Quote:
Originally Posted by austex
I also believe that ALL of the Domain...including the roads, is private property owned by only one or two entities. It is not possible to buy any land and build. One must lease the land from Simon Property Group and the Endeavor Real Estate Group according to their rules and site master plan. The Domain is a Master Planned Community…wholly owned.
In order to have "a second downtown" it is essential to have a network of PUBLIC roads, with walkable sized blocks, and a variety of land owners who are not controlled by a singular corporation. The Domain has neither and will never be anything but a suburban, automobile based, master planned community. This may sound harsh, however, a downtown is a center for the community to come and congregate in the realm of public/private partnership. The Domain is private, private, private!
If I am wrong about The Domain being completely private property…Please enlighten me.
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Endeavor doesn't "own" any part of the Domain. They are the development partner of RREEF, who owns a large portion of the Domain and who will be financing Domain 7. Simon owns another large portion of the Domain (most of the North retail and a couple of the smaller office buildings), and another company, Cencor, owns/developed the apartments. The hotels were developed individually & separately by the hotel chains. The Domain Gateway office building is owned by a completely unrelated investment company. Some of the roadways are private and some are City of Austin. Yes, you can buy land in the Domain, for the right price, but it's unlikely that any developer would buy land from RREEF, Simon or Cencor adjacent to a site that could be developed by RREEF, Simon or Cencor to compete with your property. Would you take a gamble and build a building in the Domain, if all your tenants/clients/residents could be lured away by one of the established developers? The Domain was always planned as an "urban lifestyle center" with the "live-work-play" attitude for it's residents/tenants who are supposed to be able to walk to work, to play, to eat, to live, etc. and rarely leave their immediate surroundings (a bit Orwellian), so it was always going to be a just a handful of companies involved in the development. I'm not saying that's a good thing at all, but if the City of Austin had been involved there would never have been a Domain, at least not in the timeframe that it has happened. The City had a shot at turning the Domain into something really great when IBM put all that raw land up for sale in the early 2000's (next to JJPickle Research Center, of all things), but the City punted and it just didn't happen.