What Is the ARA?

Showing ARA boundaries, the Juniper-Olive Historic District, and the Eleven East complex

The City Council created the Austin Revital­iz­a­tion Authority in the late 1990s. It serves as the city's agent in redeveloping the residential and commercial district of 11th and 12th streets – once a thriving African-American neighborhood east of Downtown – with financing from local, federal, and private dollars. Drawing tens of millions of dollars from the federal Community Develop­ment Block Grant program and other sources, the city has kept the ARA in operation, although local neighborhood activists question whether ARA's history of project delays – usually attributed to complex bureaucratic hurdles – sufficiently outweigh its development successes. One of the ARA's projects, the 18-home Juniper-Olive Historic District, kicked off about four years ago but has been slow to reach fruition. Today, officials from the ARA and the city attribute the holdup to city revisions in how the program operates. That explanation, however, is of little comfort to Austinites who qualified for and made down payments on the homes they have yet to occupy.