Report on Austin Housing Prices

Texas has long led the nation in attracting migrants from other states because of its low cost-of-living and affordable housing. Austin has long been the fastest growing metropolitan region in the state and, since 2010, in the nation. Yet the city’s boom appears peculiar because Austin no longer has low-cost housing. Starting in 2012, the median price of a new home in the Austin metropolitan area shot up from a little over $200,000 to about $500,000 dollars. With the sole exception of Boise, Idaho Austin saw the greatest housing price increase during the pandemic: almost 25 percent in one year.

Austin has become the new face of the affordable housing crisis in the United States. Despite Texas’s general latitudinarian attitude toward building and development, Austin housing prices now more closely resemble those in fellow tech boom towns Denver and Seattle rather than in neighboring Dallas and Houston. What changed?