Q&A: What Makes a New Community Work?

Austin developer Greg Weaver worked with his team and the City of Austin to help build Mueller, the mixed-use, mixed-income, master-planned development that has created a model for a sustainable community that inspires connections and growth.

In his leadership role with Catellus Development Corporation, Greg Weaver was involved in the nuts and bolts of developing Mueller, Austin’s highly regarded master-planned new urbanist community on the site of the city’s former airport. Mueller blended walkability, sustainability and a mishmash of uses into a vibrant, beloved community that has become a national model for community development. (LPA designed the General Marshall Middle School in Mueller and recently opened its Austin studio in the heart of the community.)

Today, Weaver is founder and CEO of Banbury Development, a strategic land-development company focused on sustainable, community-focused projects, which continues to develop Mueller with the City of Austin. In an interview with Catalyst, he talks about what they got right in Mueller and offers advice for future projects.

What did you learn in terms of creating that synergy and that sense of community?

A lot of the history, from a design and plan standpoint, really gets credited to this community that came together. Rather than trying to say, Hey, we don’t want anything — or We want a park and that’s it — they were very creative and started looking at newer principles, looking at more density than surrounding single-family neighborhoods, and really embraced it. Where a lot of Austin had the NIMBY (not in my backyard) antigrowth attitude, this community had the opposite. This community wanted to push density, push design ideas.

One of the things we learned is if you do it right, the community will embrace it.

What do you mean by, “do it right?”

That’s a big question. “Do it right” probably means lots of different things. Number one, our zoning is really lenient. But our architectural design guidelines, and the approval going through our architectural review committee, is pretty rigorous. With a few exceptions, every single building, every single house, everything out there has gone through a very rigorous design and review process.

How did you curate the amenities that helped build the community?

We were open to talking to anybody. We ended up landing the local Austin children’s museum, called the Thinkery now. They were a nonprofit that had no money at the time, and they were going to do a capital campaign. Some developers probably wouldn’t give them the time of day. Everyone uses the term “anchor,” but they’re thinking big retailer. Well, a children’s museum is fabulous. The family is coming and they’re going to shop, and they’re going to entertain and eat. We were open to lots of different things.

We looked at things differently and tried to do things that were outside of the norm to make it a unique place where locals in Austin who have a little bit more grunge or a little bit more keep-Austin-weird mentality would want to live and shop and entertain there.

How do you ensure the new urbanist ideas were showing up in the project?

Well, for one, we studied it. Rather than trying to be pioneers, we spent a lot of time to learn from other projects about what’s working and what’s not.

One of my two big takeaways that we implemented at Mueller is the flexible zoning. And then from a governance standpoint, creating an architectural review committee that sits outside the political realm of a planning commission or city council. It’s a private architectural review committee, and they’re the ones to allow variances. The committee is made up of paid architects. It’s not like a volunteer thing. There are five voting members. Four of the five are architects, and the developer is the fifth vote. Then the city is our ex officio member. We all work together.

What would be the second takeaway?

The second one, I think, is changing architects. There were a couple of times on the home-builder side where we wanted unique and distinct architecture. We didn’t want it to be feeling like Anywhere USA. That was part of the selection process. Over time everything — I don’t want to say it all started looking the same, but I think just naturally it started feeling the same. When we went out on another phase —probably two-thirds through the project — we told all the builders, “You’ve got to get new architects. You cannot reuse one plan.”

Anything else to add?

I’m going to give LPA a plug. There are a lot of school districts around the United States doing cookie-cutter school design, and we didn’t want that in Mueller. LPA and the school district had to go through the same architectural review committee. It was great, and you guys had great design. Your team was fabulous maneuvering through it. And they had to go to the community to make sure the community was involved. This school had lots of eyes on it in the community. I would give LPA huge kudos for one, navigating the process and then two, coming up with great design.