TA Roundtable on Austin's Downtown Residential Development

by Stephen Sharpe  

In light of the current economic downturn, I’ve invited six members of the Austin architectural and real estate community to the TSA offices today to discuss the state of the city’s downtown residential development. Prompted by a planned auction of 19 unsold condominiums in one newly renovated downtown building, I thought the time was right to assess the situation in Austin. As anyone who has visited Austin in the past two or three years knows, the building boom – particularly to supply the growing market for “soft lofts” – was on a scale unlike anything we have ever seen in the urban core.

The two-hour roundtable forum will be taped and the edited transcript published in the July/August edition of Texas Architect.

The participants are: Sinclair Black, FAIA, principal of Black & Vernooy Architects; Dean Almy, director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at UT Austin’s School of Architecture; Michael Knox with the City of Austin’s Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services Office; Kevin Burns, founder of urbanspace; Elizabeth Mueller, director of UT Austin’s Center for Sustainable Development; and Brett Rhode, AIA, principal of Rhode Partners Architects. I will moderate the forum.