Traveling east on University Boulevard, just past Scott & White Hospital but before Caldwell Elementary School, sits a plot of undeveloped land, half flat, half slanted by a hill that veers off into residential property, all surrounded by the kind of slight wire fence that is common throughout Texas.

That site has been pegged by a Dallas-based multifamily property developer as Round Rock's next major apartment complex, featuring a design of upwards of 720 units and dwarfing any such existing development in the city.

Farther south, just off the intersection of Toll 45 and Toll 130, tractors are already bulldozing and preparing the land for Pflugerville's newest multifamily development, a less-ostentatious but still significant 370-unit, $40 million project connected to Stone Hill Town Center.

Meanwhile, up the toll road in Hutto, city staff are working on a housing policy that calls for, in part, increased variety in the city's housing stock, including additional multifamily housing.

Each city is dealing with a different phase of multifamily development reminiscent of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Round Rock has too much, Hutto doesn't have enough, and Pflugerville has, well, somewhere in the middle.

The question is, how much multifamily is just right?

"You don't want to become overrun with anything," Pflugerville Assistant City Manager Trey Fletcher said. "You want to have a good balance of it all."

Demand

It was that search for a balance that set off a discussion on the Round Rock City Council in July about the weight of multifamily housing in the city.

The owners of La Frontera Square had applied to change their zoning to allow for more multifamily units and less restaurant, office and commercial space, citing a lack of interest from commercial sectors and high demand for residential units.

What resulted was a discussion about the City Council's vision for the city's mix of multifamily and single-family homes.

"What do we want Round Rock to look like in 20 years?" City Councilman George White asked. "Do we want to be an apartment-dwelling populace?"

At issue was the city's General Plan, which calls for an 80/20 split in favor of single-family homes. Currently, Round Rock has about 26 percent of its housing stock tied up in multifamily, not including the University Boulevard project.

However, at the same meeting, Round Rock Planning Director Peter Wysocki said "there is no magic number" and that the city might need to revisit that split.

Leaders in other cities have taken notice of increased demand as well.

Hutto is addressing essentially the opposite problem as Round Rock. With the exception of a few duplexes and two units in the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction, Hutto is almost entirely single-family housing, Hutto Planning Manager Will Guerin said.

However, Guerin expects that could change.

"With the Austin multifamily housing market being as strong as it is, we expect that to pick up in Hutto," Guerin said.

To that end, Guerin said city staff is working on a housing policy that addresses diversity in the city's housing stock. The point isn't necessarily to attract multifamily housing specifically, but to create a more diverse housing stock.

Still, Guerin said the city has been approached about multifamily housing by several developers, especially for space along Exchange Boulevard. He said one company in particular could move beyond the speculative phase soon, and that the opening of the Eastern Williamson County Higher Education Center in 2013 could increase the demand.

Pflugerville has already experienced some of that uptick in demand.

"We know that there will be more multifamily, that the demand for multifamily is there, and there will be developers asking to build multifamily in our community," Pflugerville Mayor Jeff Coleman said.

Those multifamily units, Fletcher said, can be important for a city's retail base.

"Low- to medium-density development doesn't support a tremendous amount of retail. So, as Round Rock has done, it's central to the policy discussion of the planning and zoning commission and our city council to consider how much is enough and how much is too much," Fletcher said.

Control

As part of the discussion, Pflugerville has created controls on the multifamily market.

"We feel like, as a community, we have done the ground work to control that multifamily [housing] by creating very strict building standards," Coleman said.

Those building standards—which regulate the look and density of new dwellings—were part of the driving force behind annexations over the past five years, Fletcher said, allowing the city to control the quality and consistency in those areas.

Round Rock, meanwhile, has recently been confronted with the issue again.

The annexation, rezoning and planned unit development applications for the University Boulevard apartment complex were scheduled to be addressed at a December council meeting but were sent back to Planning and Zoning after some council members expressed concerns over its size.

"Given the discussion the city council had during their briefing Tuesday morning, [city staff] relayed some of the concerns to the applicant," Wysocki said of a Tuesday meeting Dec. 13, adding that the delay would allow the complex's developers extra time to reduce the number of units.

Demographics changes

One aspect of multifamily housing that some officials are keeping an eye on is how such units affect the demographics of a city.

"In multifamily, you tend to have—tend to, not always—have singles, young professionals or older single people," Pflugerville Assistant City Manager Trey Fletcher said.

Indeed, over the past 10 years, Pflugerville's population has grown older, less family-centered and more diverse.

The results from the 2010 census showed a transition of sorts for Pflugerville, from a predominantly nuclear-family oriented town to one that, while still primarily made up of such families, increasingly finds itself in a state of transition.

For example, between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of the population age 19 years or younger dropped from 62 percent to 54 percent, according to city data. Similarly, the census found that households with children under the age of 18 dropped from 59 percent to 48.6 percent.

Overall, the median age of the population increased from 31.6 years to 33.8 years, increasing at a faster rate than the rest of Travis County, according to census data.

The cause, Fletcher said, is likely due to annexations which brought both apartments and retirement homes into city limits.

"We're predominantly a single-family detached community, a bedroom community, and we have so little multifamily by comparison, but when we get some, it's going to influence those percentages," Fletcher said.

That goes doubly so for Hutto, which only has a few duplexes in city limits and two multifamily units in its extraterritorial jurisdiction, Hutto Planning Manager Will Guerin said.

In fact, census data from 2010 Hutto bears a striking resemblance to 2000 Pflugerville. Hutto's median age is lower—28.9 years—but both had more than 80 percent of households listed as family households, and about 55 percent had children younger than 18. The average household size for both was around 3.2—3.15 for Pflugerville in 2000 and 3.22 for Hutto in 2010.

In other words, if Hutto wants to have an idea of what the next 10 years might look like, officials need only look down the road.