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UT plans student housing, tennis courts, parking garage in East Austin
The University of Texas plans to build housing for more than 700 graduate students, a 12-court tennis center and a 2,000-space parking garage on land it owns just east of Interstate 35.
The plan, which is subject to approval by the UT System Board of Regents next month, would address pressing needs for the university while satisfying concerns of nearby residents, according to school officials and leaders of the Blackland neighborhood.
“This has been a terrific collaboration with the eastside neighborhood,” said Pat Clubb, vice president for university operations. “It was heartening to see the two groups come together and have a consensus.”
The estimated price tag for the East Campus project — $166.4 million — does not include the cost of relocating UT Press and UT Printing operations, which are currently housed in a building that will be razed to accommodate the tennis courts.
Renovating a university-owned building in Montopolis for the printing unit is estimated at $11 million. Officials did not immediately have a cost estimate for moving UT Press offices to a university-owned building along Lake Austin Boulevard and storing UT Press materials at the university’s Pickle Research Campus in North Austin.
UT had planned to build a tennis center at its B.M. Whitaker intramural field at 51st and Guadalupe streets. The longtime tennis center, Penick-Allison, was demolished last year to make way for the Dell Medical School.
But officials decided that Whitaker was too far away from campus. “For our students, time is the most precious commodity,” said Steve Patterson, director of men’s athletics. “Trying to commute up and back in traffic every day was sub-optimal.”
The construction timetable for the tennis center is still being worked out, Patterson said. In the meantime, players are using Whitaker, the UT Golf Club at Steiner Ranch and the Caswell Tennis Center on Shoal Creek Boulevard.
The graduate student housing units would be built along the west side of Leona Street, south of Manor Road and north of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The units would have a residential, townhouse-style appearance to blend with the single-family houses to the east.
UT officials initially proposed building the tennis complex along Leona, where the student housing is now slated to be constructed. But residents objected because of concerns about lighting, traffic and parking, and UT President Bill Powers nixed the plan, officials said. That led to the plan for upgrading Whitaker.
Assuming UT regents grant approval, which is expected, the tennis center will be built farther away from the residential area, on land just east of I-35 and north of the UFCU Disch-Falk baseball field.
Residents and neighborhood leaders are pleased with the overall plan, said Bo McCarver, president of the Blackland Community Development Corp. The parking garage should ease on-street parking pressures, and the location of the tennis center should make that activity much less disruptive than it would be along Leona, he said.
UT stirred a firestorm of opposition from the neighborhood in the early 1980s when it bought and razed numerous houses. School officials scaled back their acquisition plans and have worked for years to repair relationships, McCarver said.
