Austin

Austin is the largest community area in the city by land and among the largest by population, running from North Avenue down to the Eisenhower between Cicero Avenue and the Oak Park border. That size is the first thing to understand: the northern end near Galewood is a different market from South Austin, and treating Austin as one place will mislead you.

Both the Green Line and the Blue Line serve it, and Oak Park sits directly across Austin Boulevard, which matters because the price difference across that street is large and visible.

The county numbers: the median 2-to-4 unit sale went from roughly $66,000 in 2013 to about $340,000 in 2025, up around 419%, or 14.7% a year. The sample is the largest in Chicago at over 500 sales in a rolling window, which means this number is more reliable than almost any other on the site.

Rents run about $1,400 for a two-bedroom and $1,700 for a three-bedroom, with the overall median up 8% over the year. Two-bedrooms are actually down 1%, so read the growth as coming from the smaller and larger units rather than across the board.

How I would approach it: Austin rewards knowing specific blocks more than any neighborhood in this batch. The spread between a solid block near Galewood and a struggling one in South Austin is enormous and the community-area median tells you nothing about which you are standing on. That is the work, and it is worth doing here because the inventory is real.