Alright…this is old news, but I wanted to post it anyways.  360 Condos are celebrated their “topping out” on 11/12 by hoisting a live oak to roof of the 44-story project. The 360 condos will be completed early next year.

360 Condos will be the first completed high rise project of the many in construction. They sold briskly & were priced on the entry level side of downtown condos. The finish out is still extremely nice, as is the project overall.

The Monarch, which started out initially as an apartment highrise & flipped to condo sales, has flipped back to its original conception as an apartment community. The project looks to be about 80% complete, and the word through the grapevine is that its investors set an end of October goal of 80% sold in order to move forward with the project as a condo sale.

There’s been a ton of speculation about the downtown Austin condo market. I’m a little leery of it - especially with the recent shifts in the mortgage market. Most of the projects are very close to sold out in pre-construction. However, I think that a large percentage of the buyers downtown are in the volatile “alt-A” category & will be very curious to see how many of the contracts convert.

Regardless, I think the Monarch’s conversion back to a rental apartment community is a good shift for downtown. It adds much needed lease units, and takes a nice chunk of sale inventory out of the market - which will help prop up the prices.

Seriously…and it would actually be super-sweet. “Waller Creek Whitewater Trail” a local group that’s put together the proposition, says that it’s actually perfect.  In order to get ~1 million s.f. of downtown real estate out of the floodplain, the city has approved a $125m tunnel that’s going to be used to divert water underneath the creek when it storms. This same tunnel can be used to pipe water up the creek from Town Lake (I refuse to call it Ladybird Lake) whenever it’s NOT storming. By doing this, we can have controlled rapids in the middle of downtown Austin 365 days out of the year.

Let me say…I think this would be a first for any major city’s downtown.

Alright…so I stole that title from South Park. Everyone right now is up in arms over the proposed Super Wal-Mart on Anderson - in the old Northcross Mall location. It will definitely increase traffic flow, but anything in that location that’s mildly successful would increase traffic over what’s currently in there. Northcross Mall? The place is a joke - I don’t think the ice rink is even open anymore. Now I’m not the biggest fan of Wal-Mart, but the Northcross location really needs to be used for something, well, useful. And the best use of that location is something big - be it a mall, Wal-Mart, Target, or any of the other big box stores. In Austin, we like to keep it local, and the only local business that could fill a spot that large is Whole Foods - and they’re already downtown & in the Arboretum. Unfortunately, we don’t need a Whole Foods to service every 3 square miles.

So what are we left with & where are we going? The Wal-Mart, in my opinion, is inevitable. Responsible Growth for Northcross is suing, but if they win, Wal-Mart is going to sue. Trust me, Wal-Mart has much more money than RG4N and will come out on top. In order to maintain some level of decent public relations, Wal-Mart has even redesigned this store with much more focus on style.

The style of the building is really killer. They’re also incorporating a deli style restaurant on the ground level. This design is as different from a traditional Wal-Mart as Central Market stores are from H-E-B’s. The residents of Allandale (which includes my girlfriend,) Crestview, & Northtowne really don’t have to worry about this storefront devaluing the neighborhood, or about losing (much) street cred for living near a Wal-Mart. If an out-of-towner drives by this store it’s going to reinforce the fact that these are trendy ‘hoods since they built this style of store here.
Does this make me want to give Wal-Mart a big warm hug? No, absolutely not. But I do appreciate them taking into account the type of area of town where they’re building, and modifying their store design.