Demolition of City-Owned Home Depot Building Finally Underway

Austin ISD Trustee Candace Hunter (right) and others look at a model for the redevelopment of the old Home Depot site (Photo by Jana Birchum)

It takes a special kind of building to draw a crowd to celebrate its impending demolition.

But that’s exactly what the “Old Home Depot,” located at 7211 N. I-35, is to the people living in North Austin’s St. John community – a vacant, deteriorating city-owned building that will soon be torn down to make way for affordable housing, parkland, and new retail. Demolition of the building began Aug. 14 and is expected to take about three weeks.

Community and civic leaders held an event Saturday, Aug. 12, to commemorate the latest step toward redevelopment of the Home Depot site (which also includes a former Chrysler auto dealership located at the adjacent 7309 N. I-35, totaling about 19 acres). Once completed, it will represent a major victory for an historic Austin community.

The neighborhood was established by the St. John Regular Missionary Baptist Association as a freedman community following the Civil War. Today the Black population has decreased and the census-tract containing the community is majority-Latino. The neighborhood is still an important part of Black Austin history – which the redevelopment intends to honor. But the site has been a more frustrating part of the community’s modern history: Purchased by the city in 2008, it languished in planning purgatory for nearly a decade, during which it mostly served as a storage facility.

That long period of inactivity is why the demolition celebration was needed, St. John Neighborhood Association president Akeem McLennon told us. “Today we’re commemorating our progress as a community,” McLennon, who began organizing around redeveloping the site in 2017, told us. “It’s been a long road, but we felt like providing the community with a visual reminder that progress is being made was important.”

Once slated to become a police substation, a lengthy community engagement process led to a new vision for the Old Home Depot site. Now, through a partnership between the city, the Housing Authority of the City of Austin (HACA), and private development firm Greystar, the site is set to be transformed into 560 housing units, about half of which will be reserved for tenants earning between 50-60% of Austin’s Median Family Income ($40,900 and $49,080 for a single person). Negotiations over the site are still underway, but the final plan could result in an expansion of the St. John Pocket Park and about 15,000 square feet of retail space.

U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, who represented District 4 on City Council when the bulk of the organizing and planning around redeveloping the site was done, was on hand for the celebration. The project represents a place of “beautiful vision and hope,” Casar told the crowd, because despite the resistance organizers faced in pushing for redevelopment of the site, it is now imminent. “People in the community came together with elected officials to create an example of what can be accomplished when we work together,” Casar said. “We’ve built something that people are going to be proud of in this community for a long time.”