The downtown Austin skyline at dusk, towers lit against a low sky.

East Cesar Chavez, where this ZIP stops being this ZIP

A house here asks about $599 a square foot, which is $67 above anywhere else in 78702 and dearer than Clarksville. Half of that is the walk to downtown. The numbers below are the other half.

29 homes for sale in East Cesar Chavezas of October 16, 2026 at 3:53 PM CDT

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On the market

East Cesar Chavez right now

Every residential listing whose location falls inside the East Cesar Chavez planning area, in 78702. That is the boundary the City of Austin publishes, and the one this page uses. From Unlock MLS through MLS Grid as of October 16, 2026 at 3:53 PM CDT. Closed sale prices are not shown: Texas is a non-disclosure state, so every figure here comes from asking prices and days since listing.

For sale: 26
Median asking: $707,750
Median per sq ft: $597
Median days listed: 45

All 29 of them, newest first. Sort by price either way below. Everything across 78702, filters and all, is on its market page.

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Listed by AustinVestors; Beycome Brokerage Realty LLC; Christies Intl Real Estate Lone Star; Compass RE Texas, LLC; DDFW Realty; E3 Properties; Fathom Realty; Gold Realty; Joseph Properties LLC; Kuper Sotheby's Int'l Realty; Pauly Presley Realty; Real Broker, LLC; SMART LINK REALTY; Spyglass Realty; Texas Green Realty; The Davis Agency; Urbanspace; Waterloo Realty, LLC; eXp Realty, LLC.

Drag to pan, pinch or use the buttons to zoom. Hover a price for a preview and click it for the listing, or tap it on a touchscreen. Every one of these is also in the grid above.

Counted

Priced with the west side

There are 29 residential listings here as of October 16, 2026 at 3:53 PM CDT, 19 of them houses with a stated size. Their median rate is where this neighborhood separates from its neighbours, so the first thing to do is put it next to every other neighborhood on this site rather than only next to the eastside.

Median asking price per square foot for houses in every neighborhood on this site with at least four of them, highest first
	Neighborhood	ZIP	House per sq ft	Houses
1	Pemberton Heights	78703	$877	5
2	Clarksville	78703	$868	5
3	Tarrytown	78703	$796	30
4	Travis Heights	78704	$773	26
5	Barton Hills	78704	$764	8
6	Zilker	78704	$743	16
7	Bouldin Creek	78704	$734	26
8	West Campus	78705	$713	4
9	Deep Eddy	78703	$644	11
10	East Cesar Chavez	78702	$599	19
11	North University	78705	$587	5
12	Dawson	78704	$534	16
13	Holly	78702	$532	21
14	South Lamar	78704	$486	21
15	Chestnut	78702	$476	12
16	Galindo	78704	$455	14
17	Govalle	78702	$451	44
18	Central East Austin	78702	$451	24
19	Rosewood	78702	$429	19

East Cesar Chavez comes 10 of 19. Only Pemberton Heights, Clarksville, Tarrytown, Travis Heights, Barton Hills, Zilker, Bouldin Creek, West Campus and Deep Eddy ask more per foot for a house, and all of them are west of the river or west of Lamar. Immediately below it sit North University, Dawson, Holly and South Lamar. That is the comparison worth sitting with: this is eastside ground asking more per foot than Clarksville.

Inside its own ZIP it is not close. $599 against $532 in Holly, which is the next highest, and $148 above the median of the other 5 neighborhoods in 78702.

Why, and how much of it

The six neighborhoods of 78702 by median distance from Sixth and Congress, with their house rate and median days listed
Neighborhood	From Sixth and Congress	From the Capitol	From the Convention Center	House per sq ft	Median days
East Cesar Chavez	1.14 mi	1.40 mi	0.76 mi	$599	64
Central East Austin	1.25 mi	1.12 mi	1.11 mi	$451	104
Chestnut	1.68 mi	1.43 mi	1.64 mi	$476	95
Holly	1.69 mi	1.84 mi	1.35 mi	$532	115
Rosewood	2.28 mi	2.02 mi	2.16 mi	$429	59
Govalle	2.37 mi	2.33 mi	2.14 mi	$451	71

Across those six, the house rate falls about $81 a square foot for every mile further from Sixth and Congress, and the fit accounts for roughly 41percent of the spread. That is the honest version of “you are paying to be close to town”: about half of it, and about half of it something else.

