The Twin Oaks Shopping Center at South Congress Avenue and Oltorf Street is trading its decades-old strip-mall bones for a low-rise retail and dining destination, with developer SomeraRoad aiming to open the reimagined 10-acre property by summer 2028. The plan calls for 90,000 square feet of shops, restaurants, wellness concepts, and service businesses spread across landscaped walkways and green gathering space, a scaled-back vision for a site that nearly became a high-rise mixed-use complex just a few years ago.
According to CultureMap Austin, SomeraRoad has not yet filed a new site plan with the City of Austin, and the company has not said whether it intends to use the roughly 120 feet of building height current zoning could allow. The New York- and Nashville-based firm plans to preserve the property's midcentury character even as it rebuilds the retail mix, and the redevelopment will include more than 250 parking spaces. Gensler and Oro Design are leading the design work, while brokerage RUE will oversee retail leasing at the property — the same firm that handled leasing at Music Lane, a major South Congress development combining 75,000 square feet of high-street retail and restaurants with office space and residential units, according to RUE. No tenants have been announced yet for Twin Oaks.
A Denser Vision That Got Scrapped
The low-rise approach is a sharp reversal from what Trammell Crow Company and High Street Residential pursued in 2023, before abandoning the project later that year. That denser proposal, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, called for 959 homes, 211 condo units, a 175-room hotel, 150,000 square feet of office space, and 125,000 square feet of retail across five buildings up to 90 feet tall, with nearly 1,900 mostly underground parking spaces, according to The Real Deal. That plan never broke ground, leaving the 10-acre site — made up of two roughly five-acre parcels — open for a new direction.
SomeraRoad is not new to South Austin adaptive reuse. In November 2023 the firm acquired the unfinished St. Elmo Public Market at 4329 South Congress Avenue and converted it into an arcade-bar complex anchored by Pins Mechanical Company, a project Hoodline covered at the time, before announcing plans in 2024 for 230 adjacent apartments. More recently, SomeraRoad partnered with Austin-based Brick Row in September 2025 to acquire the nine-story, roughly 89,500-square-foot office building at 801 Barton Springs Road out of receivership, renegotiating WeWork's lease down to two floors to free up about 41,000 square feet for standard office tenants, per The Real Deal's reporting.
H-E-B's Long History With the Site
H-E-B has owned Twin Oaks Shopping Center since 2016 and still maintains ownership today, even as SomeraRoad leads the redevelopment. The grocery chain originally opened a store across the intersection at 2400 South Congress Avenue back in 1957, and in 2019 decided to rebuild at that original location rather than move permanently into Twin Oaks. While that rebuild was underway, H-E-B ran a temporary store inside the shopping center's former CVS space starting in January 2022, operating there until its rebuilt flagship — a multi-level, 145,000-square-foot store with a True Texas BBQ restaurant and parking garage — opened across the street in December 2024, as Hoodline detailed in its coverage of the reopening. The Travis Central Appraisal District valued the Twin Oaks property at a combined $60.3 million for 2026, up from roughly $36.6 million in 2022.
Twin Oaks itself dates to 1954, when it opened as a modern open-air shopping center built for about two dozen businesses. The Twin Oaks Branch Library operated within the center for half a century before moving into a new building nearby that opened in 2010.
A Transit Gateway in the Making
The redevelopment's timing lines up with a major transit milestone. In January 2026, the Federal Transit Administration and the Austin Transit Partnership issued a combined Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the $7.1 billion Austin Light Rail Phase 1 project, clearing its primary federal environmental review requirements, according to the Federal Register. Phase 1 would terminate beside Twin Oaks at South Congress and Oltorf, part of the Project Connect Orange Line that Austin voters funded in November 2020 through Proposition A, a permanent property tax rate increase of 8.75 cents per $100 valuation. Hoodline previously reported on the broader Phase 1 route design in a February 2024 story on the transit expansion.
Austin Transit Partnership planning documents specify a 20-foot-wide by 400-foot-long center platform on South Congress Avenue between Oltorf Street and Long Bow Lane, paired with an at-grade park-and-ride lot at 200–400 Long Bow Lane — placing a high-visibility transit hub essentially next door to the reimagined shopping center.
More Change Coming to the Corridor
Twin Oaks isn't the only project reshaping this stretch of South Congress. Site preparation and demolition began in November 2024 on the Leland South Congress project at South Congress Avenue and Live Oak Street, a seven-story mixed-use building planned to include 265 luxury condominiums alongside approximately 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The corridor's retail market has given developers reason for confidence: South Congress Avenue maintained roughly 95% occupancy over the decade leading into 2024, with prime retail spaces commanding triple-digit lease rates per square foot, per The Real Deal's market data. Whether SomeraRoad ultimately builds taller on Twin Oaks' remaining height allowance, or sticks with its low-rise, retail-first vision through the planned 2028 opening, remains an open question the company has not yet answered.
