City and county to invest in historically underserved Northeast Austin area

At its Tuesday meeting, the Travis County Commissioners Court heard an update on what Commissioner Jeff Travillion called a “Marshall Plan” for the rapidly developing Northeast Austin area, referring to the 1948 plan for the U.S. to help in Western Europe’s economic recovery after World War II.

The Northeast Austin District Plan began in 2023 when both Travis County commissioners and Austin City Council passed resolutions to develop an interlocal agreement for the plan, which was finalized in March of last year. A group made up of city and county staff has worked since then to create a holistic plan to retain the existing culture of the 26.5-square-mile area bounded by U.S. Highway 183, U.S. 290, State Highway 130 and the Colorado River, knowing that development will continue.

“We want to make sure that we plan before gentrification. It should not have to be gentrified before it is planned for and used, right?” Travillion said on Tuesday. In the process, the county hopes to stimulate economic development, improve connectivity with the rest of the city and county and generate jobs that pay a living wage for the people already living there. 

The area is particularly vulnerable to transit woes due to its many interlocking highways – the average Georgian Acres resident’s commute time, for example, was 67 percent longer than the average Austinite’s in 2021. Despite its proximity to the North Lamar Transit Center, the neighborhood is caught between U.S. 183 and Interstate 35. In response, UT-Austin’s School of Architecture collaborated with the Austin Transportation Department in 2022 to design a transit mobility hub, including a request-to-ride circulator that takes residents to and from the transit center. The relative improvement took years – and that’s an area within Austin city limits. 

About 69 percent of the Northeast District is within city limits, but about 27 percent lies in the extra-territorial jurisdiction, where the city provides limited municipal services, collects no taxes, and residents can’t vote. That’s where Travis County would come in.

“We are addressing the needs of the ETJ, looking at how we connect to other cities in the area, so that we can design a place that is affordable for our entire community, and that people don’t have to continue to be pushed further out,” Travillion said. 

The goal of the working group is to identify investments that can use publicly owned land, federal funding or other combinations of the city’s and county’s resources to invest in the historically under-invested East Travis County. In the agenda from March 2024 wherein the county passed the Northeast Plan, staff wrote that the population in that district has faced “displacement and systemic racism that has left people of color falling further behind economically; made them more likely to be in a generational cycle of poverty; and less resilient to natural disasters, weather events, and national or personal economic or health crises.”

Christy Moffett, director of economic development and strategic investments in the Planning and Budget Office, told commissioners on Tuesday that the city of Austin has hired a consultant to assist with land use planning, and the next order of business for the working group is to finalize the physical boundaries of the area, with an eye toward expanding what is currently in the plan. After that, the group will come back to the city and county with a summary report of existing conditions, assets and activities within that area by June of this year, before they actually start any plans of their own.

“When the city was looking to annex parts of our county, it focused on places that already had infrastructure and not places that historically have been underserved,” Travillion noted. “So it’s going to be important that we work together to make sure that our road infrastructure, our water infrastructure and all the services – clinics, transit, food access – are taken care of. We want a Marshall Plan for the area that considers not only its infrastructure, but the ability of the community to use that infrastructure while it is under development.”

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