What can Austin learn from Dallas about covering I-35 with a park?

From KUT News:

As a high-stakes project to sink I-35 through downtown Austin kicks into gear this summer, city officials and the University of Texas are looking to Dallas for a possible glimpse of the future.

The vision: a vast, green expanse covering sections of I-35, similar to Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. The 5.4-acre sanctuary spans the sunken Woodall Rodgers Freeway, connecting the densely populated Uptown neighborhood with a thriving Arts District and downtown business center.

Since it opened in 2012, this “deck park” has been widely hailed as a success, boosting land values and stimulating the development of luxury high-rise buildings with homes and offices that are among the most coveted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

But the project also raises important questions about how Austin and UT should navigate the governance of their potential new parks, balancing public accessibility with privatization and commercialization.

“When we started this, TxDOT was like, ‘What are you talking about? That’s insane,” reminisced John Zogg, a Dallas real estate professional who helped launch the deck park project in 2002. “It started with that flimsy of an idea and somehow it got legs and just kind of took off.”

On a sweltering weekday in July, a father and son were at the park playing on public pingpong tables shaded by a veranda. Kids were running around a splash pad the size of an NBA court. A couple was sitting on a picnic blanket playing Uno, while office workers bought lunch from food trucks lining one side of the park.

“This is our favorite park to come to. It’s always [got] a lot of shade, which is important,” said Shakkira Mitchell, who was reading a book while her 6-year-old daughter splashed with other kids in a fenced-off play area. “We love coming here. She always makes new friends.”

Klyde Warren Park draws an estimated 1.3 million visitors annually, about half the attendance of Zilker Park, which is 70 times as big. Klyde Warren hosts hundreds of free events each year, including movies, yoga, live music, ballet, children’s theater and fireworks.

The park’s 5.4 acres are packed with amenities including a dog park, a TexMex restaurant and a small open air “reading room” with newspapers, magazines and board games for people to use for free. A historical street car, the M-Line Trolley, runs along the street bisecting Klyde Warren.

Lounging underneath one of the 247 trees in the park, it’s easy to forget you’re sitting atop eight lanes of traffic. Woodall Rodgers Freeway noise is muted by the 6.5-foot deep park deck. Ambient sound is dominated by street-level traffic and nearby high-rise construction.

Klyde Warren now serves as an advertisement for installing parks over freeways, and TxDOT has deployed the concept elsewhere in an effort to make highway expansions more politically palatable.

The state agency recruited Zogg and Rob Walters — a Dallas antitrust attorney who helped bring the park to life — to meet with officials working on Austin’s highway lids, including senior members of UT Austin’s real estate and management team.

“We interestingly have become sort of the template for these things,” Walters said, sitting at one of the dozens of bright green bistro tables lining shaded pathways.

Klyde Warren Park cost about $112 million, including $20 million from the city of Dallas, $20 million from TxDOT, and $16.7 million in federal stimulus funds. The state now says it won’t pay for decks over highways, but will design and construct them if another entity foots the bill.

The remaining $55 million for Klyde Warren came from wealthy philanthropists who paid for the park’s amenities. A $10 million fountain is named after Nancy Best, the wife of an educational technology CEO. The Muse Family Pavilion was named by John Muse, the chairman of private-equity firm HM Capital Partners. The Sheila and Jody Grant Children’s Park was named after two park founders by Margot Perot, the widow of the late Texas billionaire Ross Perot. She donated $5 million.

Even the name of the park itself was for sale. The billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, Kelcy Warren — now a University of Texas regent — pledged $10 million to name the park after his son Klyde Warren. The oil and gas magnate has since contributed another $20 million toward a 1.7-acre expansion set to open in late 2028.

“Everything you see on this park, everything we’re sitting on, all of this, was paid for out of the private sector through the good will of our philanthropic community with the attendant naming opportunities,” Walters said.

Klyde Warren Park itself is owned by the city of Dallas. But it’s privately operated and managed by the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Zogg and Walters have encouraged Austin and UT to pursue the same type of public-private partnership.

“The Austin Parks Department’s got a million parks to run. They’ve got a thousand different needs and demands,” Walters said. “We focus like a laser with our own little private operating entity.”

Zogg emphasized how private operation of the park allows it to run in a “Disney-like fashion,” with security guards and custodial workers roaming day and night.

“If there’s a piece of gum dropped here, it’s picked up very quickly,” he said. “Mothers feel very safe with their children on this park. There were a lot of questions when we were trying to build this park, ‘Oh it’s just going to be a place where the homeless hang out.’ … Rob, have you ever seen a homeless person here? Not really.”

Highway construction in the 1950s and ’60s often deliberately routed interstates through Black neighborhoods, displacing residents and businesses. In Austin, I-35 physically separated predominantly white areas from Black and Hispanic communities along a historic segregation barrier then known as East Avenue.

This new effort to conceal segments of I-35 under deck parks is possible only because TxDOT is orchestrating the largest ever expansion of the highway through the middle of the city.

The I-35 Capital Express Central Project will add lanes and sidewalks along an 8-mile stretch from Ben White Boulevard to U.S. 290 East. As part of this historic widening of the freeway, the main lanes would be lowered up to 40 feet below ground level from Holly Street to Airport Boulevard.

Caps over the highway were proposed as a sweetener to erase parts of the concrete barrier that has divided the city for six decades.

“It’s going to completely, literally change the landscape of our central city,” said Michelle Marx, a city of Austin official overseeing efforts to cover the highway with parks, splash pads and other yet-to-be determined amenities. Austin dubs the project “cap and stitch.” Caps are the decks. Stitches are widened bridges with protected paths for bicycles and pedestrians.

The cost for the city alone could top $800 million, according to early estimates.

The city’s caps would effectively tunnel I-35 from Cesar Chavez to Seventh Street, from 11th to 12th, from 15th Street to Dean Keeton — the UT portion — and from 38 1/2 Street to Airport Boulevard. Austin caps would total about 25 acres, Marx said. UT’s caps would add 17 acres to the campus, bridging athletics facilities currently divided by the freeway.

While the city and university have paid TxDOT $15.4 million and $13.5 million respectively to develop early designs and engineering for the decks, neither entity has decided what should go on top of the decks or how they should be managed.

“The short answer is [the city has] not started to come close to broaching those details in our project yet, but we will have to,” Marx acknowledged. UT has also not yet made those decisions but expects to seek public input.

As for funding, the city received a $105 million federal grant and applied for a $192 million loan from TxDOT, but still has a lot more money to raise. Options being considered include holding a bond election, seeking philanthropists, selling development rights on caps and using the increased property tax revenues that would be generated if deck parks push nearby real estate values higher.

The city of Austin is already asking residents what to put on deck parks. Options floated include green space, splash pads, farmers markets, stages, dog parks, solar panels, event space for festivals, small business incubator space, sports fields, outdoor gyms and even buildings up to two stories tall.

The first round of public input closed last week. But the city is planning a second open house on Sept. 28.

“We need to be very careful and thoughtful,” Marx said, “ensuring that what we’re developing in Central Austin is bringing community benefits to the people who live and work in this community now.”

Construction to widen I-35 through Central Austin is just getting started this summer and could take up to a decade to complete. So it’s going to be a while before anyone is playing pingpong on top of I-35.

If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.