educational estimating tool - not professional advice. a scenario, not a prediction. read the full disclaimer.
how much of your lot does the street plan take
austin's street plan sets a width for every street. where a street is narrower today, a lot that redevelops can be asked to give the city a strip along its front. pick a neighborhood, then click a lot, or type an address, to see that strip.
scenario
the lot you clicked
click a lot on the map, or find one by address, to see its streets, the widths and the strip drawn on the lot.
neighborhood totals
| hyde park, private lots | (a) full width | (b) triggering lots only |
|---|
neighborhood by neighborhood
| planning area | private lots | (a) share of private land taken | (b) share taken | (a) lots losing over 10% | (b) lots losing over 10% |
|---|
the cap and the relief
the cap. the city may require dedication only in an amount roughly proportionate to the development (ldc 25-6-23 and 25-6-55(a)), set in a written determination by the director before the application is approved, and it may take a lesser amount. the full-width strip on this page is the ceiling the table describes, not the amount a given project would owe.
the relief. the director may grant a variance from dedication where it would place an undue hardship on the owner or leave the property unsuitable for an economically feasible use (ldc 25-6-86). an owner with 15 percent or more of a lot under a right-of-way reservation can ask for a waiver (ldc 25-6-81(b)). in some cases the city may accept a public access easement over the strip rather than a deed to it, which keeps the land in the lot; that is negotiated case by case, and no code section is cited here for it.
what triggers it. the dedication article applies to zoning or rezoning, preliminary plan or final plat, and site plan applications (ldc 25-6-21). four or fewer homes on a legal lot need no site plan (ldc 25-5-2(b)(1)), so building them on an existing lot goes through a building permit and does not trigger dedication; splitting the lot (a plat) does. scenario (b) follows that line by zoning: it leaves out sf-1, sf-2, sf-3, sf-4a and sf-5 lots and counts every multifamily, office, commercial, sf-6 and pud lot. every street segment counted on this page also carries the table's remark that its required right-of-way does not apply to single-family home properties.
method
- boundary. the city's hyde park neighborhood planning area (ordinance 20000413-063), exactly as the city maps it: 38th street to 45th street between guadalupe street and duval street (tom green street at the 38th street end), and 45th to 51st street from the lots on the west side of rowena street east to red river street. a lot is in if its centre point is.
- lots. travis central appraisal district parcels as the city publishes them; stacked condominium copies counted once; lots zoned p (public) left out. "private" means every other parcel.
- required width. REQUIRED_ROW_ALPHA from the street network table, per segment. level 1 streets read "58 or 64": 58 ft where the lot's base zoning caps height at 40 ft or less, 64 ft where it allows more, after the city's own explanation that 58 ft is for buildings of three stories or less and 64 ft for four or more (austin strategic mobility plan staff, email of 2022-03-30, in the city's public record). segments the table leaves blank or at 0 (txdot ramps and frontage roads) are not counted.
- today's width. measured on a line square to the lot's street edge, from the lot line through the street centerline to the first lot line across the street (median of three samples along the edge). where no lot line is found across, twice the distance to the centerline is used and the lot says so.
- the strip. per side = (required - today) ÷ 2, from each side's own lot line, the reserved right-of-way being equal on each side of the centerline (ldc 25-6-54(e)); the strip is clipped out of the lot line exactly, and corner overlaps are counted once.
- buildable footprint. the area left inside the setbacks, with the street setbacks measured from the new lot line (ldc 25-6-53 measures setbacks from the reserved right-of-way). setbacks are the base district figures in ldc 25-2-492 (sf-3: 25 ft front, 15 ft street side, 5 ft interior side, 10 ft rear; the table is used for every district; a district the table does not list, such as pud or industrial, gets the sf-3 figures). the shorter street frontage is treated as the front; the side opposite it as the rear. neighborhood conservation (nccd) rules, such as hyde park's, neighborhood plan special-use options, the home front-setback rule and compatibility are not modeled: keep it as a comparison, not a design.
- which neighborhoods. each is one of the city's own neighborhood planning areas, used whole. an area is published only if it passes the same data checks: at least 200 private lots, no more than 20% of lots without a street in the table, no more than 3% of parcels without a zoning district, no more than 25% of frontages with no lot line found across the street, and measured widths that agree with the table on at least 60% of the level 2 and 3 segments touched by three or more lots. "agree" means within 2 ft of the table's median right-of-way for the segment, or inside the table's own minimum-to-maximum width for it: the city's figures show the right-of-way varying along most segments, and a planning area often holds only one stretch of a long one, so the lots here sample one part of it. north loop, montopolis and govalle / johnston terrace were first held back (2026-10-31) when the check used the median alone; the min-to-max reading added them the same day and changed no other area's numbers. segments where every lot still disagrees with the whole city range are appraisal lot lines differing from the city's right-of-way, and stay listed per segment in each area's data file.
sources
the other half of the question. this page shows what a lot could give up. what the same lot can now hold is how many homes fit on this lot now: run the lot there with the front of the lot moved back by the strip shown here.