right past the Domain.

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.

LoudMouth, I think that is right. In order for developers to do that, the neighborhoods have to agree to having those old no-income strip malls rezoned to VMU. Many neighborhoods are doing that, but Allandale and some others are not. As a result, the only density that can be added in those neighborhoods comes through knocking down old low-income apartments and replacing them with more new high-income apartments.

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.

LoudMouth, they CAN'T build apartments and condos along Lamar and Burnet until the VMU zoning is applied; and even then it's a relatively difficult process given that Allandale just opted out of most of Burnet.

The reason they aren't doing it today is because it's illegal. You can't put apartments in commercial zoning until you get the VMU overlay.

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.

heyzeus, if condo and apartment developers wanted to lose money, they would start knocking down strip malls and building enough condos and apartments to meet the city needs, all along Lamar and Burnet, just like mdahmus said. They aren't doing that. They're not interested in overbuilding. I have no control over what Suttle does. I can tell you one thing he will not do - that's build a big fat development that helps out the needy, provides urban gardening space, a small grocery and a free clinic.

These guys are in charge of our future and we're handing them the reins to underbuild and capitalize on demand as they see fit. They need to stop knocking out housing to replace it with more housing. They need to start knocking out old commercial spaces that are going nowhere like that old block of nothing on Lamar and Northloop or yes, Northcross Mall and provide housing that's more in line with what middle income people are making. My problem is that they'll never do that. But Hell, in 15 years, the hot thing to do might be sustainable living in a solar farm in the desert. Austin might be a town of 100,000. You never know.

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."

Don't be silly. You don't compromise after you've won.

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

LoudMouth, we've never, ever, ever built remotely enough urban development around here. On 99% of the tracts of land in this city, it's illegal. You can't look at what's happened in the last 50 years as an indictment of density when you never allowed the density to actually happen except on a couple of parking lots downtown (which just happens to be the most expensive land in the city!)

Kenneth, the hypocrisy comes from people in your neighborhood claiming to support affordable housing or the environment or public transportation but being against density, which means you're de-facto in favor of sprawl.

And, no, traffic at Burnet/Anderson would not get remotely close to "10x as high" with even a million square feet of retail. It's also not remotely bad today compared to any other center-city intersection of two major arterial roadways.

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?

Can't we just agree that we need a remodeled HEB?

And why isn't anyone crying about another damn drugstore in the neighborhood? Do we need another Walgreens?

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."

What you don't seem to realize is that increased housing and increased density hasn't done shit for affordable housing in Austin. Austin will never ever be so hot (except in the summer) that people would rather sleep in the damn street than move. We are not NYC, London or Paris so you need to stop acting like we are. If there isn't enough housing or if all the really low end housing is crap then people will move to New Orleans or Portand or shit, I don't know, Ann Arbor.

We tried this bullshit where developers get to stick a finger in and wiggle it around and you might have found it pleasurable, but 4, 10, 50 years of dry anal rape by developers does not sound like a hot time to me. I've had it with them all and with the home owners who think they know what's best for renters. Renters can tell you that increased housing hasn't made a dent in rental prices.

As for this Wal Mart bullshit - that's to be expected from those idiots.

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

Loudmouth, why do you think shithole efficiencies in a ton of major cities of the US rent for $1000 a month and up? I'll give you a hint, it's because demand for housing in those cities exceeds supply. If Austin 'hoods plan to deal with growth by pushing all of those people further out, that's our future too.

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.

Loudmouth:

VMU does not apply to existing apartment complexes. Period.

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.

Another point, figment: VMU only applies to properties zoned commercial. It does not incentive the redevelopment of existing multi-family.

Bear in mind, though, that any multi-family can already be redeveloped. Dahmus is right: those $450/month rents will eventually climb, or the apartments converted to condos, without a lot more supply.

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).

And racist suburbanites rejoice! I even talked to a lady last week who has lived there for 10+ years now and she said all the RG4N people are a bunch of crackpots. She even acknowledged that having nothing but strip malls all around them doesn't really qualify as a neighborhood. She thought comments about traffic were absurd too and said most people were more worried about the "people" the store would bring in more than anything else.

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).

I agree with you about ANA and RG4N's probable goals.

Also they get to claim this as a win, whether it is or isn't, frankly. I always figured Lincoln and/or Walmart had backup plans to scale down.

Also even if they had allowed VMU, I doubt poor people could afford fancy VMU condos or apartments, except for the small amount of affordable set-asides. For those that don't know, the older apartment complexes in the area are actually pretty reasonable for rent for a studio or 1-bedroom, my friend paid $450/mo for a nice 1-bedroom in a safe, quiet 70's apt complex in the area. If it was knocked down and replaced by condos, even if it was more dense, it would have to be more expensive. Sure, there's a supply/demand effect, but nowhere in Austin is it probably economical to create new apartments that rent at $450/month - I just doubt it would pencil out.

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, I agree that neither Wal-Mart plan is "urban" - if you click the "pretext of urbanity" link, you will see my earlier post on the fake urbanity of Wal-Mart's original plan. Wal-Mart was merely marketing it as urban, which is why I said "pretext." ANA and RG4N's excitement about the new plan (and ANA's opposition to VMU at nearby locations) shows that their claimed support for something urban at Northcross (and their claimed outrage at Wal-Mart's business practices) was also pretextual. Their real goal was to inhibit development, and it appears they will succeed.

***Comment revised by author to reflect the fact that RG4N has not taken a position on VMU at locations other than Northcross.***

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

What exactly was "urban" about a 200,000 square foot Wal-mart super center six miles from the city center in the first place? The parking garage? What would make more sense would have been for Wal-mart to have built a downtown super-center with two stories as part of a new condo development, similar to the two-story Target in downtown Minneapolis.

Going six miles in any direction from Sixth and Congress, there's not much "urban" anything, so expecting Allandale to sacrifice itself to become some mixed-use VMU utopia is unlikely, especially without any rapid bus, light rail, heavy rail, monorail, subway, or jetboat service to downtown.

(not an Allandale resident, but I live close by)

deep sigh.