As I've mentioned before, I live in a small neighborhood of urban homes in south Austin, about 2.5 miles south of Town Lake. The homes are a decent size for central Austin; most have between 1,600 and 2,400 square feet. What marks them as "urban" is the lot size. They are very small. Ours is one of the larger ones and it's only 4,400 square feet. Most of the lots are under 4,000 square feet. (This is roughly the size of the small yard-home lots at Mueller.)
Some people don't want to bother with a yard. My neighborhood might be an attractive choice for them. But if you want a real yard, pass on my neighborhood. At my house, we've only got room for a patio, a sandbox, and a strip of grass.
Of course, that postage-stamp yard might start to look better when you consider what a larger yard costs. Some recent MLS listings give us a pretty good idea. Homes in my neighborhood list for roughly $175 per square foot. (Here's one at $173 psf (2,200 sq. ft.) and another at $178 psf (2,000 sq. ft.)) Meanwhile, just down the street, a house of the same vintage and roughly the same size -- but on a 7,500 sq. ft lot -- is listed at $227 psf, and the owners already are taking backup offers. That works out to a $100,000 premium for the yard, or an extra $850/month when you factor in taxes. (In fact, the premium may be even larger than that; the "yard" house does not have a garage, while the two listings in my neighborhood have two-car garages that back out onto an alley. On the other hand, the "yard" house probably has a nicer finish-out.)
I'm not complaining about the price difference. My house was cheaper than other stuff in south Austin when we bought it back in 2001; that's how we could afford a good-sized house in south Austin back then. My point is that it is possible to mitigate central Austin's sky-high home prices. (Note, I use "mitigate" because $175 psf is hardly cheap, even if it's a lot cheaper than $225 psf.) In fact, one of the affordable housing task force's draft recommendations was to make it easier to build small-lot homes in SF-3 neighborhoods.
Needless to say, the enemy of urban neighborhoods is not the market; it is the run-of-the-mill neighborhood activist. NAs fight small-lot zoning tooth and nail. For example, at one of Brewster's VMU roadshows, one of SLNA's officers openly pressed Brewster to guarantee that there would be no more "urban neighborhoods" -- small-lot zoning -- in SLNA. You know, as a quid pro quo for tolerating VMU.
Council should give this type of objection short shrift. Urban neighborhoods house almost twice as many households at a much lower cost per household. Considering all the hand-wringing over home prices and density, you'd think Council would jump at the chance to add more of them.
