Live in Uptown

Uptown was prairie, estates and vegetable farms along Post Oak Road, three miles outside the city limits in 1948. William Giddings Farrington opened Tanglewood the next year, ranch houses on former prairie, and from the late 1960s Gerald D. Hines built the Galleria, opened in 1970 and now the largest mall in Texas, and the towers around it: Philip Johnson's 901-foot Transco Tower, now Williams Tower, was finished with its Waterwall in 1983. This guide covers the City's Greater Uptown super neighborhood, 5,281 acres between the Katy Freeway, the West Loop and the Southwest Freeway, with 57,978 residents at the 2020 census. It is much larger than the Uptown District, the business core that taxes itself, and it takes in Tanglewood, Briargrove and St. George Place.

Most people here rent, and there are more of them every census. The count rose from 49,277 on about the same ground in 2010 to 57,978, in 36,592 homes; 19,341 were rented and 12,202 lived in by their owners, and 5,049, about one in seven, stood empty on census day. The towers and garden apartments along Post Oak Boulevard, San Felipe Street and Westheimer Road hold most of them. Tanglewood is the other Uptown: about 1,220 lots in twenty-three sections, where the homes association's deed restrictions keep lots residential, set building lines, roof and wall materials and where a garage door may face, and require its approval for any work outside the house. Newer houses had replaced most of the 1950s ranch houses by 2003, Wikipedia says, and the owners amended the restrictions in 2002 and 2018 to govern them.

Three different tax bills sit inside one boundary. Houston has no zoning, none of the City's historic districts or special lot size areas reaches Uptown, and its one City protected landmark is a single 1960 house on Westminster. What changes from street to street is the bill. North of Buffalo Bayou, 7,383 residents are in Spring Branch ISD, which levied 1.0231 per $100 for 2025 against Houston ISD's 0.8783. Inside the commercial core, the Uptown District, Harris County Improvement District No. 1, adds 0.14345 per $100, with a 20% homestead exemption. The Uptown tax increment reinvestment zone, in place since 1999, is on the appraisal district's list as non-taxing. Read the list of units on the exact account before comparing two addresses.

No price index follows the line, and the three ZIP codes disagree. Zillow's typical value in August 2026 was $685,164 in 77056 around the Galleria, up 2.5% on the year, and $274,653 in 77057 to the south and west, down 1.7%; 77024, where only the blocks north of the bayou fall and which reaches well beyond Uptown, was $1,471,108. On the 2025 rates a homestead at the 77056 figure owes the eight Houston ISD units about $10,440 a year, or $11,226 inside the Uptown District; the same value in Spring Branch ISD owes about $11,031. Tanglewood's own maintenance fee was $3,150 a lot for 2026. The citywide arithmetic is on the Houston page.

The flood map is modest; the bayou is not. FEMA's 2007 map puts 5.9% of the super neighborhood in the 1% annual chance zone and 3.3% in the 0.2% zone, most of it along Buffalo Bayou, which drains all of it; 751 residents lived on blocks in the 1% zone in 2020 and 1,037 in the 0.2% zone. The Flood Control District says flooding also comes from ponding when rain overwhelms the street drains, which no map of the bayou shows. For getting about, the Silver Line runs in its own lanes down Post Oak Boulevard, every 20 minutes since METRO cut its service in June 2024, and the nearest METRORail station is about 7 km away in the Medical Center. The Galleria and Whole Foods on Post Oak Boulevard are each about a ten-minute walk from the reference point.