Austin continues to see growth in housing and recreation

(ABC 6 NEWS) – Over the past year, the Austin City Council saw a new space open for the farmers market, road work start and finish, and plans for new housing in the works.

Austin Mayor Steve King said a big win for Austin was getting Nu-Tek BioSciences to start building a facility that will bring about 35 jobs to town. This is still under construction.

The former YMCA building will soon become 91 units of market-rate housing.

Those three acres of land are going to be some of the first units in the area in hopes to bring more people to Austin.

"I think that is really going to be a transformational building for Austin to have young professionals come to town that maybe work in the medical field at Mayo or through Hormel the schools or the city some of these young professionals do need a place to live and I think that will give them that," Austin Mayor Steve King said.

Mayor King said he is also hearing older community members might want to rent apartments if they are downsizing from a home.

"I love that the growth and the core of our city is kind of blown up and it seems like all demographics want to participate either live in the core of visit the core of the city," Mayor King said.

The new apartments in the old YMCA building are expected to open by Spring 2023.

Another big project coming to Austin is the Welcome Center will get a permanent building within the Community Action Center. This is an expansion of the Siebel Center.

Within the ongoing pandemic, the council did not want to put too much of a burden on taxpayers with the 2022 budget.

"Continuing in a pandemic and trying to set a levy that is reasonable where we still have a functioning city at the same time we don’t want to put upon our residents to greatly so to come out of our pandemic with a 6.8% levy we are pretty proud of that," Mayor King said.

Mayor King said they could have not seen progress without community partners.