Live in Northwest Hills

This guide covers the area the Northwest Austin Civic Association filed with the City's Community Registry: RM 2222 to US 183, MoPac to Loop 360, about 7.4 square miles. It lies in no City planning area and has no neighborhood plan. The Barrow family began developing Northwest Hills in 1952 and came to own 2,500 of its 3,500 acres, Wikipedia records, and the appraisal roll dates 3,783 of 6,259 single-family houses to the 1960s and 1970s, with a median of 1976. The 2020 census counted 27,903 residents, 2,132 more than in 2010, in 14,274 homes. That is more than twice the 6,265 single-family parcels: homes that are not houses make up the difference, and 48% of occupied homes were rented.

The ground is limestone, and much of it is steep. On the federal soil survey every single-family lot stands on soils formed from limestone or washed down from it: 2,802 on Eckrant soils mapped at 0 to 2 percent slopes, the flat tops of the ridges, and 1,834 on Brackett soils mapped at 8 to 30 percent, 834 of those with rock outcrop. None is on the Houston Black clay that underlies 604 lots in Tarrytown, and the City's permits show the difference: 52 houses here got a foundation-repair permit from 2016 to 2025, under 1% of the lots, against 75 of Tarrytown's 2,740. What the slope brings instead is height. On a grid of 53 points the USGS elevation model runs from 533 feet near Loop 360 in the west to 905 feet, and the reference point here stands at 898 feet, 355 above Tarrytown's. The median lot is 11,783 square feet.

The canyons bring the fire code. The Balcones Canyonlands Preserve, set aside from 1996 for the golden-cheeked warbler and other endangered species, holds 137 acres inside the boundary in four City tracts, along Bull Creek and at Stillhouse Hollow and Barrow, and its 409-acre Forest Ridge and 213-acre Bright Leaf tracts lie just outside. Because of that wildland, the City's wildfire code map puts 4,847 of the 6,265 single-family lots in a proximity zone, and 699 within 150 feet of wildland, in Zones A and B, against one in Tarrytown. Since 10 July 2025 a new house anywhere in the zones needs a Class A roof, vents screened against embers and a five-foot noncombustible strip around it, and in Zones A and B ignition-resistant materials as well. The code leaves existing houses alone, so it is a cost of rebuilding rather than of owning, and rebuilding is slow here: the City permitted 91 house demolitions from 2016 to 2025, against 298 in Tarrytown on fewer than half as many lots.

What is not known is the value. Zillow publishes no Northwest Hills figure. For ZIP code 78731, which holds 18,455 of the residents, its typical single-family value was $1,118,662 in August 2026, higher than a year earlier and 17% below the June 2022 peak; for 78759, which holds the other 9,448 among its 42,333, it was $703,889, lower than a year earlier. The Census Bureau's tract medians run from $238,000 to $926,600, and the appraisal district's parcel layer states no appraisal year, so this guide quotes no appraised values. On the 2025 rates a homestead at the 78731 figure owes the five taxing units about $19,309 a year, and the same house without the exemption about $22,893; the citywide arithmetic is on the Austin page.

Getting out is a highway question. No rail line crosses the area. CapMetro's Route 30 is the local bus, the 661 shuttle runs from Far West Boulevard to the university, and express buses pass along MoPac, which is the way downtown, about 13 km. Loop 360, which carried 58,497 vehicles a day north of RM 2222 in 2021, is under construction at the southwest corner: TxDOT broke ground on 29 April 2026 on a $68.4 million project that takes the traffic signal off Loop 360 at Courtyard Drive and turns the RM 2222 junction into a diverging diamond, due in 2029. Just south of that junction the Pennybacker Bridge, opened in 1982, carries Loop 360 over Lake Austin.