I like this one better than the more recent American version with Gere and Lopez.

I'm currently using an AMD 5950x and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 LHR, pushing video to a Dell U4021QW, which is a 40" monitor running 5120x2160@60hz. A few of the games I play are pretty challenged at that resolution, so I'm thinking of upgrading at least the video card. Is there any reason to build a new system with a newer CPU as well?

Two years ago, with the office real estate market in Austin stuck at a 20 percent vacancy rate, Brad Stein took the first of two trips to other markets to see if some of the hundreds of thousands of empty spaces in downtown Austin and areas beyond could be converted into badly needed housing stock. What Stein saw in a 2022 visit to Chicago and another trip to Dallas last year was that housing space and office space are two very different puzzle pieces that don’t fit together without considerable and expensive alterations.

“It’s easy to throw the idea out, to say, oh, we should just do office conversions to residential,” said Stein, president of Intracorp Texas, which has three residential developments in the works in Austin. “I was curious myself, and so I toured an office conversion to a multifamily rental project. … I wanted to see: Is this something that we could do in Austin?”

While those kinds of conversions are feasible and successful in other cities with older office buildings and less demand for new development, which keeps land prices lower than in Central Texas, the reality quickly set in that office-to-residential conversion isn’t likely to take place locally in any major way unless office vacancies rise to 50 percent or higher.

Stein and other real estate experts who spoke with the Austin Monitor said it would take a precise mix of factors to make those conversions make economic sense locally.

Among them:

Properties need to be 30 to 40 years old and already in need of significant renovations and improvements;
Only buildings with floor plates of 15,000 square feet or less offer the ready access to windows and egress needed for residential use;
Vacancies would need to be high enough to force owners to essentially give away a distressed asset at or below its land value.

Unless an owner is several years or even decades into owning a building that is only half full, Stein said it’s unlikely that the time and cost of a conversion would be in any way attractive. Since the surge in Austin office space has taken place in the last 10 to 20 years, owners would rather wait out a downturn instead of taking on substantial new costs or exiting a project at a loss.

“The offices and the areas where people want to live, I think they’re just kind of too new,” Stein said. “And I don’t think that the owners and the lenders of these office (real estate spaces) right now … are really willing to take a huge loss to kind of sell them and get out of them.”

By most industry measures, office space in the Austin area sits at about 20 percent vacant, though that number doesn’t take into account the amount that has been subleased by major tenants who had signed on for full occupancy of some new buildings and then changed course. Aquila Commercial listed the central business district vacancy rate at 22 percent in March, with the Domain having the lowest area vacancy rate at 11 percent.

The persistence of the vacancy rate has become a regular point of conversation with developers, real estate brokers, architects and planners, with conversion as a far-off “what if?” solution.

The biggest obstacle to putting beds in place of desks and work stations comes from the far different space needs for the two uses. Centrally located bathroom banks won’t work for residential properties that aren’t offered in a dormitory style, which means expensive new water lines are needed throughout the structure.

The same is true for heating and air conditioning systems, with individual units needed for every living space rather than centrally located plants that serve an entire building or portions of them.

Brandon Townsend, principal and project director for Page architects, said the costs of office-to-residential conversions are so high that cities and counties would have to offer substantial incentives or fee waivers to make the process attractive.

Townsend said another reason older office buildings are the most viable target for housing space is that older properties were likely constructed below their maximum allowed floor area ratio because the local economy at the time didn’t justify the expense, even in a desirable area downtown.

Now that housing demand downtown is high, he said the most likely move would be to knock an underutilized building down and build to its maximum height rather than converting to apartments or condominiums.

“If you had a building that was built in the early 1980s or late 1970s, when Austin was kind of going through one of its growth spurts, there probably wasn’t a need to build an 800,000-square-foot office building, even though they had the ability to do it,” he said. “The demand just wasn’t there because the city wasn’t that big, and so they built maybe a 30- or 40,000-square-foot office building. Is it better to take that building and take it down and build the full capacity that that site can bear, to 800,000 multifamily?”

In the world of office space developers, most are exercising patience over the current state of the market rather than taking drastic moves like conversion, which would be even more expensive than in recent years because or persistently high interest rates.

