Austin homebuyers moving farther from urban core amid rising home prices

​​​​AUSTIN - In recent years, urbanization has become a dominant narrative in American cities like Austin.

Since the 1990s, Austin has touted the "smart growth" concept, which should have more people rushing to live centrally rather than in suburbs.

And downtown Austin is indeed a more popular place to live than ever. However, Redfin Corp. finds that Austin homebuyers are actually moving farther from the urban core, rather than closer to it.

That’s bad news for traffic, which is cited as one of Austin’s biggest problems.

The real estate brokerage and technology company recently released a report that found home sales in Austin are moving farther from downtown.

The median Austin home sold in 2011 was 13.2 miles from the city center. In 2015, that distance had grown to 14.8 miles.

Austin’s 12.3 percent increase was the second highest among the 31 U.S. cities studied by Redfin.

For comparison, in Houston the typical home sold in 2015 was 20.6 miles from the city’s urban core, a 5.6 percent increase from 2011.

Redfin points to rising home prices as one possible explanation for the suburban sprawl.

In Austin, it costs $318 per sf to live in the urban core while the suburbs are much cheaper at $128 per sf. Nationally, the median price per sf in 2015 was $148, but was nearly double in urban centers at $284.