Coming Soon, Est. 2019

The banner has faded so badly that the rendering's sky is now the color of skim milk. I was standing in the gravel shoulder on Manchaca, a little south of Stassney, photographing it with my phone like an insurance adjuster, when a man walking a beagle slowed down and asked if I was "with the project."

I told him nobody is with the project. That is the whole problem with the project.

So I opened a case. I have no badge, no subpoena power and no budget, but I do have a free Tuesday and seven years of accumulated spite, which in this town counts as a civic credential.

Case background

For the record, this lot used to be Dolores's icehouse. It was a cinderblock box with a roll-up garage door, three picnic tables with the paint worn off at elbow height, and a cooler that hummed in what a guitar player once told me was B-flat. Lone Star longnecks were a dollar fifty in 2003 and two-and-a-quarter by the end. There was a washer-pitching pit in the side yard, and a dog of uncertain ownership slept under the second table from the left. Nobody ever claimed the dog. Nobody ever needed to.

The property sold in 2018. The building came down in 2019 in a single afternoon, which is about how long it took to build it in the first place. Then the fence went up, then the banner, and then, for the next seven years, nothing at all, aggressively.

Exhibit A: The banner

The banner reads COMING SOON in a sans-serif font so thin it looks like it's on a juice cleanse. Under that is an architectural rendering of a four-story mixed-use building with a rooftop terrace and ground-floor "curated retail."

The rendering contains eleven people. I counted. Three of them are holding kale. Not salads made from kale. Whole, raw bunches of kale, carried down the sidewalk like bouquets. One woman is laughing at nothing while a man in linen shows her something on a tablet. There is a dog that is mostly ear. There is a cyclist in no traffic, because in the rendering Manchaca has no traffic, which is the most aggressive fiction in the whole document.

Nobody in the rendering is sweating. It is a picture of a South Austin July in which nobody is sweating.

I've seen more honest work on a cereal box.

Exhibit B: The fence

It's six-foot chain-link with a green privacy screen zip-tied on, the kind of mesh that's supposed to make you think something important is happening behind it. Over the years the zip ties have given out from the bottom up, so the screen now hangs off the top rail like a bathmat drying.

Through the gaps you can see what the fence is guarding:

• a concrete slab, cracked in a pattern that looks like Lake Travis from a plane
• a hackberry tree, about eight feet tall, which has grown up through the crack and is now the only tenant who has ever moved in on schedule
• a pallet
• a second, older pallet
• one porta-potty

Exhibit C: The porta-potty

This deserves its own exhibit, because the porta-potty has been on site since before anyone in Austin knew how to pronounce "aerosolized." No work crew has ever used it. I have watched this lot through two mayors, a freeze, a pandemic and the entire lifespan of at least four rideshare scooter companies, and I have never seen that door open.

Somebody is paying the rental on it. Somewhere there's an invoice going out every month for a toilet that exists only to make a vacant lot look like an active jobsite. It's the most Austin piece of infrastructure I know of: an amenity whose only purpose is to signal momentum.

Exhibit D: The phone number

The banner lists a number for "Leasing Inquiries." I called it. It rang five times and went to a voicemail box for a property group with an address in Frisco, and the box was full. I called again an hour later just to be thorough, and it was still full. Presumably of people like me, asking when "soon" is.

There is also a QR code. I scanned it. It goes to a page offering the domain name for sale, with a little banner reading Make an offer!

That is the only honest sentence anywhere on the property.

Exhibit E: The amendment

At some point after the original banner went up, someone came back and stuck a second, smaller vinyl strip across the bottom that says NOW PRE-LEASING. So the building is coming soon, and also you can lease a unit in it now, but there's no building, and the phone is full.

I'd call that a contradiction. In the real-estate business it's apparently called a phase.

Interview with a witness

I talked to the beagle man some more. He lives on a side street behind the lot and has been there since the icehouse days. He said the only times he's seen anyone behind the fence in seven years were the times someone came to mow, about twice a summer, after a code complaint.

"They mow around the porta-potty," he said. "Real careful. Like it's a monument."

He asked me what I thought they were waiting for. I gave him my honest answer, which is the same answer anyone in this city could give you if they've watched land long enough. They aren't waiting for anything. Waiting is the plan. You buy a lot, you knock down whatever had a pulse, you put up a banner showing kale people, and then you sit on it while the land value climbs on its own, because the rest of the city is doing the hard work of being desirable for you. The rendering isn't a promise. It's a press release for a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, the icehouse paid its bills by selling beer to people who lived within walking distance. That model has never once been shown on a banner.

Findings

After a full afternoon of investigation, this office concludes:

1. The building is not coming soon.
2. The building may never have been coming at all, except as a JPEG.
3. The hackberry tree is the most productive use of this lot since 2019, and it did not apply for a permit.
4. The porta-potty has earned tenure.
5. There was once a place here where a two-dollar beer, a picnic table and a dog nobody owned added up to a neighborhood, and it was knocked down to make room for a picture of a neighborhood.

The case remains open. I'll come back by in the spring to check on the tree.

On my way out, I noticed a fresh zip tie on the fence, bright white against all the gray ones, and my heart did a stupid little jump, like maybe somebody had finally come by to start something.

They'd come by to fix the banner.