For more than a year West 17th Street at Lavaca Street has been closed. There’s been construction, which residents have accepted and adapted to. After all, there is nearly always construction in some part of Austin. You can’t avoid it; you can only accept it, even when it does inconvenience several thousand state employees.
Besides, this construction, when it started, was expected to lead to luxury condos and an office building, to be called La Vista on Lavaca. The permit was taken out for it in April 2007. At that time, Jason Redfern, manager of the Right of Way Management Division in Austin’s Watershed Protection and Development Review Department, said, the developers planned to keep the street closed for six months. When six months came and went, they renewed the permit for another six.
April 2008 should have seen another renewal or the completion of the project. It saw neither, and in fact, didn’t even see construction. No one has been there for months and the permits are expired. The city is now probing into the whys and whats of the situation, hoping for a clear answer in this mysterious halt.
The developers claim that their permits are up to date, and that the city is mistaken. But their claims do nothing for the fact that the street is still closed for no apparent reason.
If nothing is going to be done, citizens want it open; so does the city. There should not be, they say, inconvenience for no reason. There should only be inconvenience with the promise of future convenience. And that has disappeared from West 17th and Lavaca.
