Town Square shapes Amarillo’s southwest face

AMARILLO – Construction is underway on both The Residences at Town Square and Verdure. The construction is the latest in the Town Square development at Soncy and Hillside Rds.

Town Square will cover the 640 acres from Hillside north to Southwest 45th Ave. and from Soncy Rd. west to Helium Rd.

Building permits issued for five structures going up now put construction cost at nearly $44 million thus far, according to the City of Amarillo.

The Residences at Town Square will include 480 apartment units, four penthouses and 120,000 sf of retail space. Apartments will contain one to three bedrooms, with one-bedroom units renting at $750 to $1,250 a month. Each of the four buildings has enough ground floor retail space to accommodate a big-box retailer.

Verdure will contain 65,000 sf of office space and a 45,000-sf health club. Amenities will include four pools, tennis basketball courts, indoor batting cages, an indoor gun range, a rock-climbing wall and an indoor pole-vaulting practice area.

The Williams Group intends to open Ridgewood Apartments in May 2014 on the south side of Arden Rd., near Soncy, in what will be the Heritage Hills neighborhood.

The complex, the first construction at Heritage Hills, will contain 240 units. The first phase of construction of single-family homes is also set to begin in summer 2014. These homes will range from 8,000 to 12,000 sf or more, with prices from $300,000 to $1 million.

Home builders have added 5,719 houses to Amarillo in the ten years from 2004 through 2013, according to the City of Amarillo. The most came in 2005, when 758 homes were constructed; the least was in 2013, when a shortage of lots ready for building kept housing starts to 472.

Amarillo’s apartment occupancy rate stood at 91 percent in February 2014, relatively unchanged from February 2013. The Amarillo market absorbed 106 new units and average asking rents increased 1.2 percent to $658 from February 2013 to February 2014, according to ALN.