Downtown Austin seen across the water of Lady Bird Lake in the evening.

Holly, and the hole in its record

Sort what is for sale here by the year it was built and 53 consecutive years come back empty. A power plant stood on the lakeshore for most of them.

30 homes for sale in Hollyas of October 17, 2026 at 8:56 AM CDT

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On the market

Holly right now

Every residential listing whose location falls inside the Holly 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 17, 2026 at 8:56 AM 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: 30
Median asking: $643,638
Median per sq ft: $518
Median days listed: 115

All 30 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 2TX Realty; Amazing Realty LLC; Bramlett Partners; Casa Blanca Realty; Classic Realty; Coldwell Banker Realty; Compass RE Texas, LLC; Douglas Elliman Real Estate; EXP Marketing Group; Gold Realty; Keller Williams - Lake Travis; Keller Williams Realty; La Casa Realty Group; Real Estate Executives of Aus; Realty Texas LLC; Vidaurri Realty Group, Inc; Vince Realty; 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

Fifty-odd years of nothing

There are 30 residential listings in Holly as of October 17, 2026 at 8:56 AM CDT, and every one of them states the year it was built. Placed on a single span they do not spread out. They bunch at both ends.

The plant generating, 1960 to 2007

Demolished 2011

19201930194019501960197019801990200020102020

One bar per year, as tall as that year has listings. Tallest is 5.

Every Holly listing by year of construction, against the power plant’s generating life. Years from the MLS, plant dates from the sources at the foot of this page. The table below splits these into groups twice: once at the widest empty run, which the feed shows, and once at the day the plant stopped generating, which it does not.

The widest empty run is 53 years long. Nothing for sale in Holly was built between 1952 and 2004. The Holly Street Power Plant began generating in 1960, was under construction until 1974, and ran until the last day of September 2007. The city had begun taking houses to build it in the late 1950s.

The reason to take that seriously rather than treat it as a small sample being quiet is the next largest gap, which is 10 years. Holes of that size are all over the early part of this inventory, in the 1920s and 1930s, where nothing needs explaining beyond 30 listings spread thinly over a century. The big one is 5 times longer than that and it is the only structural feature in the set. For the same reason this page makes nothing of the handful of empty years after the plant shut: a gap that short is ordinary here.

What this cannot tell you is whether anything was built in those years. It tells you that nothing built in them is for sale now, which is a smaller claim and the only one 30 listings can support. It is also the claim that matters when you are trying to buy, because the market you can actually shop is the one in the table below.

The cohorts

Holly listings grouped by the construction gaps found in the feed, with medians for each group
Built	Listings	Median asking	Per sq ft	Median sq ft	Beds
1919 to 195112 houses, 1 condominium, 2 of another type	15	$638,275	$510	1,248	2
2005 to 20071 house, 4 condominiums	5	$399,999	$433	940	1
2018 to 20278 houses, 2 condominiums	10	$940,000	$532	1,767	3

Those are not two vintages of the same product. The 15 homes from 1919 to 1951 ask a median $638,275 over a median 1,248 square feet. The 10 from 2018 to 2027 ask $940,000 over 1,767, which is 1.47 times the asking price for 1.42 times the floor area.

The 5 in the middle are the interesting ones, because they went up while the plant was still burning gas, under a closure the Council had already voted for in 1995. They are small: 940 square feet and 1 bedroom at the median, asking $399,999, which is what the newest cohort divided by 2.35 looks like. Somebody built for the park that was coming rather than the plant that was still there, and they built cautiously.

6 of these listings carry a year of construction later than 2025, which means they are not finished. A floor plan is not a house and the median above moves when they complete.

A plant ran herefor forty-seven years.The neighborhoodoutlasted it.

What was there

The city took the houses first

The Holly Street Power Plant was a 570 megawatt natural gas and fuel oil station on the eastern shore of what was then Town Lake, in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood. Construction began in 1958, it started generating in 1960, and building work carried on until 1974. To build it, the city took homes. One of them belonged to Lela Castro’s family, who put it better than anyone has since: “When the city comes in and tells you you’ve got to go, you don’t have much choice.”

Then forty seven years of living next to it, and the record is not vague. Ten to twenty thousand gallons of fuel oil spilled in 1974. A fuel line ruptured in 1985. PCB waste leaked from storage drums in 1988 and was being measured in the lake by 1990. There were further fuel spills in 1991, 1992 and 1993, and the 1993 one caught fire. There was another fire in 1994, and another on Halloween in 2001. Residents lived with noise that rattled foundations and with soot.

