Live in Crestview

Crestview is the City's Crestview neighborhood planning area: about 652 acres between Burnet Road and North Lamar Boulevard, from Justin Lane north to Anderson Lane, with the Red Line's track running through the middle on the route the Austin and Northwestern railroad laid in 1881. The neighborhood plan dates the houses to 1947, when the Austin Development Corporation began the Crestview Addition on the Richcreek Dairy farm and dug the drainage channel that still runs down the median of Arroyo Seco. Wikipedia credits the developer A. B. Beddow and dates the building to the 1950s and early 1960s. The appraisal roll settles the decade: 975 of 1,696 dated single-family houses were built in the 1950s, and the median year is 1955.

The chemical plant became the station. In 1949 the Jefferson Chemical Company opened on Lamar, and in 2004 the neighborhood plan still counted industrial land at 14% of Crestview; its first action item was to keep the open space on what was by then the Huntsman site. Huntsman left in 2005, Trammell Crow and Stratus Properties bought the land and cleaned it, and on 11 December 2008 the Council rezoned about 195 acres around the planned station, across Crestview, Brentwood and Highland, to transit-oriented development: up to 45 homes an acre, more with affordable housing, and buildings to 60 feet. The neighborhood association had asked for 20 an acre and two or three stories, citing a survey in which 90% of 400 respondents wanted no more than 700 more homes. Crestview station opened on 22 March 2010. Between that spring's census and 2020's, the planning area went from 2,297 homes to 3,574 and from 3,927 residents to 6,374, and the rented share of occupied homes went from 39% to 50%.

The lot is the other half of the price. The 1,396 single-family parcels outside the station's resubdivision have a median lot of 8,319 square feet, and 1,382 of them have at least 5,750, the standard minimum. The 2004 plan kept them single-family and declined the garage apartment option, and the City's record for the planning area lists small-lot amnesty and design rules for garages, front-yard parking and porches. HOME, adopted in December 2023 and May 2024, now allows up to three homes on a single-family lot and a house on 1,800 square feet, close to the lots the 301 houses at Crestview Station were built on between 2013 and 2016: their median is 2,268. The station plan put the houses around it at about six an acre. On the older lots, 209 houses are dated 2010 or later, 99 of them since 2020. Citywide, 714 HOME applications had been approved for 1,421 new homes by 8 September 2026.

What it costs. Zillow's Crestview, drawn on its own boundary rather than the City's, was $579,537 in August 2026, lower than a year earlier, 28% under the June 2022 peak of $799,700 and more than twice the $247,263 of August 2010. The county's parcel layer states no appraisal year, so this guide uses it for counts and lot sizes and gives no appraised values. On the 2025 rates a homestead at Zillow's figure owes the five taxing units about $9,379 a year, and the same house without the exemption about $11,860; every parcel here that lists its taxing units lists the same five. The citywide arithmetic is on the Austin page.

Burnet Road and Lamar are the edges; the Wall of Welcome is the middle. The 803 MetroRapid runs up Burnet Road to The Domain and the 801 along Lamar, both south to the university and downtown, a bus every 10 to 15 minutes. The train runs every 15 to 30 minutes, until 8 p.m. from Monday to Thursday and never on Sunday. In between, the shopping center the 1948 section set aside on Woodrow Avenue carries the Wall of Welcome, a 120-foot mosaic that the Brentwood artist Jean Graham began on a City cultural contract in 2003 and finished with hundreds of neighbors in March 2008. None of the 1,697 single-family parcels lies in the City's 100-year floodplain or in FEMA's.