Local News
Huge Luxury Apartment Tower Planned for Congress Avenue
While buildings keep getting taller and taller in Austin, this luxury apartment tower has one interesting feature. It will be “car-free”.
Deemed a vacant retail space, the corner of Congress Avenue and 8th Street will look very different in the next four years because The Avenue will be coming. Proposed by Congress Development Partners Ltd., the luxury apartment tower will be 30 stories tall.
As the Austin American-Statesman reported, the tower will hold “135 luxury apartments, office space, a restaurant, and a bar…[but] it won’t include a parking garage or any space for auto parking.” The development group stated that it will be the first “truly car-free luxury development in downtown Austin, designed to encourage biking, walking, ride-sharing, and public transportation.”
The carless concept is designed to appeal to people who function 100 percent in a downtown setting, from work to their personal lives, where ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft reign supreme.
The project is scheduled to break ground on May 1, 2017 and will take about two years to complete barring any major obstacles. The cost will be around $60 million and the individual costs of the apartments themselves are no small number, either.
While this does promote a car-less environment, which will no doubt help with traffic congestion, will it really stop people from owning cars? Probably not, and the downtown parking situation is likely to get much, much worse.
