Drive the corner of Mopac and Bee Cave Road this month and you will see a crane. Endeavor Real Estate Group is finally building the third phase of Rollingwood Center, the last piece of an 18-acre office park the company first assembled in 1999. It is the kind of project that shows up in real estate trade press and gets treated as the neighborhood's headline for the year.
It isn't. The bigger argument in Rollingwood right now is happening a half mile away, over a patch of city park that most residents have opinions about but almost nobody outside the city limits has heard of: whether the off-leash dog area at Rollingwood Park should keep sharing space with Little League fields 3, 4, and 5, or get a dedicated footprint of its own.
Two Decades in the Making
The office building rising now has a longer paper trail than most people realize. Endeavor bought the 18-acre site in 1999 and negotiated a Planned Unit Development with the city that entitled up to 340,000 square feet across three buildings and a bank pad. Phases 1 and 2, two office buildings totaling roughly 215,000 square feet, were completed in 2015 and later sold to Lionstone Investments. Phase 3 came back to council for site plan and zoning approval in 2018, and even then the discussion centered on something unglamorous: whether traffic studies would protect residents from footing an unexpected tax burden if the development strained the intersection.
Milestone | Year |
|---|---|
18-acre site assembled by Endeavor | 1999 |
PUD entitlement granted, up to 340,000 SF | 2001 |
Phases 1 and 2 completed, ~215,000 SF | 2015 |
Phase 3 site plan and zoning change requested | 2018 |
Phase 3 construction underway | 2026 |
That is 27 years from land assembly to a groundbreaking on the final piece. Phase 3 adds a five-story office building, a four-story parking garage, and a bridge over Eanes Creek, according to the city's own Community Development Corporation page. The same page notes that the Rollingwood Community Development Corporation, the entity that channels the city's sales tax revenue into local projects, is separately weighing landscape architecture, a boulder retaining wall, and playground upgrades for Rollingwood Park's upper section. The office tower and the park upgrades run through the same civic pipeline even if they are not the same story.
The Argument That Actually Fills the Council Chamber
If you want to understand what residents are actually watching this year, skip the crane and look at the agenda for the City Council's April 15 meeting, where item 11 read simply: discussion and possible action to create a separate off-leash dog area in Rollingwood Park.
The conflict is not new. The off-leash area has shared ground with baseball fields 3, 4, and 5 for years, a compromise nobody designed on purpose. It surfaced again when the Park Commission started redesigning the parking lot near the ball fields and planning a new sprinkler system, work the Rollingwood Community Development Corporation was asked to help fund. Residents used that process to push for a permanent fix.
The parking lot needs reconstruction, and the proposed parking plan has broad support. What the community has not settled is how to divide the rest of the space between dogs and baseball, and how large a dedicated off-leash area would need to be to work.
The Park Commission, working with landscape architect Curt Arnette and volunteer designer Alex Robinette, who also designed the field house retaining wall, produced three distinct site plan options this spring, each dated April 7. Council held public hearings in January and again in April, hoping to reach a vote in May. As of the Park Commission's June 9 meeting, the item was still listed as an update rather than a resolution, alongside unrelated business like mosquito treatment for the lower park and an update from Western Hills Little League and Western Hills Girls Softball, the two leagues that lease the athletic fields.
This is what a town of 1,683 residents looks like when it argues about land use. There is no anonymous public comment period buried in a PDF nobody reads. There is a message board where an unofficial poll caused enough confusion that the city had to post a correction, and there are three named PDFs that any resident can open and compare before the next vote.
What's Cooking on Bee Cave Road
Not every change this year required a council vote. Taqueria de Diez, one of the Austin American-Statesman's Top 20 taquerias, opened its third location this spring at 3736 Bee Cave Road in West Lake Hills, a few minutes from Rollingwood Center. The Tijuana-style menu, built around al pastor cooked on a trompo and carne asada from the flat-top, started in a downtown alley off Trinity Street in 2024 before expanding to South Lamar Boulevard. The Westlake location runs 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and stays open until 1 a.m. Thursday through Saturday, giving the corridor something it has not had before: a genuine late-night taco option in an area better known for grocery-anchored strip centers than destination dining.
The timing is notable. Co-founders Raul and Luis Esquer, along with chef Roy Servan, announced the Westlake opening within weeks of confirming they are relocating their original downtown location to East Sixth Street as part of that district's redevelopment. Westlake is not an afterthought in that expansion plan. It is a deliberate bet that the neighborhood can support the same late-night crowd the brand built downtown.
The Club That Built the Park in the First Place
The off-leash debate lands differently once you know who built Rollingwood Park to begin with. The Rollingwood Women's Club, founded in 1958 by four women organizing a newly incorporated city, raised the money for the park itself back in 1978, financed at first through recycled aluminum cans and a Sampler Supper where neighbors brought casseroles and sold their recipes for a quarter apiece. The first playscape went in during 1985, funded the same way. In 2003, the club added a 5K race to mark the 25th anniversary of its July 4th parade, a tradition that continues as the Rollingwood 5K and Kids Fun Run, held this year on March 29 at Rollingwood City Hall, with all proceeds still going back into the club's community work.
The club's calendar for 2026 tracks the same rhythm it always has:
- Wine and Cheese Kick-Off in September
- Easter Egg-Stravaganza the Saturday before Easter
- Rollingwood 5K and Kids Fun Run, held March 29
- July 4th parade and celebration, running since 1978
- Holiday party open to all adult residents in December
- End-of-Season party in May
That is not a marketing calendar. It is the same volunteer infrastructure that installed the first swing set in 1985 now sitting in the same council chamber arguing about where the dogs should run. The people funding the parking lot redesign and the people who paid for the original park are, in a meaningful sense, the same civic muscle operating four decades apart.
What This Season Actually Says About Rollingwood
It will not change how a Saturday morning at Rollingwood Park feels for a resident walking a dog past a Little League practice. That decision, still working its way through Park Commission meetings and council agendas as of this summer, is the one that actually touches daily life here. It is a small enough town that three site plan PDFs and a volunteer landscape architect can settle an argument that in a larger city would disappear into a parks department master plan nobody reads.
That is the real texture of Rollingwood right now. The commercial real estate makes headlines because it is large and visible. The park makes the difference because it is shared, small, and argued over by name.
If you are watching how a place like this evolves, from its office parks to its park benches, Susan Barringer has spent years tracking exactly this kind of local detail across Westlake and Rollingwood. Work With Susan when you are ready to talk about what any of it means for your own address.