Holly is the reason it is only half. It sits further out than a neighborhood that asks less, which means the gradient is a tendency and not a rule, and that no buyer should accept a price here purely because a map says the neighborhood is closer in.

One caution about that table, because it changed my own reading. There is no single point that is downtown, and the choice decides the ranking. Measured from Sixth and Congress or the Convention Center, East Cesar Chavez is the closest of the 6. Measured from the Capitol, it is 2, behind Central East Austin, because the Capitol sits at the northern edge of downtown and flatters whatever lies due east of it. I first wrote this section concluding that proximity does not explain the premium at all. That was the anchor talking, not the neighborhood, and both answers are above so you can pick the one that matches where you actually go.

The last column is the one that tells you the price is real rather than hopeful. At 64 days the median listing here moves faster than every other neighborhood in this ZIP except Rosewood. Expensive and slow is a seller being stubborn. Expensive and quick is a market agreeing.

The dearest footin this ZIP isthe street thehuelga ran from.

La Primera

The street was called the first one

It was Water Avenue in Austin’s original 1839 plan and First Street from 1887. To the people who lived along it, it was La Primera, and for generations it was the commercial and civic middle of Mexican American Austin: the businesses, the churches, the places people gathered, and the place they organized from.

That last part is specific rather than sentimental. The Austin Chicano Huelga Committee ran the longest strike in Texas history out of 1915 East 1st Street. Local 456 of the Upholsterers International Union struck the Economy Furniture Company on 27 November 1968, six months after the company refused to recognize a representation vote its workforce, about nine tenths of it Mexican American, had won that May. It lasted more than two years. Cesar Chavez came to Austin in February 1971, spoke to thousands at the Montopolis Community Center, walked the picket line at the plant, and on the sixth led more than five thousand people to the Capitol.

The Council renamed East and West First Street for him in September 1993, a few months after his death. So the name on this neighborhood is not a civic gesture attached to an arbitrary road. It is the street the strike was run from, named for the man who came to walk its picket line.

It is worth holding that beside the table above. The ground along La Primera is now the dearest per square foot in 78702, and 17 of the 29 homes for sale on it were built in the last dozen years. Both of those sentences are measurements from the same feed, and they sit together without needing a conclusion drawn from them. For how this ZIP came to be a Mexican American and Black eastside in the first place, the Central East Austin page has the 1928 city plan that arranged it.

A lobby interior with stone, glass and a long bench, lit from one side.

The dearest foot

The small old houses are the expensive ones

Per square foot, the cheapest houses here are not the smallest. Group them by floor area and the rate does not slope, it bends.

East Cesar Chavez houses grouped by floor area, with median rate, asking price and year built
Floor area	Houses	Per sq ft	Median asking	Median year
Under 900square feet	3	$751	$650,000	1929
900 to 1,499square feet	6	$644	$770,000	1948
1,500 to 2,199square feet	6	$593	$987,869	2020
2,200 and oversquare feet	4	$585	$1,799,500	2025

The best rate sits in the 2,200 and over square foot band at $585. Go smaller and the rate climbs, because below about nine hundred feet you have stopped buying a house and started buying a lot with something on it. Go much larger and it climbs again, because the few big new houses here are finished to a standard that carries its own premium.

The clearest example is the dearest foot in the neighborhood: a 2,489 square foot house from 1930 asking $8,000,000, which is $3,214 a square foot. That is a rate in the company of downtown penthouses, and it has been listed 3 days. Nobody is paying it for the house. The question being tested is what the dirt is worth, and the answer so far is less than the asking price.

