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Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 4:19 PM
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Austin Suburb Adopts Street Grid And Code To Deal With Flooding And Sustainability

Texas City Adopts Street Grid And Code


NOV. 15, 2019

By ROBERT STEUTEVILLE

Read More: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/201...-grid-and-code

Code: https://www.cityofbastrop.org/page/buildingbastrop

Quote:
Bastrop, Texas, adopted new, groundbreaking land-use regulations this week that address flooding and establish a street grid as a framework for growth, one of the first cities in the US to do so since the middle of the 20th Century. The Bastrop Building Block (B3) code is the result of the Building Bastrop initiative, launched in August 2018 with the goal of creating fiscally sustainable, geographically-sensitive development that is authentic to the city.

- “We started this process last summer to address flooding in Bastrop and create a roadmap for responsible development that honors our authentic past and prepares for our sustainable future,” said Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroeder. “Like many cities and towns across the country, Bastrop has been faced with tough decisions related to significant growth combined with aging infrastructure and outdated land-use regulations. With Building Bastrop, we are controlling growth rather than letting growth control us.” — Bastrop recently conducted a fiscal analysis of revenue per acre and productivity. The analysis, by the Dallas firm Verdunity, looked at whether each parcel in the city was “revenue positive,” measuring return-on-investment of the city’s development patterns. Like many cities, Bastrop has grown in a “drivable suburban” form. “The current development is not fiscally sustainable. We’re $7.2 million upside down now,” says City Manager Lynda Humble. “The goal is that everything built at least pays for itself going forward.”

- To find answers, Bastrop looked at the built part of the city that has survived for more than a century. The city hired Simplecity Design based in San Marcos, Texas, to “analyze the DNA” of downtown. “We found the solution to our problem is under our nose,” says Humble. “It’s downtown Bastrop.” The urban designers found that the square downtown blocks are a quarter the size of historic farm lots. Farm lots could therefore be divided into four “Bastrop Blocks,” which can be configured in many ways—all of which have built-in stormwater capacity. — The city is therefore determined to grow, like downtown, in the form of a grid—one that responds to geography and nature. The city adopted a Transportation Master Plan that establishes a street grid not only in undeveloped parts of the city, but also in an extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ), for which the city has transportation, environmental, and subdivision controls. “We had to have gridded streets in order to have fiscal sustainability,” Humble says. The grid is based on 770-by-770-foot farm lots, which are divided into four 385-foot blocks (330-foot-square plus the right-of-way), the Bastrop Block.

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  #2  
Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 4:59 PM
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The use of canals in the grid would be useful for cities in low lying plains. It’s also aesthetically pleasing.
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Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 5:39 PM
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It never occurred to me that Brastrap was a suburb of Austin. That city is growing fast with retirees from all over the state.
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Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 5:50 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc View Post
It never occurred to me that Brastrap was a suburb of Austin. That city is growing fast with retirees from all over the state.
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Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 8:46 PM
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That looks like a big step up, but is that surface parking behind literally every dense building?
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Old Posted Nov 22, 2019, 11:38 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc View Post
It never occurred to me that Brastrap was a suburb of Austin. That city is growing fast with retirees from all over the state.
I’d say it has been for the last 15 years or so.
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Old Posted Nov 23, 2019, 7:03 AM
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Bastrop is like San Marcos. It was a stand alone city before Austin's sprawl turned it into a suburb.
It's great to see a suburb actually planning for growth like this instead of rubber stamping one huge subdivision after another that has a tangle of streets with one way in and one way out to the rest of the world.
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Old Posted Nov 23, 2019, 9:56 AM
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It's funny, my parents owned land in Cedar Creek, which is about halfway between Austin and Bastrop. I remember there being absolutely nothing in either Cedar Creek or Bastrop. The big place to go for anything you needed in Bastrop was the HEB, which was tiny compared to the ones in Austin. The place is still extremely suburban and rural, but it's much larger now than it was back then. SH-71 is completely unrecognizable compared to back then.
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Old Posted Nov 24, 2019, 8:56 AM
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Good news.
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  #10  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2019, 7:17 PM
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I lived out in the Lost Pines just to the east of Bastrop for several years until I was burned out in 2011. Always rather liked the core of Bastrop, a sweet little main street and several nearby blocks of late Victorian and early to mid 20th Century homes. The grid made it very appealing, and it is good news that plans call for extending it as new construction emerges. I can imagine some conflict with developers at the outer boundaries of the city itself since Bastrop County government remains in the hands of a "Good Old Boy" network eager to pinch pennies and let developers do whatever they want while the City of Bastrop shows signs of more progressive leadership. Growth in the area has been surprisingly slow given the proximity to Austin, but, as Kevin noted, the change along SH71 between Bastrop and Austin is happening at a fast pace. There is also likely to be a lot of development along the SH95 corridor between Bastrop and Elgin in the coming decade. In spite of the horrible fire of 2011, there remains a lot of demand for "country living" on one or two acre parcels in that part of Bastrop County.
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