A 43-acre land parcel at Oakwell Farms, one of the city’s most attractive undeveloped tracts inside Loop 410, has been sold by the Tobin Endowment to David Weekley Homes of Houston for development of a single family residential community set amid heritage oaks and expansive green space.
“We think this is the largest, privately owned tract inside 410, certainly in the northeast quadrant,” said J. Bruce Bugg Jr., chairman and trustee of the Tobin Endowment. “It’s going to be a mini master planned community, not unlike what Robert Tobin did with the other 450 acres.”
Proceeds from the sale of the 43-acre parcel, recently appraised at more than $7 million, will benefit the Tobin Endowment, a private charitable foundation in San Antonio that has made more than $53 million in grants since 2000, including the lead naming gift of $15 million for the recently opened Tobin Center for the Performing Arts. The Tobin Endowment had assets of $65.6 million at the close of 2012, according to its tax filings. The sales price was not disclosed.
The property, however, would have made a coveted acquisition for any developer. Bugg said the challenge was finding a buyer who could pay market rate while agreeing to develop the property in the same spirit Robert Tobin developed 450 acres as Oakwell Farms starting in 1977 when he formed the Oakwell Farms Corporation.
“Robert Tobin’s idea was to develop the property where the built environment blended nicely with the natural environment, a concept that was quite unusual in its day,” Bugg said. “We wanted to find someone sensitive to the land and our desire for the Tobin Endowment to keep the house.”
The Tobin Endowment’s offices now occupy the Oakwell Farms home Robert commissioned in 1959 that was designed by noted Houston architect Roger Rasbach and still features pieces from Tobin’s art collection and his considerable library.
“If you asked Robert who designed the house, he said, ‘I did,’” Bugg said, adding that it underwent extensive renovations in 1999 that preserved the home’s Saltillo tiles, Austin limestone and floor-to-ceiling glass window panes. The Tobin Endowment will continue as the owner and occupant of the home and three acres of land.
The tract acquired by David Weekley Homes occupies heavily wooded land with a running creek that separates the Tobin home from a stretch of Harry Wurzbach Road between Loop 410 and Eisenhauer Road. The property is zoned commercial, Bugg said, dating back to a time in the 1980s when Robert collaborated with Dallas retailer Stanley Marcus to develop an upscale retail center on the tract and convert the house to a conference center.
“It was going to be called The Village at Oakwell Farms, but then what I call the Texas Depression hit and that was the end of that deal,” Bugg said, adding that a down-zoning to residential will be requested in November with the case going to City Council in December.
David Weekley Homes, he said, is working on a master plan to build single family, detached town homes that will sell for $300-500,000. The developer will keep half the property as green space and plans to preserve more than half of the heritage oaks.
“The property is grandfathered and not subject to the tree ordinance,” Bugg said, “but the first thing we agreed to do was split the cost of a tree survey because we want to preserve as many of the heritage oaks as possible. How many developers would start a deal with that kind of agreement?”
The property is the last remaining undeveloped tract within Oakwell Farms, a 500-acre dairy farm acquired in 1937 by Robert’s parents, Edgar and Margaret “Mag” Tobin, three years after their son’s birth. The farm served as a rural weekend retreat for the Tobins, who resided in Terrell Hills at the time, decades before the area became part of the urban landscape.
Today Oakwell Farms is a mix of single family residential homes, apartment complexes, commercial and office space, a large equestrian center, and the nearby Tobin Library at Oakwell, a branch library in the San Antonio Public Library system. The branch library sits within Robert L.B. Tobin Park, a 121-acre city park that includes 2.1 miles of the Salado Creek Trailway. The park was made possible by the Tobin Endowment’s donation of 81 acres of land in 2002 and another 40 acres acquired by the City of San Antonio.
“In the years since Tobin Park was created, with all the growth related to military medicine at Fort Sam Houston, the Wurzbach corridor has become the focus of new development and the value of the remaining real estate has increased enormously,” Bugg said. “As Chairman and Trustee of the Tobin Endowment, we had no choice but to sell the property in order to satisfy our fiduciary duty to make trust property productive…we are taking this action to grow the Endowment’s assets in order to increase our capacity to make charitable gifts, which is the reason Robert created the Tobin Endowment in the first place.”
Bugg said he met David Weekley, chairman of David Weekley Homes, through Gene Dawson, president of Pape-Dawson Engineers.
“I have to credit Gene for introducing me to David Weekley, who told me he spends half his time working on his own foundation and the other half serving as chairman of his company,” Bugg said. “We spent an afternoon together and it was clear he was sensitive to our needs and what he would build here would be a continuation of Robert Tobin’s vision.”
Robert Tobin was an art collector and patron whose passion and philanthropy made him a leading national figure in the arts and performing arts worlds, better known, perhaps, in New York and Santa Fe than in San Antonio. He amassed one of the largest and most important theater design collections in the country, which today is the Tobin Collection of Theater Arts at the McNay Art Museum. Tobin died at the age of 66 in 2000. You can read his obituary in the New York Times by clicking here.
*Featured/top image: Oakwell Farms site map courtesy of Pape-Dawson Engineers. Download the full size PDF here.
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I appreciate this article. I have lived near and traveled through this area for 30 years. We use the library and the Trailway. It seems the integrity of the landscape will be incorporated into the development and that’s good to know.
Looks like a fine suburban gated community that’s unfortunately being misplaced inside 410. It’s hard to praise this development. Some trees will be saved, but a bunch will be destroyed for the same old thing you could get in any new low density, low-rise, single use development.
The proposal to follow gentle land use practices is encouraging and my hope is that these will be homes built to green and energy efficient standards. My understanding is that David Weekley has committed to energy efficient construction through the ENERGY STAR program and it would be a great accomplishment to pursue a green certification for these homes. This commitment could be taken a step further by incorporating Low Impact Development practices. With such treasured land this project has a unique opportunity to be a model of sustainable development, which will benefit its residents as well as the broader community.
By Low Impact Development, are you referring to storm water management? I am not familiar with that term, but that’s what a quick search turns up. They even have Low Impact Development highways, which to me belongs in the book of “Ridiculous Titles that Sound Great but Aren’t”. Green building standards are great, but when every resident in a subdivision makes every trip by car, the whole development is more high impact development than low impact development, even if the highways connecting that development to everything else is labeled a Low Impact Highway.
Connecting the development to the surrounding city with multiple entries, including businesses and schools in the development, minimizing or even eliminating parking, keep streets small to reduce impervious cover, and providing great public transit connections would be truly low impact.
Jeff Speck recommends 20 dwelling units per acre to make for good walkability. A 43 acre development that set aside 25% of the land as green space could be much more low impact if it had 600 dwelling units with businesses and schools and people walked than if it had 120 dwelling units with 240 or more car trips a day.
One man’s opinion.
Another puff piece touting the viability of increasing the density of this quiet neighborhood? Really? The developer(s), city, elected officials could care less about the salient issues that are important but repeatedly ignored when it comes to making big bucks by cramming as many homes/residences/apartments in as small of area as possible. With that gargantuan high density apartment complex being constructed on Harry Wurzbach and that same sort of sardine housing going in next to it, NO accommodation has been made for the increased traffic, noise, infrastructure….there haven’t been any traffic studies to-date in an area that will never be able to handle the increase of density that is already slated for development. And now, another developer wants to add another 400+ residences across the street? Who in the hell is in charge of protecting our neighborhoods and communities from this blight?
But that’s really not the point. Let’s face it….laws in Texas favor the developer. And developers can’t lose in high density residential builds. They build to make money, regardless of what it does to the existing community and environment…..that’s the bottom line. Elected officials love developers too…both parties…they add to their campaign coffers. Not that there’s anything wrong at making money….even lots of it….but please, not at my expense.
In many cities across the country, local governments are rethinking this idea of high-density urban housing…..because it doesn’t work. With no real walkable amenities in this particular area, parking issues, an inadequate transportation system—& not pedestrian friendly…. it just doesn’t make sense in a city that is mostly comprised of suburban residences to forcibly over-populate the area.
Here we go again with the anti-development folks using all sorts of hyperbole to decry infill development inside 410. Michelle, just because you wouldn’t personally live in an apartment doesn’t mean that neighborhood change equals blight. No one is cramming people like sardines anywhere in San Antonio; in fact, we are one of the least densely populated large cities in the country, so any perception that we are too dense is simply in your imagination. In fact, I’m disappointed that this proposed Oakwell Farms community is being built inside 410 with the same suburban pattern of disconnectedness as something outside 1604.
Rather than continue to sprawl out into areas that were previously Hill Country grasslands or farms, we should be encouraging more development inside the loop, which is far more sustainable and, quite frankly, is where the majority of younger adults would prefer to live. This is not about bowing down to the almighty, “evil” developers–this is about meeting real housing preferences by real people and making real attempts to stop the status quo destruction of our hinterlands so that every man, woman and child can have their own piece of grass to water and cut in order to impress their friends and keep the HOA happy.
As for your comment about “rethinking the idea of high-density urban housing,” you are completely misinformed. Quite the opposite is happening, in fact. More communities are waking up to the fact that a majority of Americans would prefer to live in walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods, even if it means having a smaller space and a smaller yard. I want to be clear: this is not meant to be a war against your house or your neighborhood or your quality of life. With the overwhelming majority of homes today being built out in the suburbs, it’s not as if anyone is expecting that the suburbs will ever disappear. Rather, this is about rebalancing the housing market to accommodate a more sustainable model of community development rather than the outdated model we’ve been pushing and subsidizing since after World War II.