The Arboretum Changed Hands. Great Hills Park Runs on Volunteers.

Two properties anchor daily life in Great Hills, and this year they are moving in opposite directions. One just got a new owner headquartered out of state. The other has been run by the same loose committee of neighbors, largely unpaid, since the fall of 1993, and nothing that happened this year changes that.

The retail center is The Arboretum, on Research Boulevard. The other is Great Hills Neighborhood Park, tucked into the canyon land off Sierra Oaks. If you live here, you already know both. What's worth understanding this fall is how differently each one gets decided.

The Buyer From Charlotte

In February 2026, Charlotte-based Asana Partners announced it had acquired The Arboretum, the roughly 200,000-square-foot open-air shopping center at 10000 Research Blvd that sits at the heart of the neighborhood's retail core. The seller was Washington Prime Group, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2021 and has spent the years since shedding its Austin-area holdings, including Lakeline Plaza, Lakeline Village, and Wolf Ranch Town Center. The Arboretum was one of the last pieces still on the books.

That matters for a simple reason: this is now the center's second ownership transition in five years, and the first one was a bankruptcy. The Arboretum opened in 1985 as one of Austin's earliest open-air lifestyle centers. Four decades later, its future is being decided by an investment firm's acquisitions team rather than by anyone who parks there on a Saturday.

Asana's plan, laid out in a release covered by Community Impact, centers on reconfiguring the center's common areas to support live music, pop-up retail, and community programming, along with new storefront signage and other physical upgrades. The stated goal is straightforward: turn a center that still holds The Cheesecake Factory, Estancia Brazilian Steakhouse, Cafe du Bliss, Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn, ATX Optometry, and Ao5 Gallery back into what the company calls a premier shopping destination. Asana's managing director of investments described the purchase as part of a broader strategy of owning some of the best neighborhood retail in the country, which tells you this isn't a one-off flip. It's a bet on Great Hills specifically.

What Changes on the Ground This Fall

None of that is abstract if you're the one walking from Amy's Ice Creams to Cava on a Tuesday evening. The announced upgrades are aimed at exactly that kind of visit: better common areas for events, refreshed signage, and a push to make the center feel less like a strip of stores and more like a place people linger after dark.

Here's what to actually watch for as the work proceeds:

• Signage and storefront changes along the walkways, since new signage was named specifically in Asana's plan
• Programming in the common areas, if live music or pop-up retail events start appearing on weekends
• Any shift in tenant mix, since a "premier destination" repositioning often means some retail turnover alongside the physical upgrades

None of this is confirmed on a fixed calendar yet. What's confirmed is the intent, and the fact that a national real estate investment firm now controls the decisions, rather than the previous owner.

The Park That No One Can Buy

Turn toward Sierra Oaks Drive, elsewhere in the same neighborhood, and the ownership story reverses completely.

Great Hills Neighborhood Park took shape over several years. Nearly 50 acres were donated to the city in the mid-1980s, but the canyon around Floral Park Drive sat mostly untouched. In the early 1990s, two separate groups of neighbors, one wanting a playscape near Floral Park, another concerned about nine misused acres near Sierra Oaks, joined forces in the fall of 1993 and formed the Great Hills Park Committee. The park wasn't formally approved by the Austin Parks Board until 1994. The playscape opened in 1997, dedicated at a neighborhood gathering on the Fourth of July. In 1996, the park became the first member of the Austin Parks Foundation's Adopt-a-Park program, and a 2002 grant funded the chimney swift tower that still stands near the playscape.

None of that infrastructure exists because a company bought it. It exists because volunteers built it, one grant application and one work Saturday at a time.

"Volunteers headed by Eric Potter maintain the trails on a continuous basis. We do major upgrades and repairs during Spring and Fall workdays. Everyone is welcome to help."

That's the park's own description of how its roughly two miles of trail actually stay walkable, crossing creeks five times as the main path connects the Floral Park trailhead to the upper trailheads at Sierra Oaks and Sierra Nevada. A side trail cuts through a cedar forest to the Foxway trailhead off Penny Creek Drive, passing two of the park's most accessible springs. After a heavy rain, a six-foot waterfall appears along that stretch. Another spur leads to what the trail volunteers call the Fish Pool, where bass, sunfish, and the occasional snapping turtle show up if you approach quietly.

Every bench, trailhead sign, map, and information kiosk in the park, there are five kiosks total, was built and installed by the same volunteer structure. On one past project alone, funded through an Austin Parks Foundation grant to build the exercise area, the neighborhood committee logged more than 300 volunteer hours.

Same Neighborhood, Two Different Kinds of Investment

Put the two side by side and the contrast is the whole point.

Great Hills residents are, at the same time, watching an outside investment firm decide what their shopping center should feel like, and being asked, directly, whether they'll show up with gloves and a trash bag to decide what their park trail looks like next season. Those are genuinely different kinds of civic participation, and this neighborhood happens to be running both models at the same time.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you want a say in what The Arboretum becomes, that decision is largely out of resident hands. Asana Partners owns the property and controls the capital plan. The most direct lever available to neighbors is patronage and feedback to tenants, not a vote.

The park works differently. The Great Hills Park Committee still runs its trail maintenance and workdays the same way it has since 1993: through a groups.io email list that anyone can join for updates on the next Spring or Fall workday, and through volunteers who simply show up. Parking matters here too. There's no real parking at the Floral Park trailhead, so if you're heading out for a workday or just an evening walk, the Sierra Oaks and Foxway trailheads are the ones with room for your car.

Both properties are worth paying attention to this fall, not because one is more important than the other, but because they represent the two ways a neighborhood actually changes: capital from outside deciding what commerce looks like, and labor from inside deciding what the land looks like. Great Hills has both running at full speed at the same time, which is not something every Austin neighborhood can say.

If you're weighing what a home near either of these anchors is actually worth, or just curious how a volunteer-maintained park and a shopping center with a new owner both factor into property values here, Liz King has spent years reading exactly this kind of neighborhood detail for buyers and sellers in Northwest Austin. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.