Mueller's Last New-House Permit Was Issued Dec. 19, 2024

The last permit the City of Austin issued for a new single-family house inside Mueller is dated December 19, 2024. Since then, through the City's records updated November 2, 2026, there have been none: zero in 2025, zero in 2026. In 2022 the same records show 133.

Mueller, the roughly 700-acre redevelopment of the old Robert Mueller airport, has been a construction site for most of this century. Our permit records now show it changing into something else: a finished street grid where the permits are for kitchens, additions and repairs, plus a handful of lots that have not been built. If you are looking at a Mueller address, that changes which questions are worth asking.

Fourteen years of new-house permits

Add the column and you get 990 new single-family house permits from January 2014 to December 2024, plus 14 apartment-building permits covering 1,176 units. The pace was never smooth. It dipped to 63 in 2020, rebounded to 133 in 2022, and then fell by about two-thirds in a single year. The last permit for a new accessory unit on a Mueller lot was December 18, 2024.

The right-hand column is the other half of the story. Permits to change a house that already stands were in single digits in 2014 through 2017. They hit 32 in 2024, the most in this window. The numbers are small, so treat the direction rather than any one year as the point: as the first buyers settle in, the permit desk's Mueller work shifts from new houses toward existing ones.

We checked it against the City's own feed

The City's open data portal publishes the same permits as the Issued Construction Permits dataset. Filtering that feed for new single-family permits whose legal description contains "Mueller" gives somewhat higher counts than our parcel-based method (159 in 2022 and 21 in 2024, against our 133 and 14), because legal-description text also catches condominium regimes and lots our parcel names miss. The shape is the same, and so is the end: the newest Mueller house permits in the City's feed are the ones dated December 19, 2024. The feed was last updated November 2, 2026 at 13:47 UTC.

What is still on the ground

A new-house permit count of zero does not mean nothing is going up. On the City's site-plan list, two filings sit at 1601 E. 51st Street, in the Mueller parcel area, both from September 2026: a concept site plan for mixed-use development (SP-2026-0294C.CC, status "CC Pending," status date September 24) and an earlier intake record that describes "two mid-rise mixed-use buildings with rain gardens and associated utilities." Those descriptions are all the City's text says; unit counts are blank. The full record is on Zabalist, which owns site-plan detail.

The legal runway is also finite. The City's Mueller page says Council approved the Master Development Agreement on December 2, 2004, and on May 30, 2024 unanimously authorized an amendment that "change[s] the MDA termination date to December 31, 2027," and resets the required annual property takedowns based on remaining acreage. The page gives no remaining-acreage figure, so neither do we. What the permits show is the other side of that clock: the house-building has already stopped.

What this means if you're buying or selling at Mueller

• Buying from a builder is over for houses. Buying a resale is not. Any single-family home you tour was permitted in 2024 or earlier. Ask for the certificate of occupancy date and the permit history, not just the year a listing gives.
• Lot sizes vary widely. Community Impact reported in August 2023 that Mueller's smallest home lots are 600 square feet, against a 5,750-square-foot minimum for most single-family lots citywide. Read the plat and the setbacks for the lot, since they decide where an addition could go. Mueller is a Planned Unit Development, and its zoning rules come from ordinances such as 040826-61, passed August 26, 2004.
• Price-restricted homes carry their own rules. Community Impact reported about 1,700 affordable units and a 2% resale appreciation cap on most affordable homes, as of that same 2023 article. Whether a given home is restricted, and what the current terms are, is in the recorded documents and the City's Mueller affordable-housing update (November 2025), not in a general article. Ask the seller's agent for them in writing.
• Association dues vary. We found no official current schedule. Listing pages show very different monthly figures for different homes, so no single number is safe to quote. Request the documents for the specific address before you rely on any number.
• Selling? The permit record at your address is what a buyer's agent will look up. A closed permit for your kitchen or addition is easy to show; an open one is a question you will have to answer. See why expired permits matter before a sale.

Taxes and appraisal

Mueller homes are appraised by Travis CAD like any other Travis County property. We did not pull Mueller appraisals for this piece, so we make no claim about values. The dates that matter this year are in our tax calendar piece, and a first-year owner should read the new-owner homestead exemption article. For tax, lending or legal specifics, ask the appraisal district or a licensed professional.

Where to look next

• The City's Mueller redevelopment page for the agreement, zoning ordinances and reports.
• The City's Issued Construction Permits dataset to search an address.
• Community Impact, "Mueller nears finish line after two decades of development" (August 2, 2023), for the affordability figures cited above.
• Our Mueller neighborhood guide and how to find what is being built near an address.

How we pulled this

We took the 2,268 parcels whose TCAD subdivision name begins with "Mueller" (about 260 acres of platted lots; streets, parks and large tracts are outside it), and counted City of Austin building permits (type BP) whose coordinates fall on those parcels. "New single-family" is permit class R-101 with work class New; "apartment buildings" is class C-105 (five or more family buildings), with units from the permit's housing-unit field; "existing house" is any residential-class permit with work class Remodel, Addition, Addition and Remodel or Repair. Permits without coordinates are not counted, which is why the City-feed check is higher. Counts, comparisons and the "two-thirds" drop (133 to 42) are our arithmetic. This is a record count, not a market statistic.

One next step

If you are weighing a specific Mueller address, talk to a local Austin Local Team agent and ask for its permit history alongside the listing.