Students at the University of Texas at Austin won a nationwide competition for their $1.3 billion bold vision to transform a bustling shopping center anchored by an H-E-B. The five-student team earned first place in this year’s ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition with their 10-year plan for the “GreenLink,” a 29-acre redevelopment of a retail hub off I-35 into a mixed-use site for community and sustainable living. 

The students envisioned a 1.6 million-square-foot GreenLink project that would replace the Hancock Center in downtown Austin, which is home to the closest H-E-B to the university. In the competition, dozens of graduate and undergraduate students from across the U.S. had two weeks to develop a new site plan for the Hancock Center and cover it into a connected and sustainable district.

Out of 79 entries, the group of UT students advanced to the top 4 finalists, beating out teams from Columbia University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. UT took home the grand prize of $35,000, proving that the students really can hold their own against a public Ivy League-level institution.

The winning team was made up of UT students from the Community and Regional Planning, Urban Design and Business Administration programs including, Michael Alada, Anushka Deshpande, Sushmita Gautam, Josh Hu, and Meng-Shin Lin. Team leader and dual degree master’s candidate, Alada told MySA that their design for the Greenlink was an ode to Austin’s current ecological projects like Waterloo Greenway and Walnut Creek.

“We included a lot of retail on our ground floor vertical mixed use buildings,” Alada said. “So a lot of things, we kind of kept and tried to mimic what Austin already has, but putting kind of our own twist on it.”

The Greenlink would also include environmentally friendly initiatives such as charging stations for electric vehicles, rainwater collection systems, solar panels, a self-contained food production ecosystem, and a geothermal-powered HVAC system.

The potential project would include more than 265,000 square feet of retail space, including a two-story H-E-B store, more than 1,600 apartments, 42 townhomes, 70,000 square feet of office space, a library, an outdoor arts area and more. Alada said his team took inspiration from the Lake Austin H-E-B and South Congress store to create their own closer to Red River Street with apartments on top of the store and parking underneath.

“That H-E-B has direct access to 50,000 students at UT, and we thought putting it on Red River and adding a bus stop could just increase the access and then also help access for the neighborhoods to the west and north,” Alada said. “There’s another feature that we have, which is a greenhouse on top of H-E-B to kind of create a self-contained food ecosystem, where vegetation can be growing right there and directly source to the grocery store.”

This student design is completely different from the chain’s current, newly remodeled Hancock store with a parking lot. Alada added that although these plans are just ideas, he’s hopeful to see what H-E-B and the developers of the land think about the project becoming a reality. 

“We would like to see this come to life as well,” Ayala said. “We were kind of saying, if the site even had half as much of what we were proposing, we would hang out there a lot more.”