By Rachel Knight
Flowers won’t be the only things coming out of the ground this spring in College Station. A new mixed-use development designed to diversify the local economy and provide an experience-centered place to live, work, and play is sprouting in the center of the College Station school district behind Baylor Scott & White Hospital off Rock Prairie Road.
The city of College Station and Impact Companies are co-branding Midtown Business Park and Midtown City Center. The two different parts of the Midtown development are connected by the Lick Creek Greenway Hike & Bike Trail, with Midtown City Center on the north side and Midtown Business Park on the south.
According to Natalie Ruiz, director of economic development for the city of College Station, this part of the city has been relatively vacant until now because it lacked infrastructure needed for development.
The city is building Lakeway Road, a major roadway with a waterline running through both parts of the development. Impact Companies has extended Bird Pond Road to provide access to businesses and housing within the development. The main thoroughfares are scheduled to be complete in June according to James Murr, the Impact Companies developer who has worked on Midtown for eight years.
In order to maintain Midtown’s amenities at the highest level possible, a special Municipal Management District was created. An MMD is a political subdivision of the State of Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. An MMD typically provides infrastructure, amenities, and a higher level of development exclusively to its area of governance.
“These special districts are created to make the highest value and most sustainable area of cities,” Murr explains. “One area in Houston that’s had one of these special districts for a long, long time is the Galleria. … Their advanced landscaping and shrubbery and that kind of thing are paid for by the district.”
Both parts of the Midtown development will add diversity to the city. Midtown Business Park will diversify the local economy, according to Ruiz.
“It’s really going to help diversify our tax base, creating new jobs ... and bringing property back on the tax rolls that has been in agriculture for quite a while and vacant,” Ruiz says.
Midtown Businesses Park is expected to attract businesses in four main fields — energy, healthcare, mobility, and sustainability. “Our hope is that all the research and development that’s happening on campus — I think the numbers last year were $905 million that went into research and development — is spinning off some of those businesses and some of those items right here in College Station and providing those opportunities,” Ruiz says.
Expansion in these business areas will bring private sector jobs to Bryan College Station the area currently lacks. Ruiz points out that between the two cities and Texas A&M University, the B/CS job market is heavily invested in the public sector. “In order to diversify and have a more sustainable economy, we need to reflect those same amount of jobs in the private sector,” she explains.
While Midtown Business Park expands the B/CS economy and job market, Midtown City Center diversifies College Station’s housing market, retail options, restaurants, hotels, and entertainment industry with their experience-driven development. According to Murr, the experience-driven development mirrors an experience-driven market.
An additional attraction to Midtown is the fact that you can live, work, shop, dine, and play all within walking or biking distance. “We are the most walkable part of the city,” Murr says.
While businesses coming to Midtown City Center are not finalized, Murr says he plans to bring entertainment options like Topgolf, a YMCA, and movie theatre; restaurants that create an experience; a specialty grocery store like Whole Foods; diverse retail options; an office park; and multiple hotels to the development.
Midtown also offers a unique opportunity to live in the same part of town for a lifetime, according to Ruiz. “When you look at aging in place, you look at a neighborhood and look at different options,” she says. “That was the idea here, to provide townhomes, larger single family lots, and with the Methodist Retirement facility that is almost complete, assisted living, independent living, all the way to Alzheimer’s care all within the same area.”
When the Midtown development is complete about eight years from now, it will provide a new style of living, a more diverse economy, and a new place to hang out in B/CS. The first houses in Midtown are expected to be complete by August. Multifamily housing, a hotel, restaurants, and retailers around Midtown Lake are expected to be under construction by the third or fourth quarter of 2019, according to Murr.
“It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity to have land in the middle of the city … where something like this could be done, and then couple that with the fact that College Station doesn’t have a downtown at all,” Murr says. “This is midtown, but in my mind it’s going to serve as a downtown for College Station for the next 100 years.”
