Austin ISD sues North Austin residents over plans to sell former school site

AISD sues North Austin neighborhood

Austin ISD is suing residents in North Austin over plans to sell a former school site. Neighbors said the district’s proposal could permanently change their community.

AUSTIN, Texas - Austin ISD is suing residents in North Austin over plans to sell a former school site. Neighbors said the district’s proposal could permanently change their community.

The lawsuit centers around deed restrictions dating back nearly a century and a surplus campus AISD said needs to sell to help close a major budget gap.

What is the lawsuit about?

The backstory:

Austin ISD is suing all 125 property owners in the Rosedale neighborhood. The district wants to sell the old Rosedale School site, but some residents are not happy with the plans for it, and they claim it isn’t legal.

"It's simply not safe," Darrell Azar, who lives near the old Rosedale School, said.

The Rosedale neighborhood was established in the 1930s and built with strict deed restrictions requiring single-family homes. An exception was made to build the former Rosedale Elementary School in 1948. It was used for more than 70 years until a new campus opened in 2022 a couple miles away.

Since, the property on West 49th Street has been considered a surplus and AISD said selling it is necessary to help address a projected $127 million budget shortfall. District documents showed AISD anticipates receiving about $26 million from selling the site to a developer.

Dig deeper:

"In 2022, they started looking at repurposing this and various plans were floated, and they came up with a recommendation from their staff, that they would make two units per lot. There's 27 lots here, which would be in keeping with the deed restriction," Azar said.

Azar said the plans changed, though, to building a six-story apartment complex with a parking garage.

"This would forever change this area into something that's more akin to downtown when it comes to congestion than it would be a neighborhood," Azar said.

AISD argues the development would be consistent with deed restrictions and benefits students, teachers, and staff. Azar said his family has lived in the neighborhood since before the school was even built, and he believes AISD is now pushing past what the restrictions allow.

"They can get an exception, but the baseline is meeting the deed restrictions. If you want to do something other than that, well, let's talk about what it is. Maybe you could go a little denser, but not this dense, not 435 units, not double, more than double the number of households in this whole region," Azar said.

AISD maintains the proposed use is legal and has now taken the issue to court, asking residents to comply.

"What we want is for them to terminate this contract when they find out that they can't legally do it and then come back and say, okay, let's do something that's reasonable," Azar said.

What's next:

Residents have a couple of weeks to respond to the lawsuit. Many have hired an attorney.