So, what happens when all the houses in West Campus fall down? Informed
observers of the West Campus real-estate scene agree that this is an
unduly
alarmist prospect. It’s true, they argue, that much of the housing
stock near
the University of Texas is old, getting older, and not aging well. But
the
reality of today’s West Campus – the most crowded and expensive part of
the
city, and yet one of the most cash-strapped – deserves a much broader
view.
Nevertheless, the decay of the historic and quasi-historic rent homes
that for
years have made up much of the available housing in West Campus is one
of the
factors bringing the area to a crossroads. Most of us, whether from
firsthand
or secondhand knowledge, can recount tales of life in funky student
squalor, in
rambling houses built to occupy proper University families but lately
home to
too many people with too few bathrooms and far too many holes in the
roof. This
“natural deterioration,” as Austin’s building inspectors call it,
recently made
the news as the city slapped the University of Texas Inter-Cooperative
Council
(UTICC), proprietors of many of the UT residential co-ops, with
numerous
code violations that could spell heavy fines or, in the unlikely
worst-case
scenario, demolition. The action against the UTICC is part of a
campaign for
more rigorous inspection and enforcement targeted to high-turnover
properties
such as those in West Campus.
For the UTICC, which already spends nearly a quarter of its budget
on
maintaining its mostly aged (60-70 years old) properties, the
prospective fines
and remedies are not happy news, but are necessary evils. Lower-profile
property owners in West Campus, of both rent houses and apartment
complexes,
may not always feel such an incentive to renovate their holdings, not
in a
famously tight rental market where hordes of UT students would gladly
pay good
money to live in a tool shed. “In my mind, the owner has a fiduciary
responsibility to make properties comfortable, clean, and livable for
residents, but I don’t think that normally happens,” says George
Humphrey,
former city councilmember and rehabilitator of several affordable
apartment
complexes throughout Austin. “We have a large percentage of landlords
who’ll
act in good faith, but also a lot of absentee landlords, and local
landlords,
who really don’t care about these things.”
Even so, Humphrey says, enough landlords will keep their properties
up on
principle to avoid a wholesale decimation of the West Campus housing
stock.
“Smart landlords will in most cases constantly renovate the property,”
he says.
“Proper maintenance, even though it costs more in the long run, means a
greater
return for everyone, both economically for the owner and in better
relationships between the tenants and the landlords.”
Other observers note that, regardless of whether most landlords wear
white or
black hats, the fragmented nature of West Campus, where so many
different
people own so many different kinds of property, makes any single trend
– like
the aging of the housing stock – unlikely to transform the area. “We’ll
see a
slow evolution, where some units are demolished, some are renovated,
and some
just deteriorate,” says Charles Heimsath, an analyst of the Austin
real-estate
market.
The piecemeal ownership of West Campus is one reason, and probably
the biggest
one, that the area seems marooned at a time when the Austin real estate
market
is hitting new heights of hyperactivity. Analysts talk about 8,000 to
10,000
new rental units coming on line before the end of the decade, but none
of them
are going up in West Campus, where everyone wants them to be. “The
problem in
West Campus is that there isn’t more of it,” says Mike McComb,
microbrewer (of
Balcones Red Granite), owner of several student-housing properties, and
vice-president of the University Area Partners. “You can’t accumulate
enough
land to build the size project that lenders are willing to finance; if
an
institution has to do the same amount of work on a $50 million project
as a
$500,000 one, which are they going to finance?”
As long as current trends hold – even if rents stabilize at current
levels –
it would seem West Campus is headed in one of two directions. One would
be
gentrification a la Hyde Park, where rents become so astronomical as to
drive
students out completely, into the new units going up on the periphery,
to be
replaced by affluent non-students. Though this is certainly possible,
it
appears unlikely. “West Campus is already unaffordable to most
students,” says
Heimsath. “But there are enough students who are willing to pay rents
25
percent higher than the city average in order to live close to campus.”
The other alternative, which would certainly be happening now if
local lenders
and city planners thought differently, would be large-scale
redevelopment
adding several thousand units to West Campus. Economically, this would
likely
make better sense than wholesale building out on the fringe. “Much of
Austin’s
current growth is from high-tech,” says Humphrey, and those newcomers
“aren’t
putting down roots here. Their capital assets are their brains. If
anything
happens to depress the computer business, which it inevitably will,
Austin
could see an exodus that matches the current boom, and we’ll have a
housing
glut.”
Yet even if there were a deluge of available units on the market,
West Campus
would still be in a drought, with most students relegated to far-flung
complexes on the shuttle routes. To create enough housing stock in the
University area to accommodate all the students who’d like to live
there would
mean creating a density common to the East and West Coasts, but with
which most
Austinites, and their city officials, are wholly unfamiliar and
probably
ill-prepared. “The density in Austin is only a tenth of what they have
in the
Northeast, so West Campus is not nearly built out to capacity,” says
Heimsath,
“especially if Austin is truly interested in being a compact city.”
While many of us, driven to vascular headache by the very thought
of
transiting West Campus, recoil at the prospect of it being even more
crowded,
McComb notes that different and better attitudes toward planning could
make it
work. “Classically, you figured out how many parking places you could
get into
your parcel, and then you built that many units,” he says. “West Campus
is, and
should be, an urban pedestrian area, and it should have different
development
criteria. We don’t need a place for everyone to park at the University,
and at
their condo, and at McDonalds. One positive thing would be a
transportation
system in place, such as light rail, that would make city planners
change the
rules and produce a zoning ordinance designed for urban
redevelopment.”
Given the banks’ current queasiness about lending in West Campus,
a more
extensive city initiative, with actual development incentives for
builders
aiming to increase the student housing stock, might be called for. But
the
city’s freedom to move is probably limited. “The city could reduce
development
fees to make the area competitive and attract more development
interest,” says
Heimsath, “but a reinvestment strategy (such as a redevelopment
authority along
the East Austin model) would seemingly be impossible. You could see the
headlines – `City supports kiddie condos.'”
That leaves the ball in the court of the University itself, and of
the other
institutions – the churches, fraternity and sorority houses, co-ops,
and
business tenants – that occupy West Campus. While most of these folks
are even
less likely to be recipients of lenders’ largesse, they do control much
of the
land, including big chunks currently used for surface parking, which
could be
assembled into high-density developments. “There needs to be some sort
of
coming together of the neighborhood and community to find how to get
better
utilization of that property,” McComb notes.
Some of this is happening now – the University’s current
master-planning
process incorporates affordable campus-area housing as a major goal,
and at
least one campus-area church has a working site plan for developing a
housing-plus-parking structure on its current parking lot. In order for
West
Campus to fulfill its traditional, and probably proper, role as the
student
community, these stakeholders will need to bring to their thinking a
creativity
that hasn’t often characterized the Austin real estate market or,
sadly, the
attempt to revitalize the central city. But McComb, for one, thinks it
could
happen. “The problems present the opportunities,” he says, “and as the
opportunities become possibilities, the marketplace will come to the
rescue.”
This article appears in May 5 • 1995 and May 5 • 1995 (Cover).