EAST Interview: Kat Murph of Vertallee Letterpress
Austin’s Endeavor Real Estate Group LLC has announced that the next phase of the Domian project will be delayed. The means Domainites will have to wait until at least 2012 for the planned Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue and Whole Foods, plus about 490 apartments and about 200,000 square feet of office space. Projects that were already underway, including two hotels and an office building, are still proceeding on schedule and are expected to open in 2009.
This is probably welcome news to Brian Rodgers and the folks at ChangeAustin.org (the spawn of the Stop Domain Subsidies group, which got Proposition 2 on November's ballot). Even though Proposition 2 didn't pass, that group is hoping to continue to push its agenda by being involved in the upcoming mayoral and city council elections.
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I wonder how this delay will affect their subsidies.
Do these taxpayer-funded payments have any conditions or incentives that this project be completed by certain target dates? Or is this another clause that the geniuses at Guadalupe & Cesar Chavez "forgot" to include when negotiating their corporate-welfare plan with Endeavor?
These comments from the Statesman article are very telling:
'What is the cost of growth?' 'What is the optimum size of the city?'"
If you're a real estate investor then by restricting the "size of the city", you can choke supply. This will make rents soar for commercial properties like those along South Lamar. The type of properties that "Stop Domain Subsidies" founder Brian Rodgers owns.
I know that people feel that the Domain is not the ideal, but do we really prefer Brian Rodgers future of Austin at 2310 S. Lamar? An old strip mall with a fresh coat of paint? Is our goal for the future of Austin really that sad? We just want all the tire shops on Lamar to be converted into boutiques so we can drive our cars from one to the next? Aren't the domain and the second street district (no matter how imperfect) much closer to how we want to live in Austin, then the broken sidewalk strip mall dystopia of South Lamar?
Austin is going to keep growing. There's really no way for a city to stop that. We can only try to control what we want. And maybe the majority of Austinites want Austin's commercial districts to look like Anderson Lane, South Lamar, and North Lamar. I just find it hard to believe.
1UP for Tim.
I've lived in a cities that are shrinking and cities that are growing, and the problems in the former are much scarier and destructive to quality of life than the problems in the latter. I'm happy to subsidize development that accomodates that growth in an urban, transit and pedestrian oriented manner, instead of the sprawling frontage road and culdesac mode we are currently subsidizing.
The delay in the Domain expansion isn't good news. But it's a better sign than an outright cancellation of the project.
Tim,
I have to believe you are being coy.
For starters, many people in Austin don't seem to know or think about what they do want; They only know what they're against. And if they have any idea of what they want for the future of Austin, it's usually just to freeze it like it is, or timewarp back to the good old days.
Outside of people like Rodgers with a concrete financial incentive to choke development, many people here just don't like them fancy yuppie shops. They've worked hard to define themselves as people that live in not-Dallas and not-Houston, and something like the Domain or 2nd St. infringes on the idea of themselves they like to sell to others.
I was really looking forward to another flagship Whole Foods. I'd also like to see a Central Market north. And rainbows.