Tim Hendricks, senior vice president and managing director of Cousins Properties, said his company and others are taking a variety of smaller steps to slowly increase vacancy including investing in renovating buildings to suit smaller, non-tech occupants, and slowing or outright halting new development to allow new businesses in the Austin market to soak up available space. Hendricks said conversions aren’t an attractive option for companies like his, which play purely in office space and would have to sell a property outright to a company more able to handle residential uses.

There is some potential in areas outside hot business districts where owners may have fewer options to address low office occupancy.

“What we have seen is pressure on the older suburban assets that aren’t able to provide the amenities that customers are looking for today. The capital that’s required to modernize older buildings – they are struggling. I believe they will struggle for a while when it relates to conversions,” he said. “There’s been a few folks that worked on converting office to residential, vertical residential and high-rise residential, with some of that going on in New York City.”

Hannah Rangel, vice president of built environment for the Downtown Austin Alliance, said conversion has been a regularly popular topic in recent years as the city has had to address the need for housing as well as the effects of vacant office space on surrounding businesses. Like Stein and others, her research shows that the combination of high costs, logistics challenges and the expected slow rebound of the Austin market will make full conversions almost impossible downtown and in many other areas.

What’s more likely, she said, is incorporating a mix of smaller professional businesses into currently available space. And Rangel is a proponent of short-term conversions for creative, lifestyle and other businesses that could keep office space active for 10 years or so, with a return to office when the market is ready. Another area of interest Rangel and the DAA have identified is equitable transit-oriented development areas, where the proximity to transit and possible incentives could make office-to-residential conversions at least somewhat feasible.

“It’s a totally worthwhile conversation to happen for Austin broadly outside of downtown. Things get really interesting when you start to think about class B and class C properties and kind of low-rise office parks,” she said. “We’re already making commercial-to-residential conversion, so even though I think we want to be sort of forceful in the conversation and say this isn’t a fit for downtown, that shouldn’t stifle the conversation because I think that those two Lego pieces do go together – sort of – in other submarkets in Austin.”

A Travis County resident is trying to remove District Attorney José Garza from office.

Betsy Dupuis filed a lawsuit Friday under House Bill 17, which allows anyone in a county to try to remove that county’s top prosecutor. Her complaint is similar to a previous one filed against the DA. Dupuis also told KXAN that Garza’s office mishandled a case after she accused someone of sexual assault.

HB 17, which took effect in September, has yet to be used in court.

Supporters of the law argue that some district attorneys in the state have gone “rogue” by, in their estimation, not enforcing laws, allowing folks to get out of jail more easily or dropping cases altogether.

Garza’s office isn’t prioritizing low-level offenses like marijuana possession, opting to dismiss some cases rather than locking up residents. Garza has also said he will not investigate cases involving abortion access.

In her petition, Dupuis cites Garza’s marijuana and abortion policies as reasons to remove him – as well as his prosecution of police officers accused of misconduct.

Opponents say the law undermines the will of voters, who elect district attorneys, and that it’s a way for the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature to meddle in Democratic counties, like Travis County.

Garza cruised to a primary victory this spring and faces Republican Daniel Betts in the November general election. The traditionally blue county typically elects Democrats.

At a news conference with congressional Democrats on Monday, an attorney representing two** **Texans being prosecuted for getting abortion-related care said HB 17 uses an enforcement mechanism similar to the state’s abortion ban.

“What HB 17 did was deputize every single person in Texas to go after every single prosecutor in Texas. It makes no sense,” Austin Kaplan said. “There are 254 counties. There are untold numbers of prosecutors … and all of them now are subject to attack from (anyone) across Texas for their decisions.”

There have been a couple of attempts to remove elected officials since HB 17 took effect. A petition in Hays County to remove District Attorney Kyle Higgins was dropped, and an earlier attempt to get Garza removed failed because the petitioner was being prosecuted by his office for drug possession. The law allows any county resident to file a petition to remove a prosecutor – as long as they’re not being prosecuted in that county.

A hearing in the latest attempt to remove Garza is scheduled for May 16. The case will be heard in a Comal County court, with a Republican judge presiding and a Republican prosecutor from Bell County.

That political divide underscores all of this. If a prosecutor is successfully removed, Gov. Greg Abbott would appoint someone to take over.

State Rep. Donna Howard, who voted against the bill, said that erodes the will of voters who elect prosecutors to do their jobs.

“We knew it could be misused to target DAs for political reasons under the guise of policy, disagreements rather than actual misconduct,” she said. “No DA prosecutes all crimes; all DAs use prosecutorial discretion to determine how best to serve those who elected them within their available resources.”

