Which would you guess makes more money for the city of Austin? One of the most historically wealthy neighborhoods in Austin boasting multi-million dollar mansions or a mixed-income, mixed-use development? To answer this question we turn to data. The figure below compares the property tax revenue per square foot for a master-planned mixed-income neighborhood, Mueller, (right-bottom) to the affluent west Austin neighborhood (left-bottom) with its multi-million dollar mansions. As you can see below, Mueller isn’t just making more for the city and its taxpayers then west Austin. It’s making up to 20x more. ( Purple colors are anywhere from 2-20x that of orange and red colors.)
TLDR; It is not in the interest of most Austin taxpayers to prohibit density zoning, but as you can see here, the residents in the wealthy west Austin neighborhood, are one exception to this.
So you may be wondering how can a mixed-income development produce more value for the city than an affluent neighborhood? One word. Density. Mueller (above figure right bottom panel) is a master-planned community built on what used to be the original Austin airport. To make the neighborhood walkable and pedestrian-friendly, the developers secured many exceptions to city zoning laws. Some of those exceptions include row houses, reduced setback requirements, and reduced parking requirements. All of these factors allow for more density and this density allows for more revenue to the city. How does this benefit the average tax payer? More affordable (and market rate) housing for residents.
Neighborhood character
A common argument against zoning for density is that it will kill the character of a neighborhood. But does the density of Mueller lack character? I would argue, no. If a neighborhood with relaxed zoning has an undesirable character then one would expect the demand for that area to be lower than houses in the surrounding area. But the opposite is true. In Mueller, the market rate homes are going for > $1 million. A far cry from the Austin median home price of just over $600k. The neighborhood is in clear demand.
But it’s not just about the money. Mueller is an extremely walkable neighborhood. If you live in this neighborhood you have the option to walk to the grocery stores. farmers markets, coffee shops, and many neighborhood parks..
Methods
The appraised property value was downloaded from the Travis county appraisal district website
https://stage.travis.prodigycad.com/property-search . This data was collected manually by searching by zip code and downloading the data 1k records at a time. We assume a flat property tax rate of 2.22%
Property square footage was taken from Austin's open city data https://data.austintexas.gov/Locations-and-Maps/Land-Use-Inventory-Detailed/fj9m-h5qy .
The two sources of information were joined within Tableau. Maps are generated in Tableau.
Why are you missing values for certain properties and areas?
Downloading property data manually was annoying. The Travis County search website is pretty good at blocking bots. Either that or I'm bad at web scraping. meh.
Shout outs
Shout out to Michael Miller,Gabriel Seeman, and Dan Lawin who all contributed to building this map as part of a Procore hackday challenge.
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