Rosedale Residents and AISD Battle Over Luxury Development

This past February, Kathleen Harrington, an Austinite living on Ramsey Avenue near 49th and Burnet, wrote to Scott Boone of the Zoning and Platting Commission to try to stop a luxury apartment complex from being built across the street from her home, on the site of the former Rosedale Elementary School.

“A 75-foot-high, six-story apartment complex directly across the street from our house would literally block the sun,” Harrington wrote, describing the planned development. “How do you imagine cars coming and going from over 400 apartments would work? It is inconceivable and ludicrous. Please have mercy. We do not oppose development; we are only asking that it be reasonable.”

The project Harrington protested is a collaboration between the Austin Independent School District and OHT Partners, a housing developer. Last fall, AISD signed a contract to sell OHT the 4.6-acre campus of Rosedale Elementary, a school that served students for eight decades before closing in 2022. The sale would net the school district $26 million and allow OHT to build a 435-unit apartment complex across from a row of single-family homes. The contract contains a catch, though: It specifies that AISD won’t receive the money until it gets the Rosedale site rezoned with the city to allow for multifamily housing. 

There is a further complication as well. The sales contract also specifies that AISD must resolve deed restrictions on the Rosedale site that stretch back to the 1930s. The deed restrictions stipulate that if the school is ever closed, the property reverts back to single-family zoning, something that would scrap OHT’s apartment complex. To get the deed restrictions nullified, AISD took the highly unusual step last fall of suing over 100 Rosedale homeowners. 

The homeowners responded by lawyering up and creating Play Fair With Rosedale, a group arguing that the project is too large for the neighborhood and will increase traffic to dangerous levels, among other things. On May 1, Play Fair With Rosedale joined the Rosedale Neighborhood Association in asking city leaders to help broker a compromise with AISD that would create high-density housing at the site at affordable prices. The groups say the compromise would help AISD get its money quicker, that it would support the city’s density and transit goals, and that it would allow the creation of the lower-cost “missing middle” housing the city is encouraging. “Rosedale provides an opportunity to chart a coherent policy to keep school properties as community assets,” a letter from the groups stated, “a policy both AISD and the city support.”

“The fact that nearly a dozen AISD campuses are slated for closure makes this a significantly precedent-setting legal matter and zoning case.”

Affordable housing was at the center of AISD’s original plan for Rosedale. The district proposed creating 50 units of affordable housing on the site in 2023. What happened next is disputed. Play Fair With Rosedale’s leaders said AISD stopped communicating with residents in late 2023, as the district’s financial situation worsened. At a meeting with neighborhood residents on April 16, Council Member Mike Siegel said that AISD Superintendent Matias Segura had told him the neighbors rejected the district’s affordable housing proposal, something those in the audience fiercely denied. AISD officials did not clarify whether the residents rejected the proposal. 

At the April meeting, former Rosedale Neighborhood Association President Chris Allen pressed Siegel on whether he would help residents broker a deal for a high-density, 100% affordable housing development at Rosedale. Siegel assured him that he would like to see such a development but that putting together the financing for affordable housing projects is complicated and private developers like OHT typically don’t build them. 

Siegel reiterated those sentiments to the Chronicle. “I would absolutely love it if we could build hundreds of affordable units of housing in the Rosedale neighborhood,” he said. “That would be a tremendous victory. I don’t think that’s realistic in this situation. Council’s zoning authority does not include the ability to tell the owner of a property how to develop it and how to finance it.”

Council is set to consider the Rosedale rezoning request today, May 7, but a final vote will likely be put off until May 21 or later, Siegel told us. He said he will ask his colleagues to delay action on the rezoning until at least the summer. Council Member Marc Duchen, who also represents a portion of the neighborhood, said he is asking that the rezoning be put off until the resolution of the AISD lawsuit. “The fact that nearly a dozen AISD campuses are slated for closure makes this a significantly precedent-setting legal matter and zoning case,” Duchen added. “We can reasonably expect that the outcome of the Rosedale rezoning will cascade across neighborhoods throughout Austin.” 

Meanwhile, the Rosedale residents are filling in the details of their affordable housing proposal. On May 4, Play Fair With Rosedale circulated a preliminary version of the plan that includes approximately 200 units, with a mix of duplexes, townhomes, stacked flats, and apartments. The group emphasized that the community strongly supports this kind of low-cost, missing middle housing because it’s accessible to people of lower incomes and it builds community. They said they will pursue the plan even if they win the legal battle against AISD.

“The missing middle philosophy speaks to me, and I think those are good neighborhoods where you have a bunch of different kinds of housing and a bunch of different income levels,” said Adam Hootnick, a developer who helped design Rosedale’s alternate housing proposal. “I think the people in the neighborhood believe that’s what they want the neighborhood to be.”

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