Howard and other Democrats said Monday the petition filed Friday is identical to the earlier one – pointing out that it even includes the same typos. They said the petition was initially submitted by Martin Harry, who ran against Garza for DA in 2020 and who has been shopping possible plaintiffs on social media. They also point out that the alleged misconduct** **Dupuis accuses him of took place before the law went into effect and is not enforceable in this instance.

Garza has said the case is politically motivated. In a statement published Monday, Dupuis said that’s not the case and that she wants accountability on the part of his office.

“While the petition focuses on Garza’s politically framed policies, upon legal advice, I saw signing it as the most viable way to initiate an investigation into the corruption of Garza’s office,” she said.

The Downtown Commission wants the city to take a more proactive role in a proposed new measure that seeks to address friction over noise levels between new residential developments and existing music venues.

Last week’s meeting included a presentation on a pending requirement that would force developers building within 600 feet of a music venue to conduct a sound assessment prior to construction to determine if they should add sound mitigation measures to their hotel, condominium or apartment project. The measure, which has been proposed by the Development Services Department, would also require any buyers or renters to be informed of the possible noise issues and that the sound assessment had been conducted so they could make a more informed decision prior to buying or renting a property.

Members of the commission said the city should require that the exact findings of the sound assessments be provided to prospective customers instead of merely informing them of the possibility of noise issues. The argument for that requirement was that a prospective resident needs as much information as possible provided easily, especially concerning a quality-of-life issue such as noise levels that could play a major part in their decision.

“I would strongly encourage that if I were representing a buyer that was looking at a unit in one of these buildings and I knew there was an assessment that was done for my client’s interests, I would want to see that assessment,” chair August Harris said. “Making it publicly available is the appropriate thing to do. Making it transparent avoids questions that you might have otherwise and it avoids somebody walking on a project that they might have an interest in instead of moving forward with a unit, because that is not disclosed.”

Commissioner Taylor Major, who is a developer, said the city should also establish a standard requirement of what professional or entity needs to sign the verification that a sound assessment has been conducted during the site plan review process. He said that in the past, other portions of the site plan process have seen him held to different standards on different projects because of DSD staff having different interpretations of the city’s regulations.

“A lot of the issues I run into sometimes with staff is when there’s ambiguity. It might be worth sort of fleshing out what is acceptable certification, because one staff member who’s reviewing it might say a signature from the architect is OK, and a different staff member might want to see something different,” he said. “They can create challenges for developers if the rule is not hard and fast about what is and what is not acceptable for the certification.”

Brian Block, the city’s nightlife and entertainment services manager, said the feedback from commissioners would be taken into consideration as DSD moves forward with the proposed measures that are scheduled to go before City Council next month. If approved, they would take effect in October and only cover new developments entering the site plan review process.

That approval would close nearly a decade of discussion and work to address tensions between entertainment businesses and development, especially in dense areas such as downtown. Block noted the sound mitigation requirements would not impose any changes in building standards for developers, nor would they affect established music venues that are already regulated by noise ordinances to operate at acceptable levels.

“The intent here is this would have as light a touch as possible on the development review process, that it wouldn’t include a staff review, that it wouldn’t lengthen the time or process related to the development review, and that it wouldn’t have an impact on housing affordability,” he said.

Plans for an electric-vehicle charging lot spanning Pleasant Valley Road were thwarted by Planning Commission members who objected to its auto-centric nature at their last meeting.

The project would have created two electric-vehicle charging parking lots flanking Pleasant Valley at Cesar Chavez Street. The easternmost lot is currently home to a vacant building and a former home to food trucks, and the western lot is undeveloped. Under the neighborhood plan, off-street parking lots are a conditional use that requires approval by the commission. 

Commissioners voted 7-3-3 to deny the request. Commissioners Adam Haynes, Patrick Howard and Grayson Cox voted against the denial, and commissioners Nadia Barrera-Ramirez, Jennifer Mushtaler and Ryan Johnson abstained.

“I really do think as a city that it’s important we have adequate EV charging infrastructure, but I would be much more comfortable if these charging stations were some sort of conversion from an existing auto-oriented use, like a gas station, rather than, in this case, a mixed-use site on an Imagine Austin corridor,” Commissioner Alice Woods said. “I just really don’t feel like this decidedly auto-oriented use is appropriate in this area that we’ve identified for walkability and pedestrian-oriented uses in our comprehensive plan.”

