If you live in the Rundburg neighborhood of Austin, chances are you've driven by a few vacant buildings.

These ones, in particular.

The Jack in the box at 814 East Rundberg, the Sonic at 9325 North Lamar Boulevard, and a large flat slab of concrete at the former site of action pawn at 801 East Rundberg Lane.

Collectively, the properties have sat vacant for at least a year now.

Beyond being an eyesore, vacant properties like these pose real health and safety risks to the community.

Residents can report code violations and suspected abandoned properties through the Austin 311 app, but that process can take a long time for the city to properly investigate and enforce any code violations, with a property continuing in its vacant holding pattern.

While work has started on the 814 East Rundberg property, the slab across the street in the Sonic down the road are still completely vacant.

Austin ranks as the second fastest growing city in the country.

The community's population has boomed over the past decade, and property developers continue to pour money into the region.

Yet the same growth that transformed downtown Austin into a corridor of glittering skyscrapers has largely bypassed these corners of Rundburg.

So what's going on here?

Well, according to Austin based commercial realtor Joaquin Lopez, the answer lies in the broader dynamics of the local real estate market.

It is a growing market.

It's slow and idled since 2022. since the downturn in the economy, the Austin market has took a hit.

And it's not just vacant buildings that are the problem because they're just sitting there doing nothing.

First, it's important to understand the difference between vacant and abandoned properties.

A vacant property is simply unoccupied, but it's still owned and managed by someone.

Abandoned property, however, is typically neglected, may have unpaid taxes or code issues, and is often left behind by an owner.

There's no legal process for abandoning a property.

Even so, residents can report neglected buildings to the city.

These properties, however, are not abandoned.

The Jack in the box and the sonic locations remain owned by the respective regional franchise operators.

While the concrete slab is owned by HUGGINS-MICHALK LTD.

None of the property owners were able to comment on the current status of the properties.

The owners of the former Action Pawn and Sonic Drive-In, could not be reached for comment.

While the 814 East Rundberg property has since been sold to a new corporate entity to an individual potentially like me or you that seems like a lot of money to just sit on.

to them.

It's like stubbing your toe.

It's something very manageable to just work through and wait for the right time and the right opportunity.

That strategy of holding on to vacant or underutilized property as an investment is what fellow Austin area retailer Megan Flake describes as land banking.

So developers might hold on to a property if the return for development isn't there yet.

So if they're looking at the cost of labor or raw materials, and they're realizing that the development is going to be more expensive than they had originally projected, it could be worth their while to hold onto the property.

so they're hoping that the property will beat inflation.

In other words, if property values and other economic indicators aren't good enough, some owners are more than willing to wait until the area's growth makes their investment more valuable.

Regardless, that still leaves another question.

Even if owners decide to sell, who would actually buy these properties?

According to Lopez, a lot of developers, especially in commercial retail, aren't looking for vacant buildings that require major renovations.

Fast food restaurants are particularly challenging to transform, Unfortunately, fast food restaurants, they're like highly bespoke, right?

They're like designed very specifically for a task at hand.

Keith is a building and closure consultant and teaches architecture at the University of Texas.

He says the more specialized a building is, the harder it is to give it a second life.

He advocates for adaptive reuse, a design philosophy that encourages buildings to evolve as a community's needs change.

Adaptive reuse is when we take a building that has a certain function.

It's a school building, it's an office building, it's an apartment building, and you renovate it to have a new function every time you tear down a building.

And incredible amount of embodied carbon is wasted.

Something like 40% of global warming emissions in the world is because of buildings.

What an architect or designer can do to make their building more likely to be adaptively reused in the future, whether that's in 25 years or in 100 years or 500 years, is to to follow certain principles of universal proportions.

Good day lighting, like all of these kinds of things.

While construction on the Jack in the box proves Keith's point, those principles apply to projects on much larger scales as well.

For example, what adaptive reuse can accomplish, look no further than the ACC Highland campus, according to Aziz Hussaini, associate vice chancellor, campus planning for ACC.

The current campus is the result of years of planning and millions of dollars in investment to transform the former Highland Mall into something entirely new.

When we hit the 2000, it started becoming a, a bit of an abandoned mall.

Hussaini says that the Highland Mall offered ACC something the college desperately needed-space in the center of a growing Austin.

What followed was a multiyear, multimillion dollar effort to transform the mall.

When we renovated those buildings, we cut in huge swaths of skylights just so we could get daylight and have that infiltrate within the building, from where we were 15 years ago to where we are today, it's just really revived, revived the community.

However, the Highland campus's success does not change the reality facing vacant properties in Rundberg.

Keith says preventing more properties from becoming long term eyesores starts with designing them differently from the beginning.

The market drives a lot of things.

The developer who's going to build something and flip it for profit within a couple of years.

It's a tough sell because even if you say, look, this decision, it's actually saving you money.

They didn't care.

They're off and running.

Ultimately, Lopez says that much of the responsibility falls on property owners and developers.

Outside of future policy changes.

The biggest factor may simply be time.

The reality is, it just going to require a little patience, because there's very similar cycles that neighborhoods go through And that's just the ebb and flow of how neighborhoods work.