What am I missing?
I meant to comment on this last week because Bill Bunch has me stumped.
A developer is planning to develop 265 acres in Southwest Austin just south of Texas 45 Southwest and MoPac (the blue rectangle below). The developer is calling it “Wildflower Commons”:
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The developer, with the City’s encouragement, is proposing a dense, mixed-use development, . . .
up to about 550 condominiums and town homes, 490,000 square feet of retail and 124,000 square feet of office space just south of Texas 45 Southwest and MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1). The plans would put the bulk of the development on less than half of the available land, leaving about 160 acres that would be preserved as open space through conservation easements. Portions of that land would be donated to the Hill Country Conservancy, a nonprofit group dedicated to open-space preservation, and adjoining property owners Geoffrey Weisbart and Diane Senterfitt.
Walters Southwest’s attorney Steve Drenner said the amount of land covered by building materials impenetrable by water, also known as impervious cover, will be limited to 15 percent, the maximum allowed under the Save Our Springs Ordinance. Impervious cover includes rooftops, roads and parking lots.
Thanks to a settlement with Circle C’s developer way back when, Walters could build up to 18% impervious cover. Hence, it is proposing to use less than its allotted impervious cover, preserve in perpetuity 60% of the land as open space, and build the type of mixed-use development the City has been encouraging for years. This is as good as it gets for development over the Edwards Aquifer, right?
Bill Bunch of Save Our Springs opposes it, though:
Bunch disagrees, saying that he would prefer the single-family and office development allowed under current zoning, instead of what the developer has proposed. “More people and more density means more pollutant loading in the watershed and greater reliance on controls rather than prevention,” Bunch said.
Huh?
Bunch claims the developer is understating the impervious cover because it is not counting perimeter roads, but surely that doesn’t justify his opposition. I’m not the professional environmentalist, but I assume it is easier to control and treat the run off from a compact, dense development on 160 acres than from several hundred single-family homes spread across 265 acres.
Note this is not about whether Wildflower Commons ought to be built. The developer can build something there. And I don’t think Bunch is trying a backdoor blocking move: there is no question a single-family subdivision would be viable there; a mixed-use development on that spot is just a “maybe.”
Bunch claims the developer is understating the impervious cover because it is not counting perimeter roads, but surely that doesn’t justify his opposition. I’m not the professional environmentalist, but I assume it is easier to control and treat the run off from a compact, dense development on 160 acres than from several hundred single-family homes spread across 265 acres.
Note this is not about whether Wildflower Commons ought to be built. The developer can build something there. And I don’t think Bunch is trying a backdoor blocking move: there is no question a single-family subdivision would be viable there; a mixed-use development on that spot is just a “maybe.”
