What's up with East Cesar Chavez Street?
Written By: Ryan Saunders, ryan@gospacesquared.com
I imagine a future where patios open onto busy sidewalks up and down the street highlighted by huddles of people flowing on and off buses and bikers commuting to and from Downtown in bright green bike lanes.
Local residents commuting to East Cesar Chavez Street on foot and by bike from their homes in the surrounding neighborhoods to grab last minute grocery items, coffee, lunch or an after work drink as well as busy daytime traffic with mixed use neighborhood offices sitting above cozy shops and restaurants.
On the weekends tourists step off a bus or walk over from the light rail with excited eyes to experience Austin like a local. They are able to grab a Bike Share down to Lady Bird Lake for a kayak or paddle board rental or to visit Festival Beach Food Forest or Community Garden. As night falls there is a steady buzz of conversations as restaurants are packed for dinner and drinks before a concert at the Scoot Inn.
The only question you should be asking at this point is, why isn’t this the way it is now?
The answer is a bit complicated but I don’t like looking backwards. So let’s talk about how to make it happen in the future.
I am in real estate so my perspective is that you have to create a favorable situation that catches the eye of investors. Cities and the real estate industry (developers, investors, brokers and realtors, business owners, construction companies and workers, title companies, banks, sign companies, craftsmen, artists and on and on) are symbiotic.
Oftentimes cities will incentivize development in certain areas with examples such as Transit Oriented Development which are meant to encourage density and allow investors to build more “building” on smaller lots with attractive zoning with no or limited parking requirements. This allows an investor to maximize revenue per square foot.
Other times amenities drive value for the future user such as a park or trail. This is an older stat but when I was working on a project several years ago, I read a CBRE report titled Premiums on the Park, which concluded that office space located in buildings across from Bryant Park (NYC) were approximately 63% higher than asking rents for comparable office space located just one block farther from the park, and 46% higher than Midtown’s average asking rent
An article written in Feb 2020 on Redfin News wrote that “In U.S. cities, homes within walking distance of schools, shopping, parks and other urban amenities sell for an average of 23.5%, or $77,668, more than comparable properties that are car dependent.”
In Austin, you might be seeing a lot of white concrete in new crosswalk medians and sidewalks, these are made possible by $1.34B in transportation related bonds over three different bond packages since 2016. Yet you might notice that very little has happened in this regard on East Cesar Chavez Street east of 35 (for the purposes of this article I-35 to Pleasant Valley).
New crosswalk with median on Manor Rd, view looking West from Airport Blvd
This is two fold: In conversations with the city it is that they have anticipated the impact the I-35 project would have on the street in terms of potential changes such as the large drainage tunnel project of which work will begin later this year as well as expected heavy construction trucks beating up the pavement carrying materials back and forth to I-35 road crews.
City Staff also view East Cesar Chavez Street as an important automobile centric corridor for moving a large volume of vehicles east to west and vice versa to and from Downtown Austin as opposed to the neighborhood centric business district described in the opening paragraphs of this article. East Cesar Chavez Street is labeled as a level 3 street the same as Lamar Blvd, E 7th St and S 1st St.
When reviewing the multitude of vision plans that have been produced over the last ten years, most importantly Imagine Austin (first written in 2014), Sidewalks, Crossing and Shared Streets Plan (2023), Austin Strategic Mobility Plan (2019) and the City Council Contract to voters related to the 3 bonds mentioned previously, East Cesar Chavez Street should have been a blue ribbon priority.
In 2024, Cities are not only seeing a decrease in average residential homes sales prices (According to the mid-year report released in July by the Austin Board of Realtors, Austin metro has the highest inventory of home listings since 2011 with a 6.3 drop in median sales price since June. Overall, the metro has seen a 13.4% decline in sales since last year). The city is also feeling the Covid hangover Office vacancies in Downtown Austin of which is predicted to take 3-7 years for full absorption as well as following a trend of an overall decrease in value of office properties across the country.
Yet, according to Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (2021 report),Texas is one of only 7 states that collected 20 percent or more of their state and local general revenues from property taxes in 2021. On average taxes make up 42% of local general revenue for cities and local governments, with 30% of that coming from property taxes.
The total taxable value of commercial real estate more than doubled between 2013 and 2022 in Austin which has been reflected in the city budget. My assessment is that a large percentage of that was based on the high dollar office towers that have been built in Downtown. So how will the city be impacted as office development slows down and property values decrease?
Developers are going to develop and builders are going to build, the question is where and what?
According to NAIOP (Commercial Real Estate Development Association) The impact of the construction industry on the economy in Texas, produced $185 B in contributions to the state GDP with $69.7 B in wages and salaries along with more than 1.2 million jobs created and supported (2023).
Now when we look at the funding considerations of the city for mobility and pedestrian improvements (including transit enhancements and cycling). How important do you think those dollars are to the growth of our city?
My belief is that there would be a strong financial benefit to the city in investing money into East Cesar Chavez Street in the form of speed mitigation efforts by adding crosswalks, protected bike lanes either on street or combination to off street and on as well as transit enhancements.
This area is home to three strong local bus routes with access to other amenity hubs as well as a future BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) stop at Pleasant Valley and East Cesar Chavez street. These are in addition to the Red Line Parkway urban trail, Saltillo station light rail, Butler trail and close proximity to Walnut Creek trail and Boggy Creek Greenway.
What other neighborhood features such a conglomeration of mobility options that also features a more than 1 mile long street that already has a strong base of businesses as a canvas for the type of development that developers are feverishly trying to recreate throughout the city? Cue Mueller and The Grove.
Are you with me?
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