5 of these listings carry a construction year later than 2025, so they are not finished and the medians above will move as they complete. Every figure is an asking price: Texas is a non-disclosure state, and closed prices may not be published here.

Honestly

Who East Cesar Chavez is wrong for

A buyer shopping the eastside on price: This is the wrong neighborhood for that and the numbers below say so plainly. A house here runs a few hundred dollars a square foot above Govalle or Rosewood, which are a mile and a half further out and in the same ZIP. If what you want is East Austin at an East Austin rate, I will point you there instead and the pages exist. If what you want is this particular quarter mile, it is the dearest ground in 78702 and the market has been paying it quickly.
Anyone who thinks the small old houses are the bargain: They are the opposite. The cheapest rate per square foot here sits in the middle of the size range, not at the bottom of it: the little pre-war cottages carry the highest per-foot numbers in the neighborhood because what is being sold is the lot under them. One of them is asking a rate that puts it among the dearest listings per foot in the entire five ZIP feed, downtown penthouses included, and it has been listed well over a year. Read those as land, price them as land, and do not mistake a low asking price for a low rate.
Someone who needs quiet: The interstate is the western boundary and it is not a soft one. Add the Rainey Street towers and their traffic immediately across it, a rail line, and the fact that this is the part of the eastside people walk to from downtown bars. Several of these streets are genuinely peaceful and several are not, and the difference is one block. Nothing on a listing page will tell you which, so stand on the specific kerb at eleven on a Friday night before you commit.
A buyer who wants the neighborhood to hold still: Nearly two thirds of what is for sale here was built in the last dozen years, and four of these listings are not finished. The street grid and the old bungalows are what remain of something much older, and it is being replaced around them at a pace you can watch. That is why the rate is what it is, and it is also what people who have lived here a long time are losing.
Anyone who wants the history to be decoration: The street in this neighborhood's name was La Primera, the commercial and civic middle of Mexican American Austin, and the longest strike in Texas history was organized from an address on it. The name was given in 1993, months after Cesar Chavez died. It is reasonable to buy here. It is not reasonable to arrive without knowing that, and the people who can tell you about it are still on these blocks.

Working here

Paying a premium on purpose

The job here is making sure the premium is a decision rather than an accident. This is the dearest ground in its ZIP by a wide margin, about half of which the distance to downtown accounts for and about half of which it does not, and the half it does not is where a buyer either gets value or overpays. In practice that means building the comparable set from this neighborhood rather than from 78702, being candid when a listing is priced off the two or three dearest sales on its street, and being equally candid when a number that looks outrageous is actually in line with what has been moving in sixty days.

For sellers the specific risk is the opposite one. A house here can be listed against ZIP-wide figures and leave a great deal on the table, because the ZIP contains five neighborhoods asking hundreds less per foot. For small older houses the question is whether the buyer is a family or a builder, because those are two different prices, two different sets of terms and two different marketing approaches, and deciding that before the listing goes live is most of the work.

If that is the kind of help you want on a purchase or a sale here, start a conversation.

Nearby

The rest of 78702

Everything for sale across the ZIP, with filters, is on the 78702 market page.

History: the street’s names and the September 1993 renaming from the City of Austin’s renaming materials and the Austin Chronicle. The Economy Furniture strike dates, Local 456, the May 1968 representation vote, the Austin Chicano Huelga Committee’s address at 1915 East 1st Street and the 6 February 1971 march on the Capitol from the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas, Preservation Austin, and Austin American-Statesman reporting on the 2024 monument. Distances are great-circle from the anchors named above to each listing’s own coordinate, then taken at the median. Rates, counts and medians are computed from the Unlock MLS feed at build.

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Listings courtesy of Unlock MLS as distributed by MLS GRID

Based on information submitted to the MLS GRID as of October 16, 2026 at 3:53 PM CDT. All data obtained from various sources and may not have been verified by broker or MLS GRID.

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