An old office space on the former Tokyo Electron campus in Southeast Austin was filled with presentation boards and leaflets on the final, chilly Saturday of January as residents funneled through to try to learn about the future of their neighborhood.
Children got their faces painted and made arts and crafts while their parents attended listening sessions with city staff and visited with municipal planners. Residents picked up Koozies touting a light-rail train that might one day run down the main thoroughfare of the corridor they call home.
Rivercrest Apartments on East Riverside Drive in Austin on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)
Rivercrest Apartments on East Riverside Drive in Austin on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)
The former tech facility was a fitting venue for the city-sponsored open house focused on changes coming to the East Riverside corridor. The 125-acre campus at 2400 Grove Blvd., which the city acquired in 2024 for $87 million, represents a blank canvas for redevelopment in Southeast Austin.
Austin’s East Riverside neighborhood, a historically low-income, largely Hispanic residential area, is rapidly evolving. Its main corridor — East Riverside Drive between Interstate 35 and Texas 71 — has seen significant growth and development in recent years.
“I think the last five years, what we’ve done in this ZIP code has been transformational,” said Soud Twal, a real estate agent with Kuper Sotheby’s who represents listings in East Riverside. “It looks night and day from what it did five years ago.”
Now, about a year out from the planned start of construction on the Austin Light Rail project, the neighborhood sits on the cusp of another major wave of redevelopment — for better or worse. As the city of Austin prepares for that growth, leaders say they hope to limit displacement in one of the city’s most vulnerable ZIP codes.