Saturday morning at Toney Burger Center starts the same way it has for over a decade. Folding tables go up before nine, coffee gets poured before the produce even arrives, and by the time the SFC Farmers' Market officially opens, the parking lot at 3200 Jones Road is already half full of people who know exactly which vendor sells the good peaches. Somewhere in that crowd, most weekends, someone points toward the trees and says something like "we should walk the greenbelt after this."

That sentence covers more ground than most people realize. Williamson Creek cuts through 78745 in two separate stretches that get lumped together as one greenbelt, and they are nowhere close to the same thing. One stretch has been quietly there for decades, expanded piece by piece with no grand plan behind it. The other has been sitting inside a formal vision document since 2020, moving forward in small negotiated steps rather than a single groundbreaking. Living near this creek and assuming it's all one project is the kind of small local mix-up that only gets sorted out by knowing which half is which.

The stretch that's already there

Near Brodie Lane and Sunset Valley, Williamson Creek runs through what's simply called the Williamson Creek Greenbelt, dedicated back in 1977 as both parkland and a drainage easement. It grew the way a lot of older Austin greenbelts did, not through a single master plan but through years of piecemeal additions. In 1991, a five-acre donation from a local landowner named Eli Garza expanded the park, though the gift later got tangled in a legal dispute between the city and the neighboring city of Sunset Valley over an attempted sale of adjacent land to Lowe's. Two years after that, in 1993, Austin purchased another 13.6 acres, adding it to both the Williamson Creek Greenbelt and the nearby Dove Springs District Park.

None of that history shows up on the ground today as a visitor center or a set of trail markers. What's there instead is a quiet, informal stretch of shaded gravel path under oak cover, with the creek's limestone bed running alongside it. There's no official trailhead and no dedicated parking lot. Neighbors just park along the side streets near the Brush Country Road bridge, a couple of blocks off William Cannon Drive and about a mile from Loop 1. It works because it's always worked, not because anyone recently decided it should.

The stretch still waiting on paper

A couple of miles east, the story is a lot slower. The Central Williamson Creek Greenway is a two-mile stretch of creek corridor between Menchaca Road and South Congress Avenue, weaving through the Heartwood and Southwood neighborhoods. The goal, according to the planning team at Asakura Robinson, is to reclaim roughly 70 acres of underutilized parkland and floodplain as connected green space. Some of that acreage came from a 2014 voluntary home buyout program the city ran with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which added 17 acres of former residential floodplain to the corridor, joining 58 acres of undeveloped parkland the city already owned along that stretch.

Public engagement for this plan began in May 2020, largely conducted virtually because of the pandemic, and included creek-side pop-ups, virtual town halls the project called "creek chats," and roughly 2,200 votes cast online on community priorities. The Austin Parks Board formally accepted the vision plan in August 2022. Since then, implementation has continued in small, deliberate steps rather than a single groundbreaking. One example: an early draft called for eight parallel parking spaces at the South 1st Street trailhead to help residents who couldn't walk in from elsewhere. After hearing from neighbors that more parking wasn't wanted in that spot, the city reduced the plan to three accessible spaces, a compromise that preserved access without adding car traffic to a quiet residential stretch.

That kind of granular back and forth is a good sign the plan is alive and being negotiated in good faith. It's also a sign that nobody should expect a ribbon cutting on the Central Greenway soon. Four years after Parks Board approval, this remains the stretch of Williamson Creek that exists mostly on paper.

Here's the two-part picture, side by side:

• Williamson Creek Greenbelt (near Brodie Lane and Sunset Valley): Dedicated in 1977, expanded piecemeal through land donations and purchases over the following decades, informally maintained today with no official trailhead or parking.
• Central Williamson Creek Greenway (Menchaca Road to South Congress Avenue): Vision plan accepted by the Parks Board in 2022, roughly 70 acres identified, still moving through implementation details like trailhead parking rather than construction.

What actually holds the neighborhood together right now

While the creek project sorts itself out one negotiation at a time, the two things that reliably bring 78745 together every year haven't changed much at all. The SFC Farmers' Market at Sunset Valley has run at Toney Burger Center every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. since 2010, rain or shine, with live music most weeks and the market's Double Dollars program stretching SNAP and WIC benefits further for shoppers. It's the kind of fixture that doesn't need a press release to keep functioning.

Once a year, that same parking lot gets taken over entirely. The 18th Annual Sunset Valley ARTFEST returned on April 25, 2026, filling the Toney Burger Center grounds with more than 120 artisans, food trucks, a kids' activity zone, and a main stage that this year featured Asleep at the Wheel. Local reporting from Hoodline put attendance at roughly 8,000 people, up enough from previous years that the SFC Farmers' Market had to temporarily relocate to Sunset Valley Elementary School for the day just to make room. Sunset Valley's mayor, Marc Bruner, put it simply: "Over the years it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and the city just loves putting it on."

That's the part of 78745 that doesn't wait on a vision plan or a Parks Board vote. It just shows up every Saturday, and once a year, shows up bigger than the parking lot can hold.

What this means if you already live here

None of this is a reason to expect sweeping change along the creek anytime soon, and it isn't meant as one. The Central Greenway will likely keep moving in small increments, a parking compromise here, a signage decision there, for a while longer. What's useful is simply knowing which stretch is which the next time a neighbor mentions "the greenbelt," or the next time you're deciding whether Saturday morning means a walk near Brodie Lane or just staying put at the market table with the good peaches. The creek runs through both, but only one half is actually finished.

If you're weighing a move within 78745, or just want a clearer read on how a specific block sits relative to the creek, the market, or the trail system, Cody Hobza knows this stretch of South Austin from the ground up. Let's Connect.