During the Neighborhood Conservation Combining District project that I worked on with our neighborhood association over the past three years, one of the Baby Developers*, who was responsible for several super-duplexes† being built in Hyde Park in the past, came to the neighborhood association planning team with a fistful of zoning changes he wanted us to incorporate for a mixed-use development he intended to build on a hundred-foot wide through lot—one that runs through from one side of a block to the other—facing the arterial street that marks the western boundary of the neighborhood. (At least this time he came to the neighborhood association before he started building, to try for our cooperation rather than our antagonism.) He ended up getting most of what he wanted from us, including height and footprint variances, and that zoning was written into the conservation district ordinance. The property sat and sat throughout 2005 with no activity other than the occasional yard sale by someone who appeared to be the caretaker. Within the last few weeks the buildings on the lot were demolished at last, as though Baby Developer was finally ready to begin.
Tonight on my walk I went past the lot . . . and noticed a “For Sale” sign posted, with one of Baby Developer’s partners-in-crime as the listing Realtor. I’m betting that no bank was willing to finance an ill-thought-out project and it collapsed, and he’s trying to dump the property to cut his losses. (An enormous mixed-use development is already being built directly across the street from Our Baby’s lot.) “Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” So now the neighborhood is stuck with this great big mostly-scraped-bare through-lot with commercial zoning on it, waiting for the next over-ambitious, pie-in-the-sky development scheme to come along.
*A Baby Developer is a twenty-something who’s been set up by Daddy with his Very Own shell development company, and is acting as Daddy’s front man for pushing-the-rules residential infill projects. They get a nice cushy project to play with, and maybe also some practical experience in how to fight neighborhood associations—or sometimes in how to get their noses pushed in by a neighborhood association that’s tougher than they are. The super-duplex fight became an example of How To Get Your Nose Pushed In.
† A “super-duplex” is a dwelling with anything from five to seven bedrooms per side, a duplex in name only. They were designed to squeeze structures that were apartment complexes in all but name through a loophole in the Austin zoning code. The zoning code has since been tightened to make super-duplexes impossible, by limiting the total number of unrelated adults who can occupy a duplex (i.e., both sides counted together) to six. There’s no point in building a fourteen-bedroom duplex if you can’t cram fourteen college students into it.
