Austin UNO site rules: no FAR, no coverage cap, 100% impervious cover

Four rules simply stop

Most of this hub is about limits. §25-2-763 is about limits that do not exist in West Campus, and it is a shorter list to read than to believe:

• Maximum floor-to-area ratios — do not apply.
• Maximum building coverage percentages — do not apply.
• Article 9 (Landscaping) — does not apply.
• Article 10 (Compatibility Standards) — does not apply, if the property is at least 75 feet from the boundary of the overlay.

For a multi-family use, §25-2-763(C) also removes the subchapter's minimum site area and open space requirements. What is left holding the building down is height, the envelope, and the street.

A hundred percent means the whole lot

In the inner west campus and Guadalupe subdistricts the maximum impervious cover is 100 percent. There is no requirement to leave any of the site pervious.

Outer west campus and Dobie are written as a comparison: the maximum is the greater of 90 or 85 percent or the percentage permitted in the base zoning district. Both halves are still ceilings — nothing here obliges you to cover anything. What the "greater of" decides is which ceiling applies, and it fixes the overlay figure as the lower bound of that ceiling.

In practice the West Campus base districts permit well under 90 percent, so the working answers are simply 90 and 85. The comparison is a safety valve for a base district that one day permits more, not a live choice on most sites today.

No minimum setback, but you still cannot reach the kerb

§25-2-757(A) says there are no minimum front or street side yard setbacks — the single exception being 10 feet along Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. between Rio Grande and San Gabriel. Interior side and rear yards have neither a minimum nor a maximum.

Then subsection (E): a building must be at least 12 feet from the front face of the kerb and at least 30 feet from the centreline of the adjacent street. That is not a contradiction. A setback is measured from your property line; (E) is measured from the street itself, so on a narrow right-of-way it binds long before any property-line rule would.

The maximum setback, and the four ways out of it

As in the rest of the city's urban-form rules, the setback here is a ceiling of 10 feet, not a floor — the building is required to come forward. Four exceptions loosen it:

• 15 feet along 24th Street, or along MLK between Rio Grande and San Gabriel.
• 45 feet for a public plaza or private common open space.
• No maximum at all for a pedestrian entry court or an outdoor café.
• A modification by the director of the Watershed Protection and Development Review Department, where it is required to protect a historic structure or a tree the city arborist has designated significant.

The pattern is consistent: you may only step back to make somewhere for people to be, or to save something already standing.

Compatibility survives at the edges

Article 10 drops away only where the property is at least 75 feet from the boundary of the overlay. Inside that 75-foot band the compatibility standards still run, which is how the overlay meets the ordinary neighbourhoods around it.

And where compatibility does apply, §25-2-757(F) adds a requirement of its own: a building, or a solid masonry wall at least six feet high, between a public or common open space and the property that triggered the standards.