Quote:
Originally Posted by freerover
Austin needs office space 1000 times more than it needs high end residential. I edited my above post before your repose. Let me copy paste:
Austin badly badly badly badly baldy needs more office space. As of last July, out of the top 15 cities vying for Amazon, the only ones with a lower office vacancy rate are San Fransisco and New York City. NYC is building 11.1 million sq feet right now, SF is building 6.6 msf and Austin is 1.9 msf. We have hit a huge huge stumbling block for generating new business and growing the economy. I don't mean for Amazon HQ2. I'm talking about for anything. We are having a very hard time servicing our existing companies.
If we have a hypothetical choice between an office tower or residential tower in downtown then it should be an office tower. Downtown is not your answer to higher density residential zoning. THat's why we need something like Code Next to open up density in other parts of the city. The point of downtown is to have a center of commerce. Yes, development diversity is good and important but we have to understand that we can put top hats on the beast, give it a cane and some nice shoes but we still have to feed the beast. We need offices. We can better serve more businesses by building tall buildings and it's cheaper to serve the needs of those buildings when they are clustered together.
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I agree with this post for the most part. My concern is the huge parking podiums, and I really don't know what the solution might be. Requiring all or most of the parking to be below ground is cost prohibitive and would likely discourage development of a major office tower. I guess I might like this project better as an office tower, if it had another 15 floors of office space.