Click images to view full size Chestnut Commons Austin, Texas Project Type: Mixed Residential Volume 38 Number 23 October–December 2008 Case Number: C038023 PROJECT TYPE Situated in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Austin, Texas, Chestnut Commons is a transit-oriented infill community featuring 32 cottage-style residences and 32 for-sale flats above garages. This housing typology— smaller-than-average homes arranged to maximize density—has the advantage of making homeownership more affordable, with initial sales prices ranging from $149,000 to $260,000. The developers of Chestnut Commons— locally based Momark Development, LLC, and Benchmark Land Development— donate half of the project’s profits (beyond an initial 20 percent gross profit threshold) to the nonprofit Austin Community Foundation, resulting in a total contribution of over $1.1 million toward community development in the city. LOCATION Central City SITE SIZE 3.89 acres/1.57 hectares LAND USES Single-Family Detached Residential, Condominiums KEYWORDS/SPECIAL FEATURES For-Sale Housing Mixed Residential Workforce Housing PROJECT ADDRESS 601 Miriam Avenue Austin, Texas WEB SITE www.austinchestnut.com DEVELOPERS Momark Development, LLC Austin, Texas 512-391-1789 www.momarkdevelopment.com Benchmark Land Development Austin, Texas 512-472-7455 www.benchmarktx.net BUILDER Armadillo Homes San Antonio, Texas 210-662-0066 ARCHITECT * some assembly required 512-467-2888 PLANNER Bosse & Turner Associates Austin, Texas 512-472-7332 www.btaaustin.com LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT TBG Partners Austin, Texas 512-327-1011 www.tbg-inc.com GENERAL DESCRIPTION Mixing 32 small two-story, for-sale detached single-family houses and 32 one-bedroom flats built over garages, Chestnut Commons is a transit-oriented infill project in a diverse and gentrifying neighborhood a little over a mile (1.6 km) east of downtown Austin, Texas. Characterized by compact lots, the project features common areas: a large courtyard and a number of small, informal gathering spaces. Each of the 64 dwellings on the site has its own garage, accessed by an alley or a sidestreet. Located behind the detached houses, garages are grouped in sets of four per building. Atop each of these structures sit two one-bedroom flats. The entire 3.89-acre (1.57-ha) development is under condominium ownership, in which buyers purchase the interior spaces, but the homeowners association owns all of the outdoor space as well as the exteriors of the buildings. BACKGROUND Chestnut Commons is part of a larger development that was inspired by the desire of Tom Meredith—a former chief financial officer at Dell Computer—to give back to his community. Purchasing 22 acres (8.9 ha) of unused land in the at-risk neighborhood of East Austin, he envisioned a transit-oriented community that would improve the character of the existing neighborhood, thus benefiting longtime residents as well as newcomers. At the eastern edge of this property, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Capital MetroRail station is under construction as of fall 2008. Capital MetroRail’s Red Line will carry commuters 32 miles (51 km) from the suburbs into downtown Austin when it opens in March 2009. As part of Chestnut Commons’ development process, Meredith sold four acres of the site to the Austin Community Foundation (ACF), a philanthropic nonprofit organization with a mission to improve the quality of life in Austin through funding a broad array of services including community development. The ACF then sold the four acres to regional development firms Momark Development and Benchmark Land Development in exchange for a portion of the project’s returns. The deal called for the developers to donate half of the project’s profits, once the project had exceeded a 20 percent gross profit. As of November 2008, with only two units in Chestnut Commons left to sell, the development team has donated $1.1 million to the ACF. As of fall 2008, about $250,000 from this fund has been given to Habitat for Humanity to repair existing housing for elderly residents in the surrounding neighborhood. To develop Chestnut Commons, Momark and Benchmark created a limited partnership. In this partnership, Benchmark brought its financial relationships and experience gained from leading the development of Plum Creek—one of the area’s first new urbanist communities—to the table. Momark’s role in the process focused on product development and marketing, as well as managing much of the site preparation and landscaping. Together, the two firms hired Armadillo Homes, a homebuilder with projects in Laredo, Austin, and San Antonio, to build and sell the residences. THE SITE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS Chestnut Commons is located near downtown Austin, in the rapidly changing neighborhood of East Austin, which is bordered by Lady Bird Lake (a damned segment of the Colorado River, which cleaves through the middle of Austin) to the south, Interstate 35 to the west, Airport Boulevard to the east, and 51st Street to the north. Originally a community that was occupied predominantly by lower-income African American and Latino residents, East Austin has been gaining in popularity with a whiter, more professional demographic. Ten years ago, the average house in the area was worth about $40,000 to $50,000 and the price per square foot was approximately $60 ($645.83 per sq m). As of fall 2008, prices there can exceed $300 per foot ($3,229.17 per sq m). The neighborhood’s proximity to the campus of the University of Texas and to downtown has become a major draw for homebuyers, especially as traffic worsens in the region. As mentioned previously, Chestnut Commons is part of the larger 22-acre (8.9-ha) triangular property purchased by Meredith. The Meredith property was originally owned by the Featherlite Building Products Corporation and was used to store giant precast concrete slabs that were intended for use in large-scale construction projects. Surrounded by pre–World War II bungalows and postwar ranch houses, the property is bordered on the north by Martin Luther King Boulevard, a major east–west arterial in East Austin. Cutting diagonally across the street grid, the aforementioned Capital Metro train tracks mark the eastern property line and Miriam Avenue defines the western boundary. While Miriam Avenue serves as the western boundary for most of the 22-acre (8.9-ha) property, at this corner of the site the property extends half a block further toward the west of Miriam between East 16th and East 14th streets (there is no East 15th Street). Chestnut Commons’ northern boundary is East 17th Street and its southern boundary is East 14th Street. The eastern edge of the project is marked by a private alley that provides access to the garages. Surrounded by a chain link fence, the property sat unused for a long time. People would routinely cut the fence and use the weed-covered area as a dump. Because the property is located at the bottom of a hill, drainage was a challenge and the southern end of the site had a history of flooding. Large chunks of concrete, gravel, and random junk excavated from the site led the development team to believe that people added these materials to elevate the land out of the floodplain. Much grading work had to be done, the storm sewer system was channelized, an adjacent creek was cleaned up, and a blockage in the preexisting stormwater system needed to be removed. The Chestnut Commons site was treated separately from the larger property because of the more acute drainage challenges and because of how this section interfaces with the community. DESIGN Chestnut Commons was designed so that most of the 32 bungalows face Miriam Avenue, while the garages and the flats above them were placed behind the houses and are accessed by alleys. Because the development team extended Miriam Avenue farther south from 16th Street to 14th Street, this section of Miriam is a private road that is owned by the homeowners association. Between 16th and 14th streets, the houses line both sides of Miriam; however, between 16th and 17th the cottages are only on the eastern side of the street. The design goal was to integrate a higher-density community within the existing community—namely, to have the “look and feel” of a single-family community with the benefits of a higher-density project. Ranging in size from 667 to 1,394 square feet (62 to 129.5 sq m), two-story pitched-roof bungalows are clad in bold-colored HardiPlank (a durable cement fiber product that resembles wood clapboard), all with white trim. Six of the houses are arranged in a courtyard designed to be a meeting area, and the mailboxes for all 64 units are located there. Between the houses and the garage/flats are pedestrian paths that run the length of the project. Smaller nodes along the paths allow residents to interact. Amenities such as fire pits, picnic tables, special plantings, and fountains give each of these nodes its own character. All of the nodes are intended to replace privately owned outdoor space. Because East Austin is not known for its schools, the developers assumed that there would be few children at Chestnut Commons and therefore none of these nodes is designed with children in mind. Most of the garage buildings are paired so that the garage doors face each other. On the opposite sides of these structures are pedestrian entrances and more landscaped areas. Chris Allen, the primary architect of the locally based firm called *some assembly required, designed Chestnut Commons from what the development team describes as a three-dimensional perspective. Because much of the Austin-area real estate market is composed of lower-density, single-family homes, it was important for the development team to have a designer who could think beyond the suburban tract house model and plan for the challenges of constructing buildings that would be so close to each other.