The highs and lows of Holly

What does it cost to buy a home in Holly right now?

In an ongoing series with Curbed Austin, real-estate analytics site NeighborhoodX took a close look at the range of sales asking prices per square foot in the area to find out.

Today's analysis focuses on the Holly neighborhood. Bounded by Chicon Street on the west, Pleasant Valley Road on the east, East Seventh Street on the north, and the Colorado River/Lady Bird Lake on the south, the East Austin area has, along with adjacent East Cesar Chavez, been been one of the places in the city where gentrification issues came to the fore visibly and early.

For years a bastion of working-class, predominantly Latinx citizens who carved out a multigenerational community in the face of the city's early 20th-century segregation policies, the neighborhood been fighting for itself for several decades—first against being a dumping ground for environmental hazards (a power plant and a leaking gas tank farm) and then against gentrification as its proximity to downtown and the riverfront became a valuable commodity.

The current average asking price in Holly is $384 per square foot. However, the individual properties that make up that average range from $167/square foot to 607/square foot.

If we exclude the outlier at the bottom (2604 E Santa Rosa Strett), the range tightens considerably to $319-607/sq.ft.

The neighborhood’s wide variety of housing—revealing it to be somewhat still in transition—affects the range. Some of the highest priced units on a per-square-foot basis are freestanding bungalows, points out NeighborhoodX co-founder Constantine Valhouli, these priced below the neighborhood average are predominantly condos.

The analysis excluded a number of properties positioned as development sites, or those on double lots, which would skew the price for the existing built square footage higher.