town center

Carl,
your email is the most constructive critique i have seen on this topic. i too saw the site plan on the newsletter. i think you make a good point on the concept of CC town center. i believe that neither the pool area or school make for a good gathering place, rather i would like to see something along the lines of a commons area/shelter type facility. it could be adjacent to or integral to the pool....but part of the commercial area? that does not make a lot of sense to me. i favor pedestrian focused common spaces. i dont know if you have ever seen how river place has built this type of facility, which is centered around a soccer field/park setting.... in the middle of the residential area.
so as an architect, given the constraints of the available areas and zoning as we know it today (yea i know the stratus site needs rezoning) how would you site this type of ''town center''.
One other point. i looked closely at the site plan and layout for the Wal Mart Store. i feel that the comparison to the HEB as shown, is apples and oranges. the wal mart looked like terrible land use vis a vis the surrounding neighborhoods. it was just in the wrong place. the HEB plan can work in my opinion, without most of the biggest issues of the Wal Mart site. i would much rather have the plan shown for the HEB than more apartments (who rents all those anyway?

S/W Austin Growth Planning

KLRU has a program hosted by Tom Spencer that will be very interesting to hear (link below for part of the story on-line). It's about what urban sprawl is doing to Austin and some of the issues.

Also, there is a group called Envision Central Texas, which just gave a lenghty study report to the city and they have just produced a Survey that you can take on-line or in today's newspaper. They will be asking your opinion about future growth in Austin, based on 4 models. While I don't think that those are the only choices, it's a good, detailed study and they do want your opinion now.

And, OHAN members are getting interested in creating a committee to develope a Master Plan for the Southwest Austin area, that includes Circle C, so that future zoning and development issues are easier to articulate in meetings or hearings. Where our area has good long range planning in place, most of the neighborhoods around us, don't. The city used to have programs to help facilitate this, but I don't think we can look to the city for help, right now. They are bogged down and still tend to focus on downtown issues more than ours. We still have some elbow room, but bad development, especially with roads and transportation, will impact our lifes more and more.


See KLRU at
http://www.klru.org/austinnow/archives/bigbox/bigbox.asp


and Envision Central Texas at
http://www.envisioncentraltexas.org

(be sure to sign in and take their survey, but before you do, you may want to take a few DAYS to review the reports and studies that they have recently published. These 4 plans include a lot of information that is not obvious at first or second glance)

WRONG QUESTION!

OUR CCHOA BOD ASKS: Would you like apartments or HEB?

What if the question itself is wrong?

It's publicly known that Circle C Land Corp is a subsidiary of Stratus. Look at this Travis CAD web page and look at Name and Mailing Address for Circle C Land Corp:

http://www.traviscad.org/travisdetail.php?theKey=04315702120000

It's Steve Bartlett.

Our ''representative'' (BOD).

How can he truly be ''representing'' our interests, if he is entrenched and has financial interests in all the decisions that are made in Circle C.

Even the leading question from our CCHOA (Would you rather have apartments or HEB?) is upside down. Why isn't the question: What would the community like to see and use in track 103?

Then we can talk with Stratus and see if they would like to work with us (since we will be the customers of whatever is put there).

Great Idea Sal

Sal has a great idea. Let's talk w/ Stratus. I know that I've called them to ask what a specific tract was going to used for and they seemed helpful. I think they are more open to conversation then trying to deal w/ Endeavor. Also Mr. Armstrong wants (so it seems) to have good relations w/ people. Are you going to set it up Sal?