The closest Austin gets to a private-club residential neighborhood. Four residents on the tuition trade, the trailing-spouse isolation, and the deer.
West Lake Hills and Tarrytown are the closest Austin gets to a private-club residential neighborhood. The roads curve through hills. Lots are a half-acre and up. Driveways are long. The houses sit back from the road, often gated, and most driveways contain both a car and a golf cart, the latter used for the drive to Barton Creek Country Club or the tennis courts at Westlake High. The streets do not have sidewalks. Almost no one walks.
The demographic is tech and law, mostly late forties and fifties, mostly second-marriage. Kids are at Westlake High or Hill Country Middle or already out of the house. Weekday daytime population is thin because almost everyone is on Mopac heading somewhere else. The cars in the driveways are Range Rovers, Tesla Model Xs, and the occasional Porsche Cayenne. The second-driveway vehicle is almost always a golf cart.
The explicit trade most residents describe is tuition. A couple moving from Newton, MA or Palo Alto, CA who were writing $60,000 to $80,000 a year in private-school checks arrive here and discover that Eanes ISD is a top-ten Texas public school district and the checks go away. What replaces them is a $1.1M to $2.8M mortgage and a 1.99 percent property-tax bill. For a two-kid household over thirteen years, the math is close to break-even against the East Coast private alternative. For three kids it is cheaper. For one kid it usually does not work.
I live in a 4/3.5 on a half-acre off Westlake Drive. We paid $1.85 million in February 2025 with 30 percent down. The mortgage and the property tax together are $14,200 a month.
The reason for the math is Eanes ISD and our two kids. The other reason is the half acre, which we did not have in Palo Alto. The trade is that you are not in Austin.
West Lake is a separate city. We drive twenty minutes to the things that made us move here.
Tom, 47, West Lake Hills, 14 months in · Engineering manager at a public software company · Read the full Tom interview
The price bands, the streets, the trade-offs inside the boundary.
Between Bee Cave Road and the 360 bridge. Curving streets, half-acre and up lots, sixties and seventies ranch-and-limestone construction mixed with 2015-and-later rebuilds. Bridge Point Elementary or Forest Trail Elementary zoning depending on block. The core of the neighborhood.
North of Lake Austin Boulevard, closer to downtown than West Lake Hills. Sidewalks partial. Houses smaller (2,000 to 3,200 square feet) on flatter lots. Casis Elementary and O. Henry Middle zoned (both AISD, not Eanes). Different school district, different price point, different demographic mix.
The northwest quadrant, closer to 360 and Pennybacker Bridge. Gated subdivisions, acre-plus lots, custom 2005-and-later estate construction. Eanes ISD zoning. The most expensive tier.
At the 2026 median of $1.78M, what you buy in West Lake Hills is a 3,400 to 4,200 square-foot four- or five-bedroom single-family on a 0.5 to 0.8 acre lot, either a 1970s ranch that has been remodeled or a 2010-and-later rebuild. The 1970s stock is increasingly being torn down, which means the median is climbing. Rebuilds in the $2.2M to $3.2M band are the current marginal transaction.
Estate-scale homes ($3.5M and up) trade on a different market entirely, mostly off-MLS. The Tarrytown equivalent on a smaller lot sits in the $1.3M to $2.1M band.
West Lake Hills' commute math is heavily Mopac-dependent. A downtown commute at peak hour is a twenty-two-minute slog and a twelve-minute drive off-peak; the delta is almost entirely the 360-Mopac merge. The Domain is tractable.
Apple's north campus and Round Rock and Tesla all push past forty minutes at peak. Transit is effectively not a practical option from here; one bus runs every half-hour and requires a quarter-mile walk with no sidewalk. The one commute West Lake Hills solves better than any other neighborhood in this guide is the downtown-off-peak drive on a Sunday at 11 a.m.: Mopac is empty and you are downtown in nine minutes.
Among the safest neighborhoods in the Austin metro.
Violent crime runs about one-sixth of the citywide median. Property crime runs one-quarter of the citywide median. The reported risks are predominantly wildlife: deer collisions at dusk, coyotes on unfenced yards, rattlesnakes on greenbelt-backing lots.
Yes, and it is the explicit reason most families moved here.
Bridge Point and Forest Trail elementaries run 10/10. Hill Country Middle and West Ridge Middle run strong and cohesive. Westlake High is consistently a top-ten Texas public and runs a 99th-percentile standardized test average on its demographics. Families who want a public-school path at this level inside the Austin metro have exactly this neighborhood and one or two others as the options.
Because the streets do not have sidewalks and the neighborhood's social infrastructure runs through Barton Creek Country Club, which members drive the golf cart to.
The cart is also the way kids get to the neighborhood pool and a few houses down to friends'. In the gated northwest subdivisions, carts are genuinely the primary secondary vehicle.
One bus runs every half-hour, the Capital Metro 30, with stops about a quarter-mile from most addresses.
Nobody we interviewed uses it for a daily commute. The practical transit option for a non-driver in this neighborhood is a car plus Uber or an Austin Ride ondemand request.
For a $1.78M assessed home: roughly $35,400 annual property tax before homestead, $4,400 to $8,200 insurance, $4,800 to $12,000 landscape maintenance, and whatever your mortgage payment is.
A typical two-income Eanes household with a 20 percent down payment on a $1.78M home is at roughly $15,500 a month in total housing carry, not including country-club dues or private-school tuition.
Different neighborhoods, different school districts.
Tarrytown is north of Lake Austin Boulevard, in AISD (Casis Elementary, O. Henry Middle, Austin High). West Lake Hills is south of the river in Eanes ISD (Bridge Point or Forest Trail, Hill Country Middle, Westlake High). Tarrytown is flatter, has more partial sidewalks, is closer to downtown, and is meaningfully cheaper per square foot. Some residents consider them one neighborhood, but the school-district split makes them operationally distinct.
Rarely. The rental stock is thin because most properties are owner-occupied. A one-bedroom apartment along Bee Cave Road or in a Tarrytown duplex sometimes lists at $2,400 to $3,600. A three-bedroom rental house is almost always $4,800 and up. The rental-property supply is the thinnest of any neighborhood in this guide.
If West Lake Hills is not the right fit, here is what is next door.
