Hey Austinite, are you hearing the siren song of the Great Northwest? Got a hot little piece of property you're thinking of selling to grab a piece of the Great American Artisanal Dream in a similar, but not identical, city where your moustache wax won't melt?
Well, hold your horses (which you'll also need to sell, btw; we've never seen one clopping down Portland's East Burnside the way we sometimes do on South Congress). Before you go, take a look at what your Austin real estate buck will buy you in that Other Weird City.
NeighborhoodX, which can be counted on to crunch real-estate data in the funnest of ways, has created a great chart that compares Austin and Portland neighborhoods according to residential listing price per square foot.
The study draws out some interesting comparisons, one of which is that Austin neighborhoods are at both the top (Downtown) and bottom (Parker Lane) of the list. It's not too surprising that, at $6.07 per square foot, the Pearl District—Portland's popular locus of overpriced exposed brick and California tech-worker overflow—would be close on the heels of the shiny glass and exposed millennial ambition found in Austin's Downtown ($6.51 per square foot).
Most of the equivalents make intuitive sense financially if you swap agave for fir trees—Austin's Bouldin and Zilker are on par with Portland's Nob Hill and Goose Hollow, though perhaps the former have a slightly funkier history.
The bottom of the chart gets interesting in that, although most of the higher numbers here are from Austin, its neighborhoods also take four of the bottom five price points. Although some of those Austin areas are relatively central, it's possible that Portland's much-lauded compactness accounts for some of the difference.
Check out NeighborhoodX's full, interactive report here.
• Austin vs. Portland: February 2016: Housing prices, by neighborhood [NeighborhoodX]