Other commissioners backed up this sentiment. Commissioner Felicity Maxwell noted that, blocks to the south, the city was investing in a new pedestrian and bike bridge that will bring more multimodal options to the neighborhood. And, though he said it was a “hard decision to make,” Commissioner Awais Azhar concurred the use was not appropriate for the area, which was targeted for transit-oriented and mixed-use development in city plans.

Jewels Cain, with the law firm Armbrust & Brown, presented the case on behalf of her client, Voltera. The company operates similar operations across the country, though this would have been its first project in Austin. 

She told the commission that the lots would “help with the city’s climate action initiatives and help bring that much-needed infrastructure for electric vehicle charging.”

City planning staff supported the conditional use permit as well, saying it complies with the requirements of the Land Development Code and neighborhood plan goals. Though the Holly Neighborhood Association did not take a position on the permit or speak at the meeting, several neighbors did object to it.

Michael Phalan, who lives near the proposed project, was one. 

“The intersection, though currently not developed to its potential, is and should be an important gateway into and out of the Holly neighborhood. East Cesar Chavez is essentially a Main Street for the Holly neighborhood, and I, along with several of my closest neighbors, would like to see this project moved elsewhere.”

Phalan said he would find commercial off-street parking a more acceptable use than what is actually being proposed, which he deemed as “more like a commercial fleet motor pool” that would bring much more traffic to an already-busy intersection.

“One can certainly envision drivers servicing, vacuuming and washing their vehicles, or conducting some other business or downtime activities on-site while they charge their vehicles. I do not think this business is genuinely off-street parking, and it is not fair to make a decision that EV charging and parking are the same thing,” he said. “I do not believe they’re the same at all.”

Though the Planning Commission does make the final determination about whether conditional use permits are granted, its decision can be appealed to City Council.

A Travis County resident is seeking to remove progressive District Attorney José Garza from office using a 2023 Texas law aimed at limiting the discretion of locally elected prosecutors. A state district judge in Comal County on Friday appointed an attorney to represent Texas and pursue the case.

House Bill 17 took effect last September and allows courts to remove district attorneys for “official misconduct.” That could include refusing to prosecute certain criminal offenses under state law, such as low-level marijuana possession.

When Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill, the Republican leader said the goal of the law was to “hold rogue district attorneys accountable.” The GOP priority legislation gained steam after progressive DAs, including Garza, said they would not prosecute people seeking abortions banned under Texas law.

However, elected district attorneys have significant prosecutorial discretion, meaning they get to decide which cases to pursue. As KUT previously reported, the law undermines this longtime convention.

Travis County resident Mary Dupuis filed a petition to remove Garza from office on April 8. The filing came just over a month after Garza won the March Democratic primary for district attorney in a landslide.

Dupuis’ petition argues Garza must be removed from office “due to incompetency and official misconduct.”

The petition alleges that misconduct includes “indiscriminately” pressing charges against law enforcement officials and presenting those cases to grand juries. The filing also argues Garza has refused to prosecute certain crimes, citing statements he has made on not pursuing abortion-related cases.

The petition concludes that “because (Garza’s) conduct makes him unqualified to serve as district attorney, he should be removed from office.”

This is not the first challenge Garza has faced under HB 17. Jason Salazar filed a petition to remove the DA from office last December. At the time, Garza’s office was prosecuting Salazar for a felony drug charge. The criminal charge Salazar was facing disqualified him from seeking to remove the DA under the law.

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Dupuis’ petition is moving forward. In his order Friday, Judge Dib Waldrip, with the 433rd District Court in Comal County, stated Bell County Attorney Jim Nichols – who, like Waldrip, is a Republican – will litigate the case.

“The prosecuting attorney representing the state shall possess full authority under the law to proceed in the litigation as he and his office deem appropriate to bring this matter to a prompt and proper legal resolution,” Waldrip wrote in the order.

Waldrip also ordered Garza to appear in a Travis County district courtroom on May 16.

Garza responded to the petition in a statement emailed to KUT on Saturday afternoon, saying that his office works every day to “bring justice to Travis County and keep people safe.”

Garza also said in the statement that this attempt to remove him from office is politically motivated and he expects it to fail.