The details
The nearly 20-acre Sunset Ridge property off Southwest Parkway is mostly undeveloped and has been zoned for office use. However, an eight-building residential project was proposed under Austin’s Affordability Unlocked program that can relax some development rules if a significant amount of housing is reserved for lower-income tenants.
Developer Manifold RE would make half of the apartments affordable based on the local median family income, or MFI, which is $126,000 for a family of four. In addition to 222 units available at market rents, Sunset Ridge will include:
- 101 units for tenants earning up to 50% MFI
- 77 units at 60% MFI
- 44 units at 80% MFI
City Council members voted in May to amend an old restrictive covenant on the land to allow for the large-scale housing development and to use $8.89 million from Austin’s 2022 housing bond to support the project's financing.
In late July, the Planning Commission approved the project plans under the city’s Hill Country Roadway rules designed to protect West Austin’s scenic highways.
The planned housing project has been widely contested by Hill Country residents, who turned out to the recent council and commission meetings to testify against Manifold’s plans.
Manifold representatives didn’t return requests for comment about next steps for Sunset Ridge as of press time.
Quote of note
Despite that opposition, council member Paige Ellis—who represents Southwest Austin’s District 8—said the difficulty of bringing affordable housing in her district and the scarcity of affordable units there led to her support. She also noted it’d be the first Affordability Unlocked project in the area since that program’s creation.
“I would love for us to be able to pick and choose as a community exactly where the best place is to be able to balance all of the needs of Southwest Austin,” she said during council’s May 2 review. “But the reality is I’ve had a number of different people come to me and say, ‘I really want to build affordable housing because it’s something that I believe in, and I think I can do it on attractive land in Southwest Austin.’ And time and time again, they don’t pencil out, and they get pulled off the table before anything is ever able to move forward. So I don’t feel like I’m in a position to say no to these when they can pencil out.”
A closer look
Multiple neighborhood groups and homeowners associations logged their opposition to Sunset Ridge given worries about added traffic and safety issues along Southwest Parkway; the project’s impact on the area’s ecology and beauty; its overall size and compliance with city regulations, such as the Hill Country Roadway ordinance; and the placement of multifamily housing in the area.
Resident Kristen Jacobs said a development the size of Sunset Ridge shouldn’t have been planned along the corridor, and that it sets a “dangerous precedent” for the area.
“Aside from the road safety concerns; the lack of sidewalks; the isolation from basic amenities, such as grocery stores, public transportation, affordable child care, et cetera, you will find that this location is completely illogical for a development of this size and scope, and if approved, not only would disregard Hill Country Roadway protections but would forever alter the beauty of the highest topographical point of Southwest Parkway, which many have fought to preserve for decades,” she said in May.
Jason Svatek, president of the Travis Country West Homeowners Association, told council members the development will be situated too close to other dense apartment buildings, and would lead to a concentration of poverty and “consolidation of minorities” within a corner of Southwest Austin. He also said it’d bring more disadvantaged students to overburden area schools.
That commentary drew some pushback from the council dais, with Mayor Kirk Watson and council member Harper-Madison taking issue with a correlation between poverty and race. Svatek said his worries were only about issues facing the community and the project itself.
“To be clear, it’s not a fight against affordable housing," Svatek said. "It is against any structure of this size, scope and density on this piece of land. I don’t care what it is."
Zooming in
During the planning commission’s July 23 review, attorney and project agent Richard Suttle addressed some of the community’s environmental and traffic worries.
The project avoided going through a civic traffic impact analysis, but he said developers will install a new traffic light at the entrance to the property off Southwest Parkway. He also noted that, while construction will remove more trees from the site than initially expected, many are “dead, diseased or damaged,” and the project team received city arborist approval for that work.
Commissioner Grayson Cox also questioned whether the project’s site plan complied with Hill Country regulations that require a portion of a property to be left in a natural state during development. More than half of the property is also expected to be blanketed with impervious cover—surfaces like buildings and parking lots that don't absorb rainfall—that's typically limited for West Austin construction.
City staff noted those factors but said the proposed addition of water detention ponds and landscaping features in parking areas helped earn their approval. Suttle also said the project will be credited for restoring “previously disturbed” land to a natural state, given the property’s history as a construction site in need of some cleanup.
Cox, an engineer who said he'd been denied similar allowances on past projects he's worked on, asked for more adherence to similar building regulations in the future.
“I’ve experienced inconsistencies with this, and it feels like in this particular case those interpretations were fairly generous,” he said. “I just wanted to put that out there, that I hope we’re really making an effort to be equal across the board in the way that we apply these regulations.”