They also got it closed, which is the part usually left out. The Council passed a resolution to shut the plant in 1995. Eastside activist Gavino Fernandez pressed officials for it; Lela Castro, whose home the city had taken forty years earlier, sat on the closure committee. Generation stopped on the last day of September 2007, twelve years after the vote. The stacks came down on 22 October 2011. The 22 acres are becoming parkland, and the first houses in this inventory built on the far side of that date are dated 2012.

This is the same ZIP as Central East Austin, where the city’s 1928 plan drew Austin’s Black population east by putting their schools and parks there and nowhere else, and the same logic that put a generating station on a lakeshore here rather than somewhere with more objections. Holly is the part of that story where the neighborhood won, eventually, and the park is the proof.

A living room with low seating, a wide window and afternoon light across the floor.

The lake

The shoreline is not for sale

Holly sits on the water and not one of its 30 listings declares waterfront. That is not an oversight in the feed. The frontage is public: the hike and bike trail and the 22 acres the plant stood on. What you buy in Holly is proximity to a shoreline nobody can build on, which is a different asset from frontage and in most respects a better one. It is also the asset the neighborhood spent twelve years creating.

The practical version: walk the trail before you decide which street you want, because the blocks nearest the water are the ones the plant sat beside and they are being landscaped into something that does not exist yet. Two of these listings front Cesar Chavez, which is a different proposition from a house on Santa Rosa or Garden, and the difference is traffic rather than distance to the lake.

Honestly

Who Holly is wrong for

A buyer who wants to be on the water: Holly is the lakeshore neighborhood and the lakeshore is not for sale. Not one listing here declares waterfront, because the frontage is parkland: the same 22 acres the power plant stood on, plus the hike and bike trail. That is arguably better than owning it, since nobody can build on it and you did not pay for it. It is not the same thing, and anyone picturing a dock should know the difference before they drive down here.
Anyone who needs a comparable: There is no middle of the market here to price against. The stock is pre 1951 or post 2004 with almost nothing in between, so an appraiser reaching for the nearest similar house often has to leave the neighborhood to find one, and leaving the neighborhood in East Austin changes the number a great deal. That is a financing risk on a purchase and a pricing problem on a sale, and it is the single most practical consequence of everything else on this page.
Someone who assumes the ground is clean because the plant is gone: The plant generated for forty seven years and its record includes a fuel oil spill of ten to twenty thousand gallons, a ruptured fuel line, PCB waste leaking from drums, and several fires. Remediation of the site has been underway for years and is a matter of public record rather than rumor. None of that makes a house here unsafe, and I am not qualified to tell you it does or does not. It does mean environmental review is a reasonable thing to ask for in diligence, and that a seller who is irritated by the question is telling you something.
A buyer who wants the neighborhood to be finished: Six of these listings have not been built yet, and the park on the old plant site is still being built out. Holly has been in the middle of becoming something for twenty years and it still is. If you want a settled street with nothing pending, this is the wrong half of the city, and Tarrytown or Bryker Woods will suit you better.
Anyone who wants to be the reason the long-time residents leave: The people who were here while the plant ran are the ones who got it closed, and some of them are still on these streets. That took twelve years from the Council resolution in 1995 to the last day of generation in 2007, and the park is the thing they won. Buying here is fine. Buying here while treating the neighborhood as though it started in 2012 is not, and it is also just bad information, since the whole shape of what you are buying was set before then.

Working here

Buying where the middle is missing

The missing middle is the thing I would actually be working on for you here. With the stock split between pre 1952 and post 2004 and almost nothing between, the nearest true comparable for a Holly house is often outside Holly, and in East Austin a few blocks is a different price. On a purchase that is an appraisal risk worth writing into the contract rather than discovering in week three. On a sale it means the first price has to be built from the right half of the inventory, because a median that mixes a 1945 bungalow with a 2022 four bedroom describes no house that exists.

The second thing is diligence that fits the ground. A generating station ran here for forty seven years with a documented spill and fire record, the site has been under remediation, and the park is still being built. I am not an environmental engineer and I will not pretend to read a soil report for you. I will tell you which questions belong in an option period, help you get the public record rather than the rumour, and say plainly when the answer is that nobody knows yet.

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.

Plant history: the Holly Street Power Plant entry at Wikipedia for construction, capacity, closure and demolition dates, and the Austin Chronicle, “One More Detour on Holly Street”, 21 January 2011, for the taking of homes, the Castro account, the spill and fire record, the 1995 Council resolution and the 22 acre figure. Prices, years, counts and medians are computed from the Unlock MLS feed at build and are asking prices: Texas is a non-disclosure state.

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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 17, 2026 at 8:56 AM CDT. All data obtained from various sources and may not have been verified by broker or MLS GRID.

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