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While the really rather tiny Clarksville neighborhood pops up quite a bit on our pages, usually in home listings and rent comparisons, this is the first time in memory we’ve, in partnership with real-estate data analytics site NeighborhoodX, have done a per-squre-foot comparison of home costs there.
The Clarksville Historic District—bounded by Enfield Road on the north, North Lamar Boulevard on the east, West Sixth Street on the south, MoPac Expressway to the west—is a section of the larger Old West Austin neighborhood, but it has a distinctive, much funkier style than other parts of the area, one that has appealed to Austinites for quite a long time.
In 1871, Clarksville became what is now the oldest surviving freedomtown—settlements founded by formerly enslaved African-Americans after the Civil War. It’s also home to many longtime businesses and restaurants along West Fifth and Sixth Streets, as well as on West Lynn Street, including Nau’s Enfield Drug, Sledd’s Nursery, Wiggy’s Liquor, and Jeffreys—one of Austin’s original fine-dining establishments–and the original Whole Foods.
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As downtown advanced west, with older developments like the Whole Foods mothership and the Waterloo Records complex joined by much larger scale projects such as the redevelopment of the Seaholm Power Plant, a funny thing happened. Because of its historic designation and the general will of the neighborhood, many of its older, sometimes ramshackle homes and businesses remained, making it an intimate, neighborly, small-scale area that just happened to be on a hill with great views, within walking distance of the now-thriving entertainment, restaurant, and shopping districts in southwest downtown. For many Austinites, that combination is downright irresistible—as home prices demonstrate.
The current average asking price in Clarksville is $449 per square foot. "However, while the average price is useful, it doesn't tell the whole story," said NeighborhoodX co-founder Constatine Valhouli.
The individual properties that make up that average price range from $287 per square foot (1506 West 13th Street #18, a 1,585-square-foot condo asking $450,000) to 634 per square foot (1112 West Seventh Street, a 2,182-square-foot house on the market for $1.39 million).
As always, readers can mouse over individual chart bars for more data on a property, and the addresses in the chart link to the property listings.