FIRST OF ITS KIND IN TEXAS

Hixon Properties completed The Soto building, the first commercial building constructed using mass timber in Texas, at the former Cavendar Cadillac dealership along Broadway in 2020.

The six-story, 141,000-square-foot building at 711 Broadway is named for the Spanish word for “grove of trees” or “small forest.” Much of it was built with wood from trees farmed specifically for mass timber production, including spruce, pine and fir.

It has about 640 cubic meters of wood that stores 490 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of taking 290 cars off the road for a year or the energy needed to operate 129 homes for a year, according to the real estate development company.

“The trees we’re building with, as they grow, they’re taking carbon dioxide out of the air, and then when the tree’s cut at about 10 years old, you build with it and you’ve just sequestered all of that carbon into the building,” Hixon executive John

Beauchamp said in an interview in 2019. “Then new trees grow, they take carbon out of the air, they’re cut when they’re young — somebody else builds with them, so you’re sequestering this carbon in your buildings.”

The majority of the office space in the Soto is leased. Hixon still is looking for tenants for about 7,000 square feet on the fifth floor and a restaurant to fill about 5,000 square feet on the ground floor.

The building was empty for a while during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recent “flight to quality” office trend has been a boon, Hunter Kingman, vice president of acquisitions and development for Hixon, said in December.

The company is putting the finishing touches on a food hall called the Make Ready Market behind the Soto. Mila Coffee operates a coffee shop, and Idle Beer Hall & Brewing recently opened inside a former Cavender Cadillac building at the site.

— Madison Iszler