Full Circle on the Triangle

Protests are starting up again at the Triangle. photograph by John Anderson

After a three-month hiatus from the headlines, the mother of all Central Austin neighborhood battles is back in your face. If you're sick of hearing about the Triangle now, you might want to spend the next few months under a rock in some other time zone. The controversial Triangle Square complex, proposed for the state-owned, undeveloped parcel of land between Lamar, Guadalupe, and 45th Street, lands before the Planning Commission on March 24, then heads to the city council a few weeks later. And - presuming the city aims to waste the project - before a state-dominated review board a few weeks after that. So the Triangle saga, already nearly two years old, will go on for a while longer.

The city's opposition to Triangle Square, at least as now proposed by Cencor Realty, is inevitable. Even if we weren't governed by a proudly pro-neighborhood council, the anti-Cencor forces, led by the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association and the ad hoc Neighbors of Triangle Park (NTP), have pulled off the best-organized and most visible grassroots campaign in Austin since Save Our Springs. And it's equally foregone, in light of its acrimonious deals at the Hog Farm in Northwest Austin and at Robert Mueller Airport, that the state has no qualms about reversing the city's decision and blessing Cencor's project.

So this story is over, right? Well, not really. Even though, with tough talk now on all sides, it looks as though nothing has changed in the last year, the Triangle story is a lot different now than it was three months ago. And there's plenty of room for more changes, even dramatic ones, before it's done.

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Gridlock

The Triangle's recent low profile has been by design, literally and figuratively. Last we heard from Cencor's Tom Terkel, NTP's Sabrina Burmeister, et al. was last fall, after Cencor filed its zoning request for Triangle Square, followed a day later by a community charrette organized by Councilmember Beverly Griffith. This planning exercise, overseen by consultants from the Florida-based Genesis Group, produced a vision for the Triangle way different from Cencor's.

It was also, though, way different from what's there now, or from what many NTP types (and charrette participants) claimed to want. The plan, as refined by Genesis, does not call for a park, or for a lower-density development than the Triangle Square "suburban strip mall" (a more accurate epithet may be "urban strip-mall-plus"), or for the banishment of Cencor's vilified anchor tenants, Randalls, Act III Theatres, and Barnes& Noble.

What Genesis envisioned, if only in outline, is a neo-traditional "urban village," more dense than Triangle Square, but including more diverse uses. Though Cencor's plan includes a modest allotment of apartments, office space, and small-scale retail, the Genesis plan gives these uses, rather than the "big box" anchor stores, the dominant role. As neighbor leader Stacy Able put it, "If you take the anchor stores away from Cencor's plan, you're left with a parking lot. If you take them away from the charrette plan, you're left with a neighborhood."

Key to this desired fate, in Genesis' view, was the development of actual cross streets within the Triangle, instead of the typical driveways and surface parking. The cross streets have become the major rallying point for the neighbors, and a deal-killer for Cencor - who, after all, develops shopping centers, not neighborhoods. But back in December after Genesis released its report, talk on all sides of the Triangle - Terkel, the NTP, HPNA and other NAs, the city, and the state - was positive, and the neighbors (despite any NTP supporters' reservations) quickly moved to endorse the Genesis concept as their own.

This led to the convening, by Griffith and her aide John Gilvar, of round-table negotiations, using the Genesis plan as a starting point for a reinvented Triangle Square. These talks involved Terkel and Cencor's lawyer; seven neighborhood leaders; city folks, including Griffith and Gilvar; and state folks, including Garry Mauro's aide Spencer Reed - personally sent by his boss, the land commissioner and Democratic gubernatorial contender, who gave Griffith and the proceedings his blessing.

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Negotiations Cease

Cencor will present this design plan to the Planning Commision on March 24. The developer rejected suggested changes submitted by neighbors of the project.

These talks began in January with mutual agreement to a de facto gag order, which is why the Triangle has been out of the news lately. That, however, was about all that was agreed to in the negotiations; as reported last week, the neighbors have now walked out, vowing to fight Terkel and Triangle Square before the Planning Commission, city council, and beyond. "We had no choice," says NTP's Sabrina Burmeister. "Tom Terkel's made it clear that he's unwilling to build a project the neighborhoods can support."

Actually, this is a point of agreement as well; Terkel concedes that he would not agree to the plan submitted by the neighbors, based on the charrette results as interpreted by local architect/guru Sinclair Black. "If the community knew what their plan calls for," he says, "I can't imagine there would be any support."

The neighbors' plan envisions a much larger and denser development than Triangle Square - about 900,000 square feet, equal to the Arboretum on a third of the land - with extensive (and expensive) underground parking and stormwater detention, and ample residential development organized on a streamlined version of Genesis' proposed grid. Naturally, Terkel thinks his plan is better, and to give him his due, Triangle Square is a better shopping center than most of the crap built throughout our city with little citizen complaint. "Our project is already more sophisticated than most anything you see in this part of the country," he says. "They say that I'm the problem, that another developer should be brought in, but who's going to build their plan?"

The anti-Cencor forces have two responses to that question. Other Austin developments, like Central Park - about 1,000 feet from Triangle Square - are having little apparent trouble filling their residential units at high rents, and developers like Post/West (née Columbus Realty, the city's dance partner at the downtown Pole Yard) are building neo-trad mixed-use projects elsewhere in Texas. So Terkel's argument that the Black/Genesis/neighbor plan isn't viable finds few takers. "It's ridiculous to argue that there's no market for this," Gilvar says. "There are plenty of real-world examples of developments like this. He can't say it's `academic.'"

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In Mauro's Court

The other neighborhood response is the complaint at the root of all our troubles: This is public land at the heart of the Capital City, and it should be developed for a higher public purpose, and with more citizen accord, than Terkel is willing to do, and if the public sector isn't going to take market risks to ensure better development, then who is? That's the high-minded way of putting it; the cynical view is that North Central Austin progressives think Triangle Square isn't good enough for their precious neighborhoods and expect the city and state to do backflips on their behalf. Either way, though, the result is the same: no deal for now.

At this point Terkel, as always, claims to be willing to make changes that will improve the project, and there's no reason not to expect a further revised Triangle Square plan to emerge, strategically, somewhere down the pipeline. (This is what happened with the current plan, unveiled by Cencor and filed with the city after the charrette was announced.) Whether any Cencor-spawned plan will be good enough for the city to approve, or bad enough for the state to reject, remains to be seen.

Ultimately, the city is on shaky ground denying Cencor's zoning outright - though they probably will anyway - since Terkel is merely asking for basic retail, which on any other site fronting three major arterials would be granted on consent. However, according to sources familiar with Cencor's lease with Texas MHMR, the deal can be terminated if the city denies the zoning. "What the Planning Commission and council do at this point is still important," says Burmeister. "It isn't just up to Garry Mauro."

The biggest allotment of influence here, though, does belong to Mauro, who's already - by committing to GLO participation in the now-abandoned talks - put his office-seeking butt on the line in a city whose votes he will greatly need in November. "He understood that the negotiations were designed to produce significant changes in the Triangle proposal," says Gilvar. If the neighbors can find another developer who will build a Genesis-style plan, or can come up with some other alternative to Cencor that meets the state's needs, Mauro would have little to lose by backing it. The state's recent backpedaling on the Hog Farm (see "Corner to Corner") shows that even the decisions of the much-feared review board are not inviolate.

So there's still plenty of time for the Triangle saga to take another turn, and there's plenty of meaning in the twists it has taken already. Back in July, it would seem inconceivable that the angry Neighbors of Triangle Park would agree to a plan for the site that paved most of it over and left in the hated Randalls.

"The majority in the neighborhoods have accepted that urban infill is going to happen," says Gilvar. "They've accepted that paradigm, instead of just saying it should be a park. But they've dug in their heels on the design concepts that they think will make the development worthwhile. And I think that's admirable."