I live in South Austin, so it's not like there's a lack of rooftops here, and there's a new 5-story apartment complex going up two blocks south of that old HEB site that will have 307 units. That store was already surrounded on all sides by neighborhoods. The irony is that where that new big HEB is going up at Congress & Slaughter, has considerably less housing stock and less dense options. It also didn't make sense to have HEB there, as it wasn't really needed since there's a Walmart and Target in the shopping center across the street. And I don't even like that store since it's laid out funky. It's laid out more like a Walmart or Target than an HEB is, which makes me think they were just trying to compete with those two.
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Originally Posted by H20
In truly urban, dense, walkable cities, the commercial corridors primarily serve the adjacent neighborhoods within walking distance and become neighborhood institutions. They are not primarily geared to attracting people throughout the city who have to drive (take transit or ride) to get there. That is the suburban auto-centric model that Austin and a good deal of the US is developed on.
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That's what I'm talking about though. That HEB at South First & William Cannon served this neighborhood, and now in its absence, we don't have a full service grocer. I mean, actually, there's a Fiesta up at Stassney and I-35, but we've never really shopped there consistently. And again, ironically, that Fiesta replaced another Fiesta that was in the same space that the old HEB was in. HEB said the reason they left that space was that they couldn't expand since they didn't own the building, and it needed infrastructure upgrades that the owners weren't willing to do. And now, unless I'm willing to take a 20 to 25 minute bike ride - something I'm fully capable of doing, we're otherwise forced to drive farther to HEB. That little HEB was an 8 minute bike ride, versus the other two which are 20 and 25 minute rides. And that's without counting the new HEB which I'll never ride to since I don't care to and it's prohibitively far, and a difficult and dangerous ride. This doesn't have anything to do with density since that HEB had been at that location for 20 years. They chose to leave an area that has been developed since the 60s. And now the people living here are forced to drive to another store farther away. Thankfully, I can do the ride, but not everyone in my neighborhood can.
I just don't buy into the idea that more density would legitimize having a store nearby since nothing stopped that from being true for the past 35 years for us as we had two stores within walking distance, and now we have 0. And South Park Meadows is a lot of things, but it's not more dense than my neighborhood. And I don't envy the people who have to deal with the traffic down there every day. I should know, my brother lives off Slaughter, and it takes them forever to go anywhere, and a bike ride to the grocery store in their neighborhood is out of the question. In the 7 or 8 years they've lived there, they've seen several fatal wrecks on Slaughter, and that's when the traffic was moving fast enough to be lethal.
I feel like those apartments up and down Lamar are great and all for density, but I don't think the type of retail they're getting is anything special or particularly needed. That's why they have such a high turnover. The first thing I would look at before moving into a neighborhood is the type of businesses in it that I would be using most often, grocery stores being chief among them. If a place is lacking that, I'd have to look somewhere else.
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