From shopping mall to campus
Austin Community College describes Highland as the transformation of the former Highland Mall into a learning and training complex. Its project history places the campus within a larger mixed-use redevelopment.[1]
Austin neighborhood field guide
Get to know the local places, then explore what the public record says: construction, restaurant inspection scores and beverage receipts, with dates and sources beside the data.
Highland is one of 65 named areas in the City of Austin Neighborhood Planning Areas boundary dataset. The saved source records its planning status as plan approved. These mapped categories differ from colloquial neighborhood names. Districts people name in conversation, like South Congress, Rainey Street or the Sixth Street entertainment district, are not separate areas in this dataset; they sit inside a planning area or straddle two. This boundary merges 5 polygons from the city's file, covering the sub-districts the city names SOUTH HIGHLAND, ST. JOHNS AVENUE, NORTH HIGHLAND, with ordinance 20040513-030 recorded in the source, and the city last modified it on . The dataset stores the name as HIGHLAND.
ACC Highland gives the neighborhood a distinctive redevelopment story: an indoor shopping mall transformed into a campus and a surrounding mix of public spaces and other uses. The college’s maps help make sense of a site that still carries traces of its earlier life.
2 linked sources · CheckedAustin Community College describes Highland as the transformation of the former Highland Mall into a learning and training complex. Its project history places the campus within a larger mixed-use redevelopment.[1]
ACC lists Highland Campus at 6101 Highland Campus Drive. The campus page links downloadable and interactive maps for locating rooms, buildings and student services.[2]
The college’s Highland project site features Jacob Fontaine Plaza and St. John Encampment Commons. These spaces add historical and community context to the campus redevelopment story.[1]
The college’s current campus occupies the former Highland Mall site. ACC’s redevelopment history explains the transition from the shopping center to the learning complex.[1][2]
ACC lists Highland Campus at 6101 Highland Campus Drive and provides interactive and downloadable campus maps.[2]
Local context is based on the sources below. Confirm current access, schedules, and reservations with the operator. Civic figures elsewhere on this page retain their own reporting periods.
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Boundary drawn from City of Austin Neighborhood Planning Areas, as last modified September 22, 2021. Markers are placed from geocoded street addresses, so a record whose address we cannot geocode is listed below but not pinned. The panels under the map are the full text equivalent.
The 25 most recently issued inside this boundary (page limit 25)
Austin Public Health · up to 15 most recent inside this boundary
Texas Dept. of Licensing & Regulation filings · up to 15 inside this boundary
Texas Comptroller mixed-beverage filers we placed inside this boundary
9 of 100 filers in ZIP 78752, 78751, 78756, 78757, 78723 placed inside this boundary. Each venue’s figure is its own gross receipts over its own filing months — there is deliberately no area total, because this is a sample, not a census.
Highland is one of 65 named areas in the City of Austin neighborhood-planning boundary dataset. Its status in the saved source is plan approved. Inclusion in this file does not by itself mean a neighborhood plan was adopted. Well-known districts such as South Congress, Rainey Street and the Sixth Street entertainment district are not separate areas in this dataset; they sit inside a planning area, or straddle two. The Highland boundary merges 5 sub-district polygons from the source file. The city last modified it on September 22, 2021.
City of Austin ordinance number 20040513-030 is recorded against this planning area in the city's Neighborhood Planning Areas dataset, with planning status plan approved.
City of Austin Development Services has issued 3,188 building permits that it has geocoded inside the Highland planning-area boundary, the earliest dated October 1, 1970 and the most recent September 23, 2026, for a combined declared construction value of $2,062,944,656. Declared value is the figure the applicant put on the permit application, not market value or finished cost. Counted from the city's Issued Construction Permits dataset (3syk-w9eu), building permits only, over every issue date in that dataset. The boundary test needs a mapped coordinate, and about one building permit in seven (13.8% as published on 2026-07-26) carries no location, so those rows cannot be placed in any neighbourhood and are not in this figure.
No ZIP code centroid falls inside the Highland boundary, so we search the 5 nearest instead: 78752, 78751, 78756, 78757, 78723. We match ZIP codes to planning areas by testing each ZIP's centroid against the boundary polygon, so a large ZIP can overlap an area without its centre landing inside it. Use the boundary, not the ZIP, as the authority.