Speck Dempsey helped create and manage the planning team—while also providing detailed design input—for this groundbreaking project currently underway near downtown Austin. Brodie Oaks is a strip shopping center located directly adjacent to the beloved and environmentally-sensitive Barton Creek Greenbelt, whose health it undermines in two ways. More obviously, its almost entirely impervious surface contributes markedly to stormwater contamination of the creek aquifer. Also importantly, its retail-only status—38 acres of a single use—participates in a regional zoning regime that condemns its residents to many miles and minutes of daily travel, mostly by private automobile, to access diverse activities that would be more sustainably organized in tandem.

The new plan addresses both problems, capturing stormwater on-site in 13 acres of landscaped parks, and combining 1,700 apartments (many affordable), 1.2 million square feet of offices, and 140,000 square feet of shops (including a grocer) into one compact, eminently walkable neighborhood. Thanks to an aggressive Transportation Demand Management strategy, including careful co-location of complementary uses, conventional parking ratios were dramatically reduced, lowering both anticipated project cost and likely traffic loads.

This progressive design approach, along with expert local outreach, allowed this large project to quickly achieve zoning approval as a Planned Unit Development in Austin’s notoriously anti-growth permitting environment.