I've been meaning to write about a forum hosted by the Central Texas Chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism I attended a couple of weeks ago. Topic: What do we do with the Warehouse District? Should Austin try to preserve it from redevelopment? If not, what are the alternatives?
It was a good crowd. There were big-time developers (Tom Stacy and Perry Lorenz), architect Sinclair Black, ROMA's Jim Adams and Jana McCann, who are developing the downtown Austin plan, representatives of the Austin Heritage Society, Charlie Betts from the Downtown Austin Alliance, and a bunch of other architects, downtown advocates and new urbanist types.
Steve Sadowsky gave a lecture on the district's history. It confirmed my prior belief that nothing very important ever happened there; these were simply warehouses and a couple of "homes for young women" (bordellos). No one -- including Sinclair Black -- claims it is architecturally significant.
To my surprise, I was probably more sympathetic to preserving it outright than most of the attendees. (I admit I've sort of precommitted myself. My law partner and I walk past 4th Street on our way to lunch once a week. Each time he jabs his finger at 4th Street and says "So you want to tear that down"? "No, No," I say.)
There are essentially four options for dealing with the district:
1. Preserve it as a historic district.
2. Allow redevelopment but require reuse of the facades.
3. Allow redevelopment but impose special design/architectural standards.
4. Allow unfettered redevelopment.
There are a couple of practical problems with preserving it as a historic district. One is getting the landowners to agree. It will be hard to cram this down without their consent.
The second is that much of downtown has stringent height limits thanks to the Capitol view corridors; the properties in the Warehouse District are among the few that don't. The redevelopment rights are accordingly worth a lot. By turning it into a historic district, the City of Austin might be foregoing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in tax revenue per block. And the Second Street area will permanently lose the chance to add a lot more density, which is essential for this part of downtown to thrive.
Near the end of the meeting, one woman (whose name I did not catch) piped up and said to scattered applause that we shouldn't put a price on some things. We can't help but put a price on things, though. If we forgo revenue from redevelopment, then we are giving up the things we could have bought with it. There are always trade-offs.
That doesn't mean the Warehouse District is not worth the trade-off. Like I said, I was more sympathetic to keeping it than many others in the room. But we need to be sure to understand the trade off before we make it.
Option 2 -- requiring preservation of the facades -- is a bad one. The facades are not architecturally significant. And "facadism" produces funny-looking, awkward buildings. (Just look at the Goodwill redevelopment at the corner of Lamar and 5th.)
Option 3 is imposing special design standards. Architecture that invokes the character of the area. That's vague; it would take a long time to work out what that means. But it's an intriguing idea.
Option 4 -- unfettered redevelopment -- would speed redevelopment and lower the costs. Although I'm still thinking about this one, I don't think I can support this one. At a minimum, I'd like to see special architectural standards.
Let me throw out a couple of other thoughts. One is that there are plenty of parking garages, surface lots, and low-value uses scattered throughout downtown, including many outside the Capitol view corridors. I want to see these dead spots excised from downtown. Would a temporary moratorium on redevelopment in the Warehouse District speed this up? Based on the lack of redevelopment to date, I doubt it. But it's something to keep in mind.
My other thought is that this practice of demolishing functional downtown buildings and leaving the lots vacant for months or years needs to stop. I understand that there's not a lot developers can do when they lose their financing, as some have in the last few months. But we need some creative thinking here. There ought to be some way to condition the demolition of functional structures on prompt redevelopment.
The commercial development market is obviously dead right now. This is still just a theoretical debate. But expect to heat up once the cranes start rising again downtown.
