Have you heard of Austin’s Dog’s Head development? Sit with these numbers for a second.
Roughly 2,600 acres in East Austin along the Colorado River, about four square miles, larger than Mueller and the Domain combined. A plan that contemplates 12,395 residential units, 9 million square feet of commercial and industrial space, including 4 million square feet of industrial and 2.5 million of retail, plus 260 acres of parks. Around 25,000 future residents. A 45-year agreement with Endeavor and a tax increment zone that Council approved 7 to 3 in July. Amazon’s advanced robotics facility is the named anchor on about 300 acres, with 300 to 500 jobs at average compensation reported in the $75,000 to $150,000 range, potentially operating by late 2027. Full buildout is projected across 28 years, into the 2050s. WHOA, I know.
Most economic developers (probably all if we’re honest) would file a project like this under “real estate”. I would argue it is the largest workforce infrastructure decision in Central Texas this decade, and I do not think that is a stretch. Bear with me folks.
Mixed use is not a new idea. Putting homes, shops, and light industry on the same ground is how cities worked for most of human history. What is new is the scale, the time horizon, and the fact that we now know an enormous amount about why people fall out of the labor market. A blank site and 28 years is a combination that almost never happens.
Proximity is not a pathway
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. On the same ground you will eventually have 2.5 million square feet of retail and hospitality and 4 million square feet of industrial and advanced manufacturing. Those are two very different wage worlds sitting a few hundred yards apart.
The advanced robotics jobs pay well. The retail and hospitality jobs, generally, do not pay enough to rent the apartments being built next to them. Every metro in America has that gap. What is unusual here is that both ends of it will exist inside one master plan, under one set of design decisions, over one very long timeline.
That is the opportunity. Not proximity, which happens automatically, but a ladder, which does not. Can a 23-year-old start at the front desk of the hotel and end up on the maintenance team at the robotics facility without ever leaving the zip code or the bus route? That is a design question before it is a training question. Where the training space sits, whether employers on site agree to a shared talent pipeline, whether the leases contemplate any of this, all of that gets decided in the site plan and the tenant agreements, not in a program brochure five years later.
Mixed use gets treated as a land use pattern. It could just as easily be a career pathway pattern. Same buildings, different intent.
The barriers are land use decisions before they are program decisions
I have spent most of my career on the program side, and I will say this plainly. You cannot solve a childcare desert with a workforce grant if there is no building to put the center in.
Texas loses an estimated $9.39 billion a year to insufficient childcare, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation figure cited in recent reporting on the state’s growing childcare deserts. That is a workforce number wearing a real estate costume. Childcare capacity is square footage, parking, licensing-compatible layout, and rent someone can actually pay. All four are decided at entitlement and design.
Same story with transportation. When I worked on immigrant and underserved workforce and talent pathways for the Global Epicenter for Mobility in Detroit, the pattern was familiar to anyone in this field. People did not lack ambition. They lacked a reliable way to get from where they slept to where the job was at 6 a.m. On a greenfield site of this size, transit stops, sidewalk networks, and where the shift-work happens is where the rubber meets the road.
Worth noting too that the city estimates this development will require roughly likely hundreds of new emergency response and services personnel. Those are workforce pipelines of their own, and those workers have to live somewhere.
Ask people what they want to become
The agreement includes a commitment to fund a displacement and needs assessment for surrounding neighborhoods. I think that is genuinely useful, and I would push it one step further.
Needs assessments ask people what they are afraid of losing. That matters. But almost nobody asks the other question, which is what people in that community want to become. Those are different studies and they produce different site plans. This process is well under way, and credit to the City and other bodies who are striving to integrate feedback into planning.
When I served as an elected school board trustee, the most useful community conversations I sat in were never the ones about a specific decision in front of us. They were the ones where families told us what they wanted for their kids ten years out. That information is only actionable if you collect it before the concrete gets poured, and then revisit it frequently as plans inevitably change.
There is a kindergartner in an East Austin classroom right now who will be in her late thirties when the last building on that site goes up. She is the actual end user of this development. We should, and are, asking her family what they hope she will be doing.
The good news is the timing
I have watched the alternative version of this play out. During my time spent working in semiconductor and advanced manufacturing strategy for the White House Workforce Hub in Columbus, the site decision came first and the workforce, housing, and childcare conversations came sprinting behind it. Everybody worked hard and a lot got built, but we were solving in year three for things that would have been cheaper and better in year zero.
Austin is not in year three. The agreement is signed, but the design plan, the land use mix, the tenant strategy, and most of the buildout are still ahead. That is a rare position to be in.
So my question for the developers, the city staff, the workforce boards, the school districts, and the neighborhood folks who are all going to be living with this for three decades: what would it take to treat this site as workforce infrastructure from the first drawing rather than the first ribbon cutting?
I have some ideas, and I’d love to hear yours as well. Let’s connect!
Edgar Padilla is a FUSE Executive Fellow, focused on the advanced manufacturing and semiconductor industry and workforce, and embedded with the City of Austin Economic Development Department. He’s working to strengthen alignment across education, workforce, employer, and support systems around advanced manufacturing pathways. He is a former senior executive in technical higher education, publicly-elected school board trustee, Deloitte and EY alum, and Founder/Chief Strategist at Padilla Futures Group. Views are his own.
Originally published on LinkedIn.