Interestingly there is a lot of apartment housing on the west side of Jollyville, and almost none on the east side. The east side also has an easy connection to the 183 access road. I think this would be the perfect opportunity to use a mix of transect zones to make help this neighborhood a better place to live. Lets take this section east of Jollyville.

A Plan

With the exception of that one spot of LDR,we could completely zone this area T4.MS or T5.* without displacing existing residents. This would allow for buildings to be constructed that could include a mix of commercial and residential. Those two zones are very different, neither is perfect for the area but a mix of the two would could create a really nice streetscape.

A potential new Jollyville

Picture having a better designed South Congress or Drag in Northwest Austin. The residents of those big apartment complexes would have a place that they could walk, residents in the suburban neighborhood could bike there, and families could hang out along Jollyville.

This part of town also has the advantage of being surrounded by many of the larger tech campuses. So demand for housing in the area is high, while property values are comparatively low. This allows us to create naturally affordable housing without having to subsidize it.

Which is one of the core issues with CodeNext as it stands, only applying CodeNext to the inner neighborhoods that are already very expensive can only produce small gains in affordable housing. We need to use CodeNext to produce better neighborhoods and housing throughout all of Austin to take advantage of cheaper real estate.

Concerns

Of course any changes come with concerns, but let us not shy away from challenges and address them for the benefit of Austin.

Traffic

Based upon the resistance to Austin Oaks, the major concern around new development is traffic. The strength of using CodeNext is that this type of development promotes walking over driving. So currently if you live in one of the big apartment buildings you have to drive everywhere, with more mixed used development people could actually walk on Jollyville. Heck, hanging out and walking down Jollyville could even become a thing like going to the Drag or South Congress is currently.

Heck, hanging out and walking down Jollyville could even become a thing like going to the Drag or South Congress is currently.

I can promise you that traffic will get worse along 183 if we don’t do this and I promise you traffic will get worse if we do it. Traffic will always get worse in Austin as long as it is a great place to live, the question is can we build neighborhoods that offer alternatives to driving everywhere and allow people to drive less?

Environmental Impact

The second issue is the environment. As almost all of this sits above the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, we need to make sure the development does not harm the quality of our drinking water. That being said Austin already has Water Quality Standards that address these issues so any new development would take that into account better than some of the existing businesses that were grandfathered in under looser standards. Already there are vast swaths of impervious cover that is very underutilized space in the form of car dealerships and huge parking lots, so we could do much of this construction without increasing (maybe even decreasing) impervious cover.

Secondly, some trees would inevitably need to be removed in rezoning this. We need to promote as many trees and as much shade along our streets as possible. Yet at the same time, saving a hundred trees but only allowing autocentric development is penny wise and pound foolish in terms of global warming.

Changing the Neighborhood Character

Finally, there is the change to the neighborhood that this would bring. Since almost all of this area is commercial and primarily massive corporate chains like Randalls, Petsmart and a Ford Dealership, I don’t think there is much logical objection to allowing them to be rebuilt as homes, offices and businesses of various sizes.

If we go further north along Jollyville we do get a few sections of low density residential. I would propose not zoning the area around them more than T4.MS to preserve their quality of life, but already those houses are surrounded by large commercial uses as shown below.