Live in Tarrytown

This guide covers the City's West Austin Neighborhood Group planning area, which holds Tarrytown and, at its southern end, Deep Eddy: West 35th Street to the Colorado River, MoPac to Lake Austin, about 2,030 acres. The land was part of Woodlawn, the estate Governor Elisha M. Pease bought in 1857. His heirs began subdividing it in 1916, and the first section of Tarrytown, named for the family's summer retreat in Tarrytown, New York, opened on 4 November 1934. The appraisal roll dates 707 of 2,732 single-family houses to the 1940s and puts the median at 1957. The 2020 census counted 10,544 residents in 4,805 homes. Its neighborhood plan, adopted in 2010 jointly with Windsor Road across MoPac, sets out to keep it predominantly single-family.

The lots are what sells. The median single-family parcel is 10,204 square feet, and a quarter are larger than 14,112. From 2016 to 2025 the City issued permits to demolish 298 houses here and to build 303 new ones. The houses coming down had a median of 1,999 square feet; the ones going up, 4,782. So 768 of the dated houses on the roll are from 2000 or later, while the census counted fewer homes, 4,891 in 2010 and 4,805 in 2020, and the rented share of occupied homes went from 41% to 35%. HOME lets up to three homes stand on an SF-3 lot, the district on about 70% of the zoned land, but the City has deed restrictions on record for 29 subdivisions platted between 1892 and 1950, which hold 1,464 of the 2,740 single-family lots. The City approves a permit that meets its code whatever the deed says; enforcing a deed is a civil suit between neighbors.

The ground is not all limestone. The line between prairie clay and Hill Country limestone runs roughly along MoPac, and Tarrytown sits on both. On the federal soil survey 1,016 of the single-family lots are on Eckrant and Brackett soils, shallow soils formed over limestone, and 1,076 on the Travis series, old river-terrace soils. But 604, most of them in the east toward MoPac, are on Houston Black, a clay formed from shale that the survey rates at a linear extensibility of 17%, a measure of how far it swells when wet and shrinks when dry, against 4.5% or less for the soils under most of the other houses. The City's permits bear it out: of the 75 houses given a foundation-repair permit from 2016 to 2025, 36 stand on the Houston Black clay. A soil map cannot say what is under one house, and not every repair is permitted, but it tells a buyer where to insist on an engineer. Flooding is narrower: 36 single-family parcels are in the City's 100-year floodplain, 33 of them along Johnson Creek and its channels.

Nearly a quarter of the land belongs to the state, and its future is open. The appraisal roll lists 442 acres here as owned by the State of Texas or the University of Texas. The largest piece is Lions Municipal, Muny, the 141-acre course the Lions Club opened in 1924 on the university's Brackenridge Tract, which in late 1950 became what Wikipedia calls the first public course in the South to desegregate. The City still leases it, for less than $500,000 a year on land Community Impact reports is appraised at more than $680 million, and the Save Historic Muny District now has until May 2027 to reach a deal. The other large holding is the state's Austin State Supported Living Center, a 95-acre campus on West 35th Street open since 1917. The neighborhood plan asks that any future use of both be compatible with the houses around them. Nobody has published what that use will be.

What it costs, and how you get downtown. Zillow publishes no Tarrytown figure. Its typical single-family value for ZIP code 78703, which holds the whole planning area and Clarksville and Old Enfield besides, was $1,593,673 in August 2026, higher than a year earlier, 18% below the June 2022 peak and about three times the city's $527,943. The Census Bureau's tract medians run from $1,079,800 to $1,746,000 with margins of error up to $535,069, 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 Zillow's figure owes the five taxing units about $28,058 a year, and the same house without the exemption about $32,614; the citywide arithmetic is on the Austin page. No rail line reaches the planning area. CapMetro's Route 18 is the local bus through it, and the Capitol is about 5.5 km east.