Historic survey of downtown Austin nears completion

Austin’s Preservation Office is poised to complete its Historic Resources Survey of the downtown area by the end of the year, wrapping up years of work documenting sites of cultural interest.

Preservation Office Planner Sofia Wagner met with Historic Landmark Commission members earlier this month for a progress update on the project, which to date has profiled 1,964 properties built before 1980. Once completed, the survey will identify priority candidates for historic zoning within the city core, an area spanning MoPac Expressway to Interstate 35 and Lady Bird Lake to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The city of Austin has not conducted a comprehensive survey of downtown’s historic resources since 1981, making the data nearly as old as the midcentury structures now up for reconsideration.

While the survey’s findings have no immediate impact on zoning, the team behind the project at HHM & Associates hope their discoveries will better position Austin’s Preservation Office to safeguard the buildings connecting Austinites to their heritage.

“What’s happening now is that things come in through the Preservation Office for a demolition permit and are reviewed for their eligibility,” architectural historian Emily Payne said in a community meeting last May. “But it’s really hard to review the eligibility of one resource in a vacuum, when you don’t have documentation about comparable resources across the city, and there’s a ticking clock for those permits so you don’t have time to do the contextual and historical research that enable you to understand what’s rare and what’s not rare.”

Payne said the survey could also make historic zoning a less intimidating prospect for property owners, who stand to gain a number of generous tax breaks for their troubles. 

“We’re really trying to give property owners who have an eligible resource that chunk of everything they need to complete an application for a landmark,” Payne told the Downtown Commission last March. “We’re trying to front-load that process to make it more accessible.”

Payne and her team are slated to summarize their findings before the Historic Landmark Commission sometime this summer. In the meantime, they are opening up their inbox to public input, with plans to host an online comment period from March 26 to May 9. Anyone particularly interested is also welcome to join the team’s next public meeting, which will be held via Zoom on April 16.

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Posted In: Preservation, District 9