Building Utopia
After years of pipe dreams, politics, and planning, the new Mueller neighborhood is rising at last
BY KATHERINE GREGOR
Who doesn’t love a utopia?
Going vertical: Viewing construction progress at Mueller are Catellus’ Matt Whelan (l), City Project Manager Pam Hefner, and Jim Walker of the Mueller Neighborhoods Coalition. Crafting Mueller required a consensus vision among the trio of major parties (and the dozens of people) they represent – the developers, the city, and the public.
Photo By John Anderson
In its master plan, the new Mueller neighborhood in near East Austin offers the gratifying headiness of a nearly perfect world vision. Co-created by passionate Austinites, this inner-city village on the site of the old Mueller Airport embraces the city’s declared progressive social values: Green Urbanism, affordable housing, neighborhoods that build community, and environmental sustainability. Forged in the slow, open fire of public dialogue and debate, the plan for Mueller should make us proud of who we are – or can be – as a town.
At long last, Mueller-The Plan is going vertical. Within 12 to 18 months, people will be living and working at Mueller-The Place. Already under construction are a shopping center, apartments, offices, a 32-acre park, new streets, and native landscaping. The Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas will open in summer 2007, surrounded by a pediatrics area, expected to include a med-school-like UT teaching and research center. (The 169-bed facility has been designed to achieve the aggressive green-building goal of LEED Platinum certification, unprecedented in the health care industry.) The new community-within-a-community will occupy the same 711 acres as the former Mueller Airport that served Austin from 1930 to 1999 – an oddly shaped parcel fronting I-35 between Airport Boulevard and East 51st, east to Manor Road. Yet it’s really a whole new place. What we’ll see, as it gets built out over the next five, 10, 15, even 20 years, is how true Mueller can stay to the master plan’s progressive vision. We’re starting the real world